NCJFCJ & NCMHJJ Webinar Series, Webinar #4: Tools for School-Based Diversion Success | May 19, 2016
Jacqui: / Hello everyone and welcome to the webinar on Tools for School-Based Diversion Success. Just a couple of pieces of housekeeping before we get started, first there should be a file transfer tab that popped up on your screen for you and there is a handout in there and also the slides for the webinar are available for you to download if you'd like to have the slides during the webinar. We will also be recording this webinar and posting the recording to the link you see on that slide and we will post the slides up there as well. If you don't download them right now but you want them later you can access them at that link. We will be having time for questions and answers at the end of this webinar after our presenters talk to you about great information that they have for you today.[00:01:00] / You can use the chat function that you see on the right side of your screen to ask questions. Just type your questions in the chat box and we will gather those questions throughout the webinar and have a chance to ask them of our presenters before our time together is over. If you are having any kind of technical challenges with the webinar today please feel free also to use that chat box and let us know what you're struggling with and we will try to help you out with it so you can have fully complete access to our webinar. We are providing you this information today through the School Justice Partnership National Resource Center. That resource center is supported by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
[00:02:00] / It's led by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and we here are from the National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice and serve as a core partner in that resource center along with the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Association of State Boards of Education and The National Child Traumatic Stress Network. This webinar today is the fourth in what has been a four-part series on developing and implementing effective school-based diversion programs that identify and address behavioral health needs for young people. We call that a responder model and in the first webinar we give you an overview of what those models in Connecticut and Summit County Ohio look like.
[00:03:00] / In the second webinar we gave you some information about strategies to engage the stakeholders who are absolutely critical to getting any kind of responder program up and running, law enforcement schools, families and behavioral health providers. In our third webinar we give you some concrete information about how to actually identify kids who might be having behavioral health needs in school and some processes for connecting those kids to services and also the role of trauma and how trauma can impact destructive behavior in schools and maybe a behavioral health need that you're seeing amongst your kids. Today we're really focused on providing you some very concrete tools and resources to help you in thinking through how you might get a responder program up and running in your jurisdiction.
Today we're hoping that we can kind of give you the fuel that you can blast off like the rocket ship here on this slide. We hope we've kind of planted an idea with you of something that you might want to do in your locality and we're really hoping to give you some strategies for success that could really catapult you on your way to developing a responder model in your jurisdiction. You're going to hear about some very concrete tools that you could use about how to select a school, how to do a needs assessment, what kind of training and data you will use in order to make a responder program work in your locality. How memorandum of agreement can help.
[00:04:00] / Things like a graduated response grid, some very concrete steps to get you started, a flow chart and some tools of family engagement are all going to be covered during our webinar today. We will get right to the content for you today and I want to let you know again to be sure to put your questions in the chat box if you have them along the way and we'll hope to get to as many of them at the end as we can. We're going to start today with Dr. Jeana Bracey. Dr. Bracey has a Ph. D. in Clinical Community Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She currently is the director of School and Community Initiative at the Child Health and Development Institute of Connecticut. She's also the coordinator for Connecticut School-Based Diversion Initiative, where she's going to be talking about today and she's the project director for the Connecticut network of care transformation. Jeana
Jeana:
[00:05:00] / Thank you Jacqui and good afternoon everyone. I'm very happy to be back with you again and share some additional information and particularly the resources we've developed through the Connecticut School-Based Diversion Initiative or SPDI and I am going to do this primarily by walking through a free tool kit that we've developed. We'll just jump in and get started. As a brief overview, here's what I'll be presenting. I'm not going to go into great detail of the model itself. I'd refer you back to the first webinar in the series or to the resources provided at the end where you can find additional details about that but I will be talking about the tool kit that Jacqui mentioned and some of the core components of the general Arrest Diversion Model as well as some specific resources to share.
[00:06:00] / The School-Based Diversion Initiative or SBDI as we refer to it is really a school level initiative to promote positive outcomes for youth at risk of arrest due to emotional or behavioral health challenges and we do this by four primary efforts. One is sort of general arrest reduction efforts and secondly, really thinking about linking to community based services and supports as well as professional development for school staff and also discipline policy consultation for the school or the district. SBDI model was initially developed in two thousand and nine with funding from the MacArthur Foundation Models for Change Mental Health Juvenile Justice Action Network and currently are fully state funded as part of the governor's Second Chance Act with additional state funding from our judicial branch, our Department of Children and Families or Department of Mental health and addiction services and the state Department of Education.
[00:07:00] / As Jacqui mentioned, I'm with the Child Health and Development Institute and we serve as the coordinating center and co-developers of this model. To talk about our goals of this model of the SBDI initiative, I would really first to reduce the number of discretionary arrest in schools as well as reducing expulsions and out-of school suspensions. We want to build knowledge and skills among teachers, school staff, resource officers; anyone who related to the discipline policy process or serving children in the school, to recognize and manage behavior health crises and to access needed community resources and finally we're really interested in linking youth at risk of arrest to appropriate school community based services and support.
We frame this model on a three tiered approach and I'll focus today just on the primary level of intervention, things that all schools or communities can implement. That's really sort of our universal level or bottom level. As we move up to tear two we're just integrating additional supports and consultation around particular areas of the model and our third or sort of highest intensive level of SBDI model is really getting the full professional development series, the consultation, the discipline policy review and all of the core components of the model. Again, today my focus is really on the tool kit and this is the product that's available free of charge. It can be downloaded on our website. We also have hard copies available if people are interested and we really realize the need to reach more schools more quickly.
