Impact of the Family Access Center of Excellence (FACE) on Behavioral and Educational Outcomes—a Quasi-Experimental Study

Many youth experience symptoms of a mental health (MH) disorder. Most of those youth never access services. Barriers to accessing MH services include unawareness of symptoms and where to access help, financial and transportation barriers, and stigma. Limited school-based MH support personnel creates a need for schools to develop collaborations to better serve students. The present study describes the social-emotional, behavioral, and academic impact for youth referred to the Family Access Center of Excellence (FACE). FACE is a community assessment and case management center modeled on the FCU process. FACE employs the Family Check-Up to conduct child-focused, family systems assessment of family strengths and problem areas and create a treatment plan and linkages to services, with intensive case management to directly address access barriers. In this study, participants were 417 youth in 52 schools in a Midwestern County, and 417 youth were referred from schools to FACE in once academic year. We compared the 224 youth who engaged in FACE services to 193 youth who did not engage in FACE services. We hypothesized that youth who engaged with FACE would demonstrate improvements in self-reported and teacher-reported social and behavioral risk, improved attendance, fewer suspensions, and improvements on statewide academic assessments. Using a quasi-experimental research design to compare educational and behavioral outcomes, the current study compared each group using a chi-square or independent t-test. Next, we used a sequence of fixed effects regression models to examine end-of-year differences between the two groups on each outcome. Results indicated that groups were equivalent at baseline on all demographic and outcome measures with the exception of a modest trending (p = .09) difference of 2016–2017 ISS totals between FACE-engaged (n = 224, M = 29.31, SD = 4.57) and unengaged (n = 193, M = 31.80, SD = 6.32) youth. The models show that FACE-engaged youth had fewer teacher-rated social–emotional risk factors (EIS-T, d = .24), a higher per- centage of attendance (%Attend, d = .26), significantly fewer ODRs (d = .24), fewer ISSs (d = .32) and OSSs (d = .33), and higher scores on standardized math tests (MAP Math, d = .45) compared to unengaged youth. The findings revealed that FACE is effective for youth who engage in FACE services that may lead to improvements in school-based outcomes and suggested the promise of FACE as a model for school-community partnerships to increase youth and family access to services.