Bridging Practice and Research in a School-Based Mental Health Program: A Multi-Site Social Emotional Learning and Trauma-Informed Care Mixed Methods Program Evaluation

The gaps between evaluation and practice are often wide. In urban school-based mental health programs, data is sporadically collected and inconsistently used to support clinical services. Further, community based organizations in school settings struggle to have the resources and expertise to support mental health program evaluations. The roundtable will outline a mixed methods school-based mental health program evaluation run by social workers and how community based staff and school staff can use research in real-time to support social and emotional learning (SEL) and resiliency.

The roundtable discussion will outline a multi-site program evaluation conducted with over 1,000 students in three New York City public schools with the nonprofit, Wediko Children's Services. Wediko’s school based programming is an innovative model that brings together whole school culture change, professional development for staff and direct clinical support in the context of the classroom through weekly social and emotional skill building workshops, parent outreach (workshops, home visits, and community referrals) and individual and small group counseling. Wediko’s school based programs provide services to primarily low income, minority communities in 20 public schools in NYC, 30 public schools in Boston and at Wediko’s residential school and summer program in New Hampshire.

The use of mixed methods research in school-based mental health program evaluations will be discussed. A mixed methods intervention explanatory sequential design was used in the evaluation (Creswell, 2014). This design uses a single group pre and posttest quantitative assessment (quasi-experiment design) with qualitative data collection at the end of the intervention. The Wediko school based services was the intervention, including clinical social workers overseeing the school based mental health program. Using mixed methods is recommended when mixing the methodologies can offset the weaknesses of both quantitative and qualitative research, in explaining and providing more comprehensive evidence, and answering questions that cannot be answered by one approach alone, among many other premises (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2011).

The lead social work researcher and Wediko’s social work program director will begin the discussion by overviewing Wediko’s school-based mental health services, the multi-site program evaluation, and the use of mixed methods. Another two presenters, social work clinicians/researchers who worked at the sites and collected data, will talk about how front-line staff can use research data to direct school based mental health interventions. The entire group will discuss how data was used by the school-based staff in real-time during the different phases to assess students for social and emotional learning levels and past exposure to trauma. Clinical interventions will be discussed, including using staffing to discuss students who are scoring low or high in terms of social and emotional skills and similarly for level of past trauma. Further, the use of administering research surveys (such as the ACE Questionnaire) during a counseling session will be discussed in terms of how to bridge assessment and therapeutic interventions. The overall goal is to stimulate conversation on how data is collected with school-based mental health programs and how this data can guide clinical interventions by school-based staff in real-time.