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Many youth experience mental health problems. Schools are an ideal setting to identify, prevent, and intervene in these problems. The purpose of this study was to investigate patterns of student social, emotional, and behavioral risk over time among a community sample of 3rd through 12th grade students and the association of these risk patterns with fidelity to a school-based mental health model. Overall growth of social, emotional, and behavioral problems declined over a 3-year period. Four classes of students were identified using growth mixture modeling: (1) students with high levels of problems; (2) students with decreasing problems; (3) students with increasing problems; and (4) students with stable, low levels of problems. These growth trajectories were associated with fidelity to the model, in that trajectories where students with higher or increasing problems were more likely to be from schools with lower fidelity. Implications for practice and policy are provided. [This article was published in "School Psychology Review" (EJ1292056).]

Healthy relationships between parents and teachers are essential to addressing children's emotional and behavioral concerns. The current meta-analysis examined the effects of family-school engagement interventions on parent-teacher relationships. Twenty-three group-design studies yielding 58 effects comprised the current sample. Random effect models were estimated to calculate pooled effect size estimates, and mixed effect models were conducted for moderation analyses. Overall, results revealed that family-school engagement interventions had a small, but significant effect on parent-teacher relationships ([delta] = 0.23, SE = 0.09, p < 0.05). This finding was consistent across mesosystemic characteristics of parent-teacher relationships including joining ([delta] = 0.25, SE = 0.09, p < 0.05) and parent-teacher communication ([delta] = 0.34, SE = 0.10, p < 0.01). However, no significant results were revealed for relational prerequisites ([delta] = 0.05, SE = 0.12, p = 0.67). Interventions were found to be significantly moderated by child behavior concerns (i.e., effects were higher for families of students with externalizing concerns) and community type (i.e., effects were more pronounced in rural areas). Results were not significantly moderated by child/family race or child age, indicating that interventions positively impacted parent-teacher relationships regardless of child/family race and child age. These findings demonstrate the benefits of family-school engagement interventions in promoting parent-teacher relationships and have key implications for school personnel.

Social, emotional, and behavioral interventions are often complicated to implement in school settings. Empirical and practical evidence suggests that educators need support to implement interventions with treatment integrity or as intended. Treatment integrity is comprised of multiple dimensions that capture quantity of the intervention delivered, quality of that delivery, and implementers' engagement with the intervention procedures. Whereas research in this area often focuses on the integrity with which interventions are delivered to students, treatment integrity can be measured and assessed across the intervention implementation process from training implementers to use an intervention to the actual use of an intervention. In fact, engagement in early intervention implementation processes may be critical for the immediate and sustained success of an intervention, particularly engagement during professional development or trainings designed to teach the skills associated with an intervention. One evidence-based intervention that includes structured training in intervention procedures (e.g., effective classroom management) is the Incredible Years Teacher Classroom Management (IY TCM) program. The purpose of this study was to examine teachers' engagement in IY TCM training sessions, their sustained intervention implementation, and student behavior over time. Using a sample of 44 teachers implementing IY TCM, we found that teachers' sustained implementation of intervention skills and students' disruptive behavior in the classroom differed based on how engaged they reportedly were in the intervention trainings. The findings underscore the importance of assessing and promoting engagement in training sessions.

As many as 1 in 5 youth in the United States experience social, emotional, and behavioral problems. However, many students with mental health concerns are unidentified and do not receive adequate care. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the factor structure, measurement invariance, and the concurrent and predictive validity of the Early Identification System--Student Report (EIS-SR), a screener for social, emotional, and behavioral problems, using a sample of over 5000 students from Grades 3 to 5. The EIS-SR was developed by using extant literature on the risk indicators that lead to social, emotional, and behavioral challenges among children and youth. As expected, seven subscales were identified as having adequate factor loadings. Furthermore, the measure was determined to be invariant across grade level (n = 5005), gender (n = 5005), and between Black and White students (n = 1582). The concurrent validity of the Internalizing Behavior, Attention and Academic Issues, Emotion Dysregulation, and School Disengagement subscales was supported by correlations with comparable subscales of the Behavior Assessment System for Children--3rd Edition (BASC-3; n = 382). Additionally, the EIS-SR subscales administered in the fall of the school year were predictive of important outcomes in spring, including attendance (n = 4780), disciplinary referrals (n = 4938), bully victimization (n = 4670), math academic achievement scores (n = 4736), and reading (n = 4772) academic achievement scores. The EIS-SR holds promise as a feasible and technically adequate screening tool for use in elementary schools.

Conjoint behavioral consultation (CBC) is a model of consultation wherein parents and teachers partner to address children's social-behavioral concerns. The teacher-parent relationship has proven critical to the success of CBC, yet little is known about the dynamics in CBC that may promote these relationships. This study explored interactions among teachers and parents during CBC. Using latent profile analysis, four interactional sense-making behaviors (i.e., engagement, perspective-taking, turn-taking, and coherence) were examined among 193 parents and teachers participating in CBC. Three classes of interactions emerged -- one class characterized by high interactional sense-making (18%), another characterized by moderate interactional sense-making (69%), and one class characterized by low interactional sense-making (13%). Follow-up analyses suggested differences in the quality of this relationship based on the interactions displayed by parents and teachers, with dyads that displayed high and moderate patterns of interactional sense-making reporting better quality relationships than those demonstrating low patterns of interactional sense-making.

The present study examined parent-teacher congruent communication within conjoint behavioral consultation (CBC). Specifically, the study purpose was to determine the extent to which congruence in parent-teacher communication (i.e., the degree to which parents and teachers view their communication in a similar fashion) moderated CBC's effects on children's social skills. Drawn from a large randomized trial investigating the efficacy of CBC, the participants were 166 children and their parents and 74 teachers. The findings suggested that CBC's effects on teacher-reported children's social skills depend on congruent parent-teacher communication. Specifically, for students whose parents and teachers have these communication conditions, social skills are expected to increase only in the context of the CBC intervention. Implications for CBC research and school-based consultation are discussed.

Many youth experience mental health problems. Schools are an ideal setting to identify, prevent, and intervene in these problems. The purpose of this study was to investigate patterns of student social, emotional, and behavioral risk over time among a community sample of 3rd through 12th grade students and the association of these risk patterns with fidelity to a school-based mental health model. Overall growth of social, emotional, and behavioral problems declined over a 3-year period. Four classes of students were identified using growth mixture modeling: (1) students with high levels of problems, (2) students with decreasing problems, (3) students with increasing problems, and (4) students with stable, low levels of problems. These growth trajectories were associated with fidelity to the model, in that trajectories where students with higher or increasing problems were more likely to be from schools with lower fidelity. Implications for practice and policy are provided.