RESUMO
Mental health concerns are on the rise among youth, contributing to a growing need for school-based mental health services. However, challenges to service provision arise due, in part, to workforce shortages, service fragmentation, and inefficient allocation of staff time. The current study describes the professional competencies and time allocation of four school-based mental health professions (i.e., school counselors, school psychologists, school social workers, and school nurses) in order to demonstrate how schools can leverage the skills of their existing staff to coordinate a comprehensive approach to support student mental health. First, we identified the core clinical competencies needed to implement the key features of comprehensive school mental health systems. Then, we crosswalked these clinical competencies with the training standards of the four professions. Finally, we conducted a systematic review of the literature to understand how these professionals' time is allocated, as well as their responsibilities related to the provision of mental health services. Results demonstrated that, although all four professions receive training in most of the core competencies needed to implement comprehensive school mental health services, their skillsets are often underutilized in day-to-day practice. Thus, we concluded that there are at least two untapped opportunities for school leaders to support student mental health-first, maximize the use of school mental health professionals through task-shifting (i.e., reassigning tasks less central to mental health service delivery to other staff), and second, implement an integrated model of school mental health services to efficiently leverage the mental health training of professionals. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12310-022-09535-0.
RESUMO
The current study aims to apply a staged approach to document heterogeneity in discussions in mentoring relationships, chiefly, discussion topics from weekly mentoring sessions with undergraduate women mentors (n = 40), then link each of the eight topics (relationships with friends, family, teachers, and romantic relationships, as well as goals, academic skills, academic problems, and hopes for the future) to developmental outcomes for middle school girls (n = 41) who participated in a school-based mentoring program. In doing so, the authors hope to better understand the mechanisms that influence variability in mentoring treatment effects. Mentoring dyads engaged in unstructured one-on-one sessions and structured group meetings across the 2018-2019 academic year. The primary predictors for this study are weekly mentor-reported discussion topics and activities addressed during unstructured one-on-one mentoring sessions, with 11 social-emotional, academic, and behavioral outcomes measured via pre- and postsurveys administered by research assistants to mentees during the fall and spring. A series of 11 path analyses indicate small to moderate associations, both beneficial and negative, between key discussion topics, such as hopes for the future, family relationships, and goals, and several mentee-reported outcomes of interest at the end of the intervention, including extrinsic motivation, life satisfaction, and self-esteem. Study findings provide information about heterogeneity in mentoring practices to inform how various mechanisms of mentoring (e.g., discussions focused on relationships, goals and skills, and strengths) influence developmentally-relevant effects for youth.