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Promoting Academic Competence and Behavioral Health in Public Schools: A Strategy of Systemic Concatenation of Empirically Based Intervention Principles

This special issue, Developing Social-Emotional and Behavioral Interventions with School Communities: Systematic and Collaborative Processes, reflects the current state of the science for improving schools to better educate children and adolescents and promote their behavioral health. The innovations described in this volume describe advancements in intervention programs and in implementation and school change at a broader level. After briefly commenting about the contributions to this special issue, I go on to suggest ways to expand the focus of our science to innovate more effective school systems. In doing so, I touch on lessons learned by our research group as we collaborated with public school systems during the past 20 years. The programs explored in this issue include The Incredible Years Teacher Classroom Management Training component (Webster-Stratton, Reinke, Herman, & Newcomer, 2011), the Cognitive Behavioral Intervention for Trauma in Schools (Nadeem, Jaycox, Kataoka, Langley, & Stein, 2011), School-Based Health Centers (Lyon, Charlesworth-Attie, Vander Stoep, & McCauley, 2011) and Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support (PBIS; Bradshaw & Pas, 2011). These intervention programs suggest significant benefits for students by improving training and feedback with respect to teachers' behavior management skills, identifying and addressing trauma in students who reside in violent neighborhoods and communities, addressing internalizing problems in children by the use of modular school-based clinics, and improving students' behavioral health through a system of positive behavior support. Each program has been tested in a randomized trial and has shown benefits intended by the program developers, and to this extent, each meets the criteria of empirically based intervention programs. Program development and testing, however, is only the first step in the innovation process of public education. An exclusive focus on this first step may be short sighted in that schools are left with a list of promising programs but not a map of how to integrate these approaches with a realistic and effective overall strategy. In fact, prevention science could inadvertently have harmful effects if it does not collectively move toward integrating the core principles of empirically based programs and interventions. It became clear to our research group that many schools are burdened with implementing too many programs, are overwhelmed by the independent training mandates, and are hampered by a lack of integration among individual programs. I am reminded of two experiences that illustrate the limitations of using packaged programs in the public school environment. In one study, my colleague and I collaborated with eight public middle schools to evaluate the effectiveness of the Family Check-Up (FCU) model for improving student behavior (Stormshak, Dishion, Light, & Yasui, 2005). Each of four randomly selected intervention schools had implemented a minimum of six programs that addressed some aspect of student behavioral health. Each school had been budgeted to select the packaged programs of their choice, yet they had no guidelines on how to fit the programs together in a realistic, overall strategy. Implementation of these programs was so taxing to the school staff that the school district had created prevention coordinator positions to manage the programs in each school setting. The prevention coordinators themselves then required supervision and coordination, and would sometimes undermine the skilled leadership of principals and other school staff. In this sense, the mandate to implement empirically based intervention programs in the public schools can lead to unsustainable solutions that are disruptive to the development of an overall, effective school system. We were left wondering whether the school would have been better off left alone. Despite our goal to integrate our family-centered intervention into the entire school system, we were unsuccessful in three out of the four randomized schools because school staff were simply too preoccupied with implementing and coordinating other prevention programs than our own. …