1. Measuring Changes in Academic Performance in School Mental Health ABBY ALBRIGHT & HEATHER MCDANIEL

2. School Mental Health SMH services to reach more children at risk for serious mental health and associated consequences Point of access for youth in need Decreasing barriers to learning “Helping educators educate”

3. Mental Health and Academic Performance Youth with mental illness at risk for other struggles, including academic related ones Links between early signs of externalizing and internalizing symptoms with later academic difficulties (e.g., Masten et al., 2005; Valdez et al., 2011) Theorized bidirectional relationship ◦Logical to intervene on one domain and see results in the other

4. Results in the field Ambiguity of methods and outcomes ◦Meta analysis: academic ES = 0.38 ◦Definition of constructs vague and not standardized across studies includes SMH services and academic outcomes: ◦Trends of initial declines, delayed gains ◦Gains or improvements less obvious, often prevention from further decline Overall, equivocal findings and mixed methods

5. Strengthening the Quality of School Mental Health Services R01MH081941-01A2 46 school mental health clinicians 2 groups ◦Wellness ◦Supporting clinician, family and student wellness ◦CSS ◦Quality Assessment and Improvement ◦Family Engagement/Empowerment ◦Modular Evidence-Based Practice ◦Implementation Support

6. Aims related to academic records Evaluate the effect of the EQAI intervention on school outcomes including school attendance, discipline related referrals, suspensions, and grades.

7. Collection of data and creation of measure Academic record data collected from schools across a large SC county ◦3 years of data for each student Created a coding system based on study aims and the academic record data

8. Grades

9. Attendance

10. Incident Reports

11. Discussion Questions for the group ◦Are there better ways to code these data? ◦Are there better ways to capture academic change? ◦How is meaningful change defined and measured? ◦Are there other data that better capture this construct? ◦Or is it the same data, but we just need better methods? Future directions ◦Is there a need to set a precedence for standardizing methods across studies in the field?