Abstract
Effectively coordinating school and community services has remained an elusive goal for children’s mental health service providers. Researchers speculate that when community and school-based providers collaborate, supports for youth with serious emotional and behavioral disorders improve. An understudied corresponding hypothesis is that such improvement will be associated with successful school outcomes. Aims of this study included: (1) investigating outcomes of students referred by their schools to systems of care; (2) examining socio-demographic correlates of outcomes; and (3) comparing youth referred by schools to youth referred by mental health agencies. Using data from an ongoing examination of more than 170 federally-funded system of care communities, findings suggest that students referred to systems of care by schools improved on internalizing and externalizing symptoms, absence rates, and rates of school failure. Youth referred from schools also had significantly greater improvement in absence rates than those referred by mental health agencies. These findings suggest the importance of considering referral source in understanding treatment outcomes. In particular, results indicate that school staff might play an especially important role in referral to community systems of care, as their involvement in referral might facilitate improved school functioning outcomes.
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Acknowledgments
The project described was supported by Grant Number K01MH085710 from the National Institute of Mental Health to J. Green. We are grateful to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) for providing the support for data collection, as well as the staff at ICF International, particularly Dr. Russell Carleton and Ye Xu, for their assistance with Children’s Mental Health Initiative (CMHI) data management. We thank Grace McMillan for her comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of Mental Health or the National Institutes of Health of SAMHSA.
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Green, J.G., Xuan, Z., Kwong, L. et al. School Referral of Children with Serious Emotional Disturbance to Systems of Care: Six-Month Clinical and Educational Outcomes. J Child Fam Stud 25, 3728–3738 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-016-0511-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-016-0511-9