The Process of Creating a Supported Implementation System to Support Social-Emotional Learning and Prevent Youth Violence through School-Community Partnerships

While the implementation of evidence-based programs within classrooms is an important piece of school-based prevention, creating healthy communities requires a more comprehensive approach: as identified in the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child model (Lewallen et al., 2015), while schools are an excellent site for collaboration, this collaboration must extend beyond the school and also include the larger community in order to best promote student well-being. Despite the promise of such models, many schools struggle with how to promote productive school-community partnerships. In order to attend to this need, the Alberta Healthy Youth Relationships Strategy has spent the past year designing a supported implementation system, which provides a structure for building and sustaining school-community partnerships to support social-emotional learning among students in grades 7 to 9. Specifically, the system focuses on creating three key conditions – 1) Healthy socio-cultural norms and environments; 2) Effective teaching, service-delivery, and social emotional learning; and 3) Robust school-community connections – in order to foster positive youth relationships in school and community settings, and contribute to academic achievement, enhanced quality of life and reduced rates of violence among young people in Alberta.

Core components of the system include a coordinating hub (located at a large university in the province); a dedicated regional lead for each area where the system is implemented; and a collaborative school-community implementation team for each site. School-community implementation teams receive two years of support and coaching from their dedicated regional lead to develop goals for the system; to assess barriers and assets via school and community mapping and youth data collection; to select a CASEL recommended program for implementation in the school building that meets the identified goals and addresses identified barriers; to design implementation and sustainability plans for the selected program; to review school policies and procedures and make recommendations for improvement; to foster school-community connections; and to engage parents. This presentation will describe findings from the first year of this project, including the design of the system manual; the building of key partnerships (e.g., with district superintendents; related provincial ministries); and the selection of regional leads and school sites (including the selection criteria and process). As many SPR members are engaged in school-based prevention efforts, this presentation will provide important information on the design of a system that aims to promote whole school, community and child well-being.