Commentary: Facilitating Collaborative Partnerships with Schools: It’s Where You Get It

Abstract

This special issue is focused around the generic topic of delivering child mental health services across contexts (school, home, primary care) using collaborative partnership models and approaches. Some very important themes and interesting practices are illustrated across the articles in this series and they reflect considerable diversity of both subject matter content and the approaches used. For example, the work of Weems, et al. addresses the question of student anxiety and stress associated with test taking. They successfully used universal screening procedures to accurately identify students with elevated levels of anxiety induced by test-taking. The implications of this work for NCLB and the standard of adequate yearly progress are obviously important to both schools and families. I have long been invested in the analysis and use of archival school records (e.g., office discipline referrals, academic measures, narrative teacher comments, agency contacts) that provide footprint impressions of how schools accommodate students—especially atypical students. The work of Power and his associates represents one of the most creative and effective treatments of such records that I have seen to date. Using a retrospective review and analysis process, they analyzed telephone contacts with families who had been referred by primary care professionals to a home–school intervention for ADHD students. They found that the extent to which parents could be accessed and engaged by staff members of their PASS project via the frequency and duration of prior telephone contacts, in which motivational interviewing techniques were employed, was quite predictable (See Miller & Rollnick, 2002). This work provides important lessons regarding the manner in which we need to approach and deal with families who are referred for mental health interventions and holds the potential to substantially increase the degree to which they can be engaged in beneficial treatments. Another very important theme identified in the work of Alderfer and Hodges concerns the role of social support in buffering and offsetting the stresses of siblings who have a brother or sister who is a cancer victim. As a cancer survivor, I have some degree of understanding of just how disruptive such stress can be on the lives of family members. It is interesting that siblings in their study valued the social support as provided by friends most strongly, followed by parents, teachers and then classmates. This held true in both the importance and amount of perceived social support. As the authors note, family–school partnerships are of critical importance in addressing the stresses induced in students by family members who are cancer victims. Finally, the work of Stormshak and her colleagues reported herein on the Family Checkup Intervention Model, that she and Tom Dishion have developed, illustrates its role in enhancing the self-regulatory repertoires of behaviorally at-risk, middle school students which in turn positively impacts school engagement and reduces self-reported depression in high school. This study provides a key demonstration of the power of the FCU model on a very important outcome variable that other research has indicated is a long-term protective factor against a host of health risk outcomes among adolescents. Hawkins, Catalano, Kosterman, Abbott, and Hill (1999) and Hawkins, Kosterman, Catalano, Hill, and Abbott (2008), in long-term follow-up studies of early intervention with teachers, parents and at-risk students, have documented the impact of school engagement and bonding as a potent mediating influence on adolescent health risks including mental health problems, sexual risk, teenage pregnancy, delinquency, drug use, low achievement H. M. Walker (&) University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA e-mail: hwalker@uoregon.edu