Author: Michael Kelly

Anxiety is a significant problem for youth, and routinely is in the top 5 of all the school-based clinical issues that I consult with school social workers to help them address.  One of the better-known evidence-based practice (EBP) programs to address anxiety in schools is the FRIENDS Program, developed by Dr. Paula Barrett.  This article from our featured journal School Mental Health, written by Skryabina et al., “Child, Teacher and Parent Perceptions of the FRIENDS Classroom-Based Universal Anxiety Prevention Programme: A Qualitative Study,” offers one of the most detailed qualitative explorations yet of the program and the challenges it...

As we wind up this month with Advances in School Mental Health Promotion Journal , we turn to a topic that is very much in the news:  bringing Yoga and Mindfulness practices into schools, and applying these techniques to school mental health.  This week brings us three pieces dealing with different components of developing and implementing these interventions: A study on developing a 20-session yoga intervention for at-risk high school youth that showed “students reported improved mood and a high degree of satisfaction with the intervention” but also showed the logistical challenges involved in doing Yoga as an intervention in a real-world...

This post will kick-off a regular series in our “Research That Matters” section here at SSWN, starting now through 2017.  Each post will address what we see as the “Grand Challenges” facing school social work today, drawing in part on the Grand Challenges framework initiated by social work researchers at the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare .  Part 1:  Identifying The Training Needs for School Social Workers In 2017   will address what current research tells us are some of the major training and practice needs for school social workers here in the U.S.  Part 2:  Building...

For this week, we offer 2 articles from our Featured Journal, Advances in School Mental Health Promotion that tackle the all-important question:  do mental health interventions improve the outcomes that schools focus on the most i.e. grades, attendance, and behavior?  These 3 studies offer a heavily qualified “yes” to this question. In the first study, “A review of educational outcomes in the children’s mental health treatment literature,” Becker and colleagues (2014) analyze 602 childrens’ mental health intervention studies and found only 14.5% of them evaluated the study’s effectiveness using a measure related to educational outcomes; 20% of the study groups took...