Symposia
Dissemination & Implementation Science
Samuel D. McQuillin, Ph.D.
university of south carolina
Columbia, South Carolina
Mackenzie Hart, MA
Doctoral Student
University of South Carolina
Columbia, South Carolina
Heather McDaniel, Ph.D.
Research Assistant Professor
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia
Schools are an ideal context for infusing evidence-based practices within young people’s daily lives. Schools are where the young people are—if access, reach, and scalability are priorities, then child mental health services must increasingly expand into public school systems. Much progress has been made on this front. Currently, public school systems provide more social, emotional, behavioral, and academic intervention services for children and adolescents than any other private or public institution. Moreover, in comparison to community or clinic-based services, youth prefer and engage more in mental health related services in school systems. Yet, similar to the broader mental health service sector in the US, schools’ capacity to meet the demand for services is crippled by dramatic and increasing workforce shortages and persistent problems related to turnover.
In this paper, we discuss the promise of paraprofessional mentoring within the context of school systems. Paraprofessional mentoring refers to a subgroup of professionally supervised, non-expert volunteer or paid mentors to whom aspects of helping tasks are delegated (McQuillin et al., 2021). We will discuss the promise of integrating paraprofessional mentoring within the interconnected systems framework. We identify and discuss several requisite scientific, systemic, and policy considerