“Nah, I'm good right here. Y'all always tryna move me somewhere, I ain't even do nothin'.”
Piedmont southern: y’all, tryna, copula absence. This is what your staff will actually hear on the floor.
Pick your program type to see every question the intake asks it. One sample is filled in with the reasoning beside each answer. The form here is the production one, so it cannot drift from what a customer fills in.
Why it matters
Marcus is fifteen and in the same behavioral state. He is answering the same sentence from a member of staff. The only difference is whether this facility completed the intake.
Staff member: “I need you to go back to your room now.”
“Nah, I'm good right here. Y'all always tryna move me somewhere, I ain't even do nothin'.”
Piedmont southern: y’all, tryna, copula absence. This is what your staff will actually hear on the floor.
“No, I'm fine here. You always want to move me somewhere and I didn't even do anything.”
Grammatically correct and spoken by nobody. Flatter than any real young person, which is why leaving the intake blank is obviously wrong instead of subtly wrong.
The form, completed
8 screens and 47 questions for this program type and tier. The form branches on both, so nobody is asked everything. The widest version is a state-level mobile crisis team with 9 screens and 61 questions.
12 options: Residential Treatment · Group Home / Congregate Care · Child Welfare / Foster Care · Juvenile Justice · School-Based Program · Day Treatment · Outpatient Behavioral Health · Mobile Crisis · +4 more
Why we ask Asked first because it decides which of the remaining questions are worth your time.
What it dictates The situations that exist at all. A mobile crisis team and a school share none of them — this sets the setting, the staffing and who the adult in the room is.
4 options: Program · Agency · Network · State & Regional Government
Why we ask Commercial scope only. It never changes how a young person behaves or sounds.
What it dictates How much administrative configuration is collected. A single program is asked none of it. A state is asked about record ownership and reporting cadence.
51 options: Alabama · Alaska · Arizona · Arkansas · California · Colorado · Connecticut · Delaware · +43 more
Why we ask You know your state. You should not have to learn our vocabulary for speech regions.
What it dictates Combined with dialect below, it resolves the speech region. North Carolina plus a southern dialect resolves to the CAROLINAS, not the Deep South — Piedmont speech is its own community and the difference is audible.
4 options: Urban · Suburban · Rural · Mixed
Why we ask Vocabulary turnover differs between urban and rural peers of the same age as much as geography does.
What it dictates Refines the region. A rural setting in a state we would map to an urban region resolves to the rural variant instead.
2 of 5 selected
Why we ask So your staff are never rehearsing against an age group they do not work with.
What it dictates Which personas appear in the roster at all — and the calibration gate BLOCKS a session with a young person outside this range before it starts.
4 of 10 selected
Why we ask So the faces in your roster look like the young people in your building.
What it dictates The persona roster, and nothing else. It is never an input to how a young person behaves and never to how they speak — the build proves the field never reaches the language engine.
1 of 13 selected
Why we ask This is the single most important answer in the form.
What it dictates How every persona actually talks. Southern here is why Marcus says “y’all”, “finna” and “ain’t even do nothin’” — and why “deadass” is BLOCKED in his mouth as borrowed New York vocabulary.
3 of 14 selected · up to 3 allowed
Why we ask Two programs in the same city can serve young people who present completely differently.
What it dictates Sentence length, deflection and how much is said at all before trust rises.
Why we ask You hear these every day and we do not. This is the part of the corpus only you can write.
What it dictates Goes into your own lexicon layer, above the shared one. Never shared with another organization.
Why we ask Every program has words that end a conversation in their building.
What it dictates Terms the simulation will not put in anybody’s mouth, and terms a staff member is marked down for using.
Why we ask One sentence here calibrates the register shift better than any dropdown.
What it dictates What the young person sounds like at high threat — and what THINNING OUT looks like when your staff member finally gets somewhere.
5 of 20 selected · up to 5 allowed
Why we ask What actually walks through your door, rather than what a curriculum assumes.
What it dictates Which scenarios are generated as typical. Anything outside this list still runs and is FLAGGED as atypical for your building, so a debrief never implies it was routine.
5 of 15 selected · up to 5 allowed
Why we ask The same young person escalates on completely different things in different settings.
What it dictates What the scenario puts in front of your staff member, and what the behavioral engine treats as a legitimate cause of escalation.
8 options: Youth · Client · Student · Resident · Patient · Child · Young person · Other
Why we ask A simulation that calls your resident a patient has already told your staff it was built for somebody else.
What it dictates The word used throughout the session, the debrief and the competency record. Yours, not ours.
7 options: Organization-specific · CPI · TCI · Handle With Care · Trauma-informed framework · Other · Multiple frameworks
Why we ask If you already run an established model, being graded against ours is worthless to you.
What it dictates Which behaviors count as correct. This is the difference between “did this employee respond the way WE expect” and “did an AI think that sounded reasonable”.
Why we ask Deliberately not a question we answer for you. Every organization’s threshold and escalation differ.
What it dictates Assessment and certification mode. Without it they do not run at all — grading a safety-critical response against a placeholder would teach your staff the wrong procedure with complete confidence. Practice mode still runs.
Why we ask Training nobody reports on is training nobody can act on.
What it dictates Who receives completions and scores, and who hears what each person should practice next. That comes with the timestamp and their own words attached.
3 options: Coaching and development only · Coaching, and as one input to formal review · Undecided
Why we ask We ask outright because it changes what the reports say.
What it dictates Competency data used to manage somebody out stops being honest data almost immediately, and then it is evidence about nothing. Coaching-only reports read differently from reports that feed a formal review, and you should choose which you are getting.
What it produced
It comes from the answers above. A director confirms this screen before anybody trains, and the calibration gate checks every session against it.
Carolinas — Charlotte metro, Triangle, Upstate
North Carolina with a southern dialect resolves to the Carolinas rather than the Deep South — Piedmont speech is its own community.
Residential Treatment · residential treatment
Ages 12–17 · Program tier
Young people are called Resident. Frontline personnel are called Direct-care staff.
These words are used throughout the session, the debrief and the competency record.
Presentations: Anger, Defiance, Authority conflict, Withdrawal, Peer conflict
Triggers: Being told no, Feeling disrespected, Public correction, Loss of privileges, Authority confrontation
Left incomplete on purpose. Nobody’s first attempt is flawless, and a perfect example would hide what a gap actually costs you.
No approved response protocol loaded. Practice sessions run; assessment and certification do not, because scoring a safety-critical response against a placeholder would teach your staff the wrong procedure with complete confidence.
The point
The intake sets the speech region, the ages in your roster and the setting. It sets your terminology and what counts as a correct response. It also decides who hears how your staff are doing. Without it your staff would train on somebody else’s young people.