CFS Staff Contribute to Article on Evaluation Efforts of the Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative (SS/HSI) in Pinellas County, FL.
SS/HSI site evaluators were responsible for the following:
- helping the site to strategically plan activities that will achieve program goals and objectives
- designing and implementing a process evaluation of the local programs
- designing and conducting a site-specific outcome evaluation to determine whether each intervention produced its intended effects
- assessing how well the programs and services have been implemented, how closely the implementation reflects the comprehensive community-wide goals, and how many of the programs and services participants are actually receiving.
An article authored by CFS staff members Kathleen Armstrong, Tom Massey and Michael Boroughs, along with Ralph Bailey and Diane Lajoie of Pinellas County Schools, was just published in the journal Psychology in the Schools, Vol. 40(5). It represents the work of the local evaluation team for the Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative (SS/HSI) in Pinellas County, FL.
With funding provided by the U.S. Departments of Education, Justice, and Health and Human Services in 2000, the SS/HSI provided funding for the Pinellas County school system – the 23rd largest in the United States – to address issues such as school suspensions, dropouts, delinquency cases and reports of child abuse and neglect. The Initiative was based on evidence that an integrated community-wide approach is an effective way to promote healthy childhood development and to address the problems including school violence as well as alcohol and other drug abuse. During the course of the Initiative, each of the 143 sites funded conducted a mandatory local evaluation of their efforts.
This article describes Pinellas County’s plan, and highlights the instrumental role played by evaluators and psychologists, which included grant writing, program and resource coordination, clinical services, program evaluation, staff training, parent advocacy, and steering committee membership. It highlights the outstanding features of the effort from inception to evaluation, and includes: (a) an overview of the project with a brief description of current models that influenced the organizational plan, (b) a description of the unique collaborative issues facing the SS/HSI effort, (c) a description of the roles of support staff in grant activities, (d) a description of the selection of strategies for implementation, (e) promising outcomes, and (f ) a summary and generalization to other communities.
The article is available on-line to registered users of Wiley InterScience at (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/anon.html).
Kathleen Armstrong, Tom Massey and Michael Boroughs also discussed their SS/HSI evaluation efforts in August 2003 at the 111th Convention of the American Psychological Association in a presentation titled Promoting Health and Mental Health in the Schools: Lessons Learned from the Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative in Pinellas County.
The Department of Child and Family Studies (CFS) is a department of the Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute, University of South Florida. The faculty and staff of CFS are committed to enhancing the development, mental health and well-being of children and families through leadership in integrating research, theory & practice.