"And keep the change…”: a school-based community intervention model with a case study from an Ultra-Orthodox/Hassidic Jewish community

Psychologists have long recognized the importance of schools to prevention and intervention efforts with children and families and to overcoming some of the powerful obstacles to their treatment. However, even as the targets of school-based mental health services have progressed from individual assessment and counseling to broad, school-wide programs and school-community partnerships, their outcomes generally remain conceptualized according to individual-student educational and developmental dimensions. For those concerned with schools and interventions, and who have followed the field’s steps toward more systemic, ecological initiatives, the multilevel, community-based, culturally situated (MCBCS) model being pioneered by Schensul and Trickett (2009) represents a conceptual and procedural revolution with the potential to spur a leap in the direction of interventions with multi- and community-level outcomes. The school-based community intervention (SBCI) model extends Schensul and Trickett’s model to a school context, using it to guide collaborative school community interventions that are designed to create sustainable change and capacity at multiple levels of the community. This approach can be particularly useful in situations where schools and the community have historically resisted traditional psychological interventions and programmatic change efforts, and represents a novel approach to that well-documented challenge. This thesis presents an overview of barriers to care, school- and community-based solutions to them, and the foundations of the MCBS model. It then proposes and outlines the SBCI model as a method of introducing change into a resistant community. A case study will illustrate the SBCI model as implemented through a school-based mental health program servicing the highly insular Ultra-Orthodox and Hassidic Jewish population of Rockland County, NY. The conclusion examines the implications for school psychology research and practice and delineates how the model piloted in this project can be empirically tested.Psy.DIncludes bibliographical referencesby Binyamin L. Goldma