Dealing with the impact of crisis on school children and staff is not the primary mission of schools. Therefore, many schools remain unprepared to respond to a crisis affecting students and staff. Too often they respond to each successive crisis in a reflexive manner with little preplanned coordination or structure. This workshop provides an overview of a program that began as a regional, collaborative effort to develop an organizational model for multidisciplinary, communitywide school-based crisis-intervention services for four school districts in the New Haven region. Goals of the workshop include developing and implementing an organizational model for school-crisis preparedness and response, establishing and coordinating training of school staff, and enhancing community resources to address emergent mental-health needs of children and adolescents in crisis settings. Vignettes are presented contrasting two schools' responses to a comparable crisis event. (Contains 29 references.) (DFR)