1. Two staff members facilitate program sessions.
Sessions, (sometimes referred to as classes or groups), are often exhilarating to facilitate, but can also be demanding. Sessions provide a laboratory for training and facilitation skills with particular emphasis on setting limits and engaging audiences.

In our experience, all of these skills are most reliably learned and integrated by working in pairs. Importantly, staff burnout is also significantly decreased.

We duplicate this co-facilitation standard in our trainings and presentations to professional and lay audiences.

2. Provide weekly staff development.
Currently, there is no formal education that provides adequate preparation to become a staff member of a NY Model batterer program. Therefore, programs need to provide in-house training. Training includes material on content and group facilitation skills, with special emphasis on working with a co-facilitator and respectful limit-setting strategies. Although staff development can be accomplished monthly or biweekly, the advantages of weekly meetings override the difficulties.

3. A late arrival is an absence.
For many years we experimented with fifteen, then ten, then five minutes of allowable lateness. Ultimately, we recognized that the participants could arrive by the scheduled start time if we were serious about holding them to that standard. We now do. Proof of the effectiveness of this policy is that lateness is no longer an issue at all.

4. Schedule pre and post-session staff processing time.
We strongly encourage scheduling fifteen minute segments, pre and post each session of a NY Model batterer program. The amount of time invested in this process consistently proves to be invaluable. Pre-session processing allows the staff to be together and prepare the topic for the session. Post-session processing provides time for staff to review communication and teamwork issues and bring their time together to a positive closure.

5. Fifty-two (52) or twenty-six (26) session order options are offered to the courts1.
An order to a NY Model batterer program is a serious and significant court response. We have been steadfast in providing only two choices and are resolute about a 26 session minimum.

1 Courts or agent or the courts (Probation, Social Service Caseworkers, Parole, etc.)