[00:08:00] / When this started in two thousand and nine we were working with three schools and two communities here in Connecticut and while we were able to sort of quickly increase the model, to where we served over twenty one schools in ten districts, we still found a need to be able to get this information out more broadly and also to attract those schools who aren't necessarily the highest needs schools in our state or in our community but that need to put in some basic supports or want to start the framework for a school based diversion model. Here we have our tool kit and we think about, look at some of the contents of the tool kit. It really includes a self-assessment guide so it gives you information about how to determine yourself whether this type of model will be useful for you. It gives you an immediate action steps that you can use to implement right away and I'll give you those at the end.
[00:09:00] / There is also support for data informed decision-making, how to make referrals and coordinate services and a host of appendences that give you some concrete tools. Again, I'll be sharing some of those today and here's the few steps to just get you started with implementing a school based diversion model and the first is school selection. How do you choose the schools that you would be interested in working with and often we start with needs. Which schools have the highest arrest or school discipline rates or which ones have the lowest service referrals? All of those are very important especially when dealing with limited resources and you want to really get the best thing for your buck and it's in sort of addressing the schools that have the highest need but we also must consider interest. Are you willing and interested in changing.
[00:10:00] / Is there buying at all levels in the school or in the district and we know that that's a very important indicator as well and capacity is our third indicator and that refers to time. Do you have the time professional development days or staff meeting time to be able to have the professional development that's needed to support this model? Do you have the availability to collect and share data to track how the intervention is going and are you able to change policies and practices sort of at all levels? Those are some things we really need to know as we're getting started and that I would courage you all to think about as you're considering this type of model, is how do they stack up in terms of interest needs and capacity?
[00:11:00] / Once you've identified those schools the next step that we start with is really a needs assessment survey as well as a focus group process. It's really more of a comprehensive process to determine what needs the schools have and again it's grounded by the core components of our model. How do they relate to the need for community based resources the professional development and the consultation? Back to the needs assessment, we have a survey that takes just about five minutes to complete. We provide it online or in paper copy, it's the school's choice whichever they feel they'll get the best return rate and the goal here is really to determine how the school identifies youth with juvenile justice behavioral health needs and how those youth are referred for services.
The responses are aggregated and also supplemented with focus group or interview data that we collect to further determine what the needs and strengths are of each particular school. Here's a quick screen shot of what the survey looks like. It is included in your file transfer that Jacqui mentions so I would encourage you to download that and to adapt it for your use as needed. A couple of sample items that are on here, one would be students in the school who have mental health needs are likely to be referred to the juvenile justice system. We want to know if that's mostly true are or folks disagree with that statement or if they are unsure.
[00:12:00] / A second one item would be our school has clear policies guidelines about mental health emergencies or crises? Another item would be the school collaborates well with law enforcement or SROs when it comes to students with mental health needs and SROs refers to first to School Resource Officers that maybe in the schools. That again gives you a sense of, what are the competencies around mental health juvenile justice and in terms of the content as well, the processes that are happening in the school and then at the end we give our staff a chance to rank order our professional development topic so that they can determine which best fit their needs for at this time. How do they prioritize the training?
[00:13:00] / Once the training needs are identified, a professional development series is developed in sort of customized, semi customized for that particular school. The goal here is to enhance the knowledge, attitudes and skills among school staff to support arrest diversion principles and practices and there's a list of our core modules here. Some are done in full staff trainings, others are done and more of a work group format that allows for skill building, processing and quality improvement processes and we've also built an eLearning collaborative approach to expand and sustain training opportunities and really build a statewide network of current and alumni schools through interactive online technology as well.
Now I'm going to move to another component of this work and to really build on the system level strategies for supporting this as a school level intervention, we have had the work in an expanded school mental health framework and you can read more about that in this report given our time today. The general idea is to really have schools serve as a hub for integrating care and services to better just the students' needs and we really help build the school's capacity to do this through the referral and service coordination, discipline policy revisions and graduated response consultation and training and professional development. We are going to talk more now about the referral and service coordination component.
[00:14:00] / Again, the goal here is to reduce the burden placed on schools to address mental health concerns. We know that schools are being asked to do more and more with less and less resources often and that includes responding to more intense needs or more -- A higher level of need that has been seen previously perhaps in the student population. How are schools being equipped to address those needs and if they don't have these resources internally, how can they better meet those needs by linking up with the community based services that are available? This is just a sample of what Connecticut has to offer in terms of community coalition building with local resources. Your rate may be similar or very different and I'll talk about one of these in particular, the Emergency Mobile Psychiatric Services EMPS.
[00:15:00] / EMPS in Connecticut serve as our responder in this model. This is a statewide mobile crisis service that will respond to any two children in any situation in any setting. It will come to school, come to your home, anywhere in the community where a behavioral health crisis is happening and their goal is to really do immediate crisis stabilization. They do a brief assessment, brief treat treatment and also will link to ongoing care. They will follow the child up to forty five days and serve them for forty five days while they're linking to other services as needed. This is state funded so it's available free to all Connecticut children and it is available everywhere, every community in our state simply by dialing two one one you can get access to this service and pretty quick rapid response to behavioral health crises.
[00:16:00] / Our mobility rate is over ninety percent on average for the state so any time you call you're more than ninety percent likely to get someone come out to you in person and most likely within forty five minutes or less and oftentimes it's within thirty minutes or less. Again in Connecticut we use EMPS as our hour of onsite crisis responder for the schools but you may also use in school crisis intervention team or other similar community based team that's available to you. We hope that we’ll clarify the relationship between the school and the EMPS provider through a memorandum of agreement and we've consistently used this through the SBDI model where we sort added this and make it fit with the particular school and the particular provider but it really helps provide some clarity and guidelines about that relationship between the school and the local provider.