Scaling up Positive Family Support in Public Middle Schools: Outcomes, Implementation Challenges and Potential Solutions

Overview: The Family Check-up model was refined and relabeled as Positive Family Support (PFS). PFS was designed for broad scale up within the public school system and to fit within the tiered PBIS behavior management system. 

Method: The present study is an effectiveness trial of the PFS in a randomized trial involving 41 PBIS middle schools. To examine the effects of implementation of PFS, multilevel models were run with condition, cohort and student risk.

Results: Overall effects of condition alone were restricted to improved peer affiliation and parent monitoring. However, condition-by-time-by-cohort effects revealed that after 1 year of implementation, reports of conduct problems and emotional adjustment improved in the PFS condition, compared to waitlist controls. In addition, there was evidence that PFS was most effective for the high-risk students.

There were, however, significant challenges to implementation of the PFS model. Direct observations of implementation fidelity revealed high levels of PFS practices in the interventions schools, compared to the control schools, yet both intervention and control schools were observed to be increasing PFS practices during the course of the study. Contextual risk factors such as change in personnel and few staffing resources were associated with low implementation scores as well as increases in student problem behavior, emotional problems and less parent monitoring over time. Sustainability interviews revealed that none of the schools were implementing the indicated parenting supports.

Discussion and conclusion: This study affirms the importance of integrating parent supports within PBIS to improve student academic competence and behavior adjustment. However, the data underscore the need for district wide support in staffing, monitoring and proactive engagement high-risk students and parents.