SUSTAINING COMMUNITY MENTAL HEALTH CONSULTATION TO URBAN SCHOOLS

The goal of this Think Tank was to address barriers and facilitators to the implementation of effective programs in schools and community agencies in high poverty urban communities. Mental health consultation to urban schools is widely acknowledged as a promising intervention to close the persistent gap in service use for children living in poverty. However, there is little or no research that describes the complexity of implementing and sustaining effective school-community models. This issue was addressed by examining the implementation of Links to Learning, an NIMH-funded study (PI: Atkins) currently in its 4th year, that aligns community providers with parents and teachers to address key predictors of academic and behavioral functioning for children in urban high-poverty schools. The Think Tank was organized to provide an overview of the intervention model and its initial and long-term goals, followed by a discussion with participants of key features of the model: the training of community providers and specifically components of the model that appeared most and least compatible with traditional mental health practice, intra- and inter-organizational factors that appear to impact school-agency collaboration, supervision models to enhance agency and school capacity, and research strategies to capture the critical domains of program adaptation, implementation, and sustainability. The overall goal of the discussion was to describe implications for advancing policy, research and practice for the sustainability of effective community mental health services in high poverty urban communities.