School-Wide Approaches for Prevention and Intervention

Recommendations

• Re-build SC’s emphasis on PBIS with increased connections with SC-APBS
• Increase advocacy with the SC Departments of Education, Mental Health and Health and Human Services on growing PBIS in the state
• Emphasize ratios of school-employed mental health staff to students are far below those recommended by national organizations
• Repurpose existing staff toward more effective roles within the multi-tiered system of support
• Improve screening to better identify and respond to the needs of all students, but especially students presenting internalizing issues like depression, anxiety and experiencing trauma
• Expand memoranda of agreement (MOAs) between schools and mental health centers to assure that community mental health clinicians are able to participate in the full array of multi-tiered programs

Challenges

• The lack of coaching and implementation support for interconnected PBIS and school mental health
• Cultural taboos about mental health and resistance to focus on it
• States, regions, districts, and schools need to build relationships in coordinating efforts and build infrastructure for effective implementation
• Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, called the Every Student Succeeds Acts (ESSA) places emphasis on school behavioral health – connecting this work to the ESSA could garner additional attention and federal support

Research Project Ideas

• Increase understanding of effective university, school, and agency partnerships
• Understand impacts of well done SBH as compared to usual limited efforts (requiring a consistent measure of implementation)
• Identify lessons learned for advancing SBH from other states
• Identify and utilize champions to build practice and policy support
• Explore the most effective strategies for engaging school administrators as leaders in SBH
• Map all relevant professional organizations in the state and have members of this community present and engage in outreach activities at their conferences

Improving Collaboration Among Families, Educators, Clinicians, and Other Youth-System Staff

Recommendations

• Expand high quality SBH involving school, family, community agency partnerships into growing numbers of schools
• Develop shared data platforms enabling the right data collected and analyzed by the right people at the right time toward improvement of efforts for individual students and for program evaluation
• Lead collaboration efforts to avoid stove-piping or “siloing” of efforts by reaching out to initiate interdisciplinary and/or cross-system collaborating
• Enhance outreach efforts to parents and family members are in need of enhancement by mental health staff and especially by schools

Research Project Ideas

• Analyze factors that promote and impede access to care and understand access differences related to school level, location, and student problem type
• Understand the impact of peer involvement in all levels of multi-tiered programs, and specifically in assisting students in need of more intensive intervention
• Analyze the SBH social network connections within districts and school buildings documenting collaborative relationships that enable higher quality programs and services
• Analyze of the achievability of particular evidenced based interventions at each Tier is needed
• Understand how students and families can be more involved in collaboratively guiding and implementing them interventions

Increasing Implementation Support

Recommendations

• Develop a statewide leadership team that would help to guide and coordinate training and IS for effective SBH, building from annual conference
• Increase outreach and involvement with policy leaders from youth serving systems to explore mechanisms to build the workforce, including relevant economic analyses that document well done prevention, early intervention and intervention in schools is actually associated with significant cost savings (see Slade et al., 2009)
• Increase efforts to explore the “fit and feasibility” of various EBPs and set up the ability to share lessons learned and provide mutual support
• Focus on continuous quality improvement (CQI), using data systems to monitor multi-tiered programs, assuring meaningful analyses of data by multiple stakeholder groups including youth and families contending with EB problems, and refining programming fluidly based on this ongoing data analysis
• Assure adequate investment in effective SBH in some districts toward identification of exemplary sites, and publicize their experiences and promote generalization of successful programming strategies to other sites

Research Project Ideas

• Identify existing infrastructure supports and enhance connections with these supports
• Conduct ongoing systems analysis, with a willingness to be open and accepting of limitations toward improved planning

Enhancing Cultural Humility and Reducing Racial, Ethnic, and Other Disparities

Recommendations

• Increase diversity of Community; almost all participants in the discussion being people who have experienced disparities
• Provide training on disparities, increased empathy and meaningful supportive actions by all stakeholders toward reducing them, and “self-identity training” for people to be able to recognize personal factors that affect their views and actions about disparities
• Communicate an emphasis on identifying active policies and practices that promote restrictive placement and discipline of students
• Provide students, teachers and all school staff more information on mental health, and resources for assistance including assistance for more basic human needs consistent with Maslow’s hierarchy
• Provide training in the biases that contribute to disparities in services and educational placements for students

Research Project Ideas

• Understand the role of other community members, such as the faith community and businesses in eliminating disparities
• Identify a community experiencing high levels of disparities, and then focus specific attention on reducing/eliminating these disparities with effectively implemented SBH playing a key role