PCG and our partner LexisNexis recently received a promise award from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)-sponsored Mission Daybreak Challenge. The award is part of the VA’s challenge “[calling] on innovators to develop suicide prevention solutions that meet the diverse needs of Veterans.

It’s an exciting time for innovation in public sector technology. With a change in orientation toward consumer experience, there are many new vendors and products emerging in the marketplace. Historically, this has been a risk-averse industry, with an inclination toward standing with the old guard; recently, however, there have been a number of unexpected contract awards that have the state and local environment buzzing.

In his decades of experience spanning many roles, PCG’s special education subject matter expert Will Gordillo has personally experienced some very tragic events on the job that unexpectedly escalated to a crisis-level, involving incidents of violence and threats initiated by students. While he was fortunate to work in school districts that used available frameworks as resources, the processes were often paper- and form-driven, had great variability, lacked uniformity, and were sometimes not consistently implemented as they were intended, all of which impacted fidelity.