Reviewing Local Conditions

Technical assistance begins with the systems an LEA and its schools already operate. Reviewing those conditions is a recurring practice.

Deliverable 1 recorded the initial position at all eighteen sites during recruitment and readiness review: staffing and organizational structures, behavioral health and student support systems, data practices, technology, screening conditions, MTSS and referral structures, existing programs, professional learning structures, and the funding and staffing arrangements these depend on. Activity 3.1 completed that review with each LEA and school.

Those findings informed implementation planning, and they continue to inform technical assistance. Conditions change: staff move, programs start and end, funding shifts, and a site's own understanding of its systems develops once it begins looking at behavioral health information. Local conditions are therefore revisited with each LEA, and the current position is what support is built on.

What The Review Covers

With each LEA and school the BHPM team reviews:

• behavioral health programming already in place, and who provides it;
• staffing models, roles, and where behavioral health responsibility sits;
• the school and district data systems in use, and what each holds;
• existing data-review protocols and the meetings that use them;
• student support structures, including MTSS, referral pathways, and wellness services;
• what teams currently know about their students, the information sources they use, and what those sources help them understand;
• performance monitoring practice, and how data informs goal setting and progress tracking; and
• what they would like to understand about students that they cannot currently see.

The last of these carries the most weight for what follows.

The Starting Question

The first substantive conversation about screening asks what information about students would be useful that the school does not currently have.

The six behavioral health competencies give teams a common vocabulary for that conversation: Emotional Resilience, Relational Awareness, Conflict Resolution, Reflective Growth, Self-Insight, and Effective Help-Seeking. A team considering which of these it can currently see, and for which students, arrives at a screening strategy that answers a question it actually has.

How Review Findings Are Used

What the review finds is used in three ways.

• It shapes screening strategy. Population, timing, and the role of baseline and subsequent administrations all follow from the information a school is trying to obtain. Element 4 describes that work.
• It sets professional development priorities. Existing data practice, the structures available for professional learning, and the experience participants bring determine which parts of the Activity 3.3 curriculum receive emphasis and in what depth. Element 3 describes that work.
• It identifies where behavioral health information belongs. The meetings and protocols a school and LEA already run are where results will be reviewed. Element 6 describes that work.

Impacter Pathway and DBG carry this review jointly under activity 3.1, with SCCOE supporting through its relationships with participating LEAs and its role in identifying behavioral health champions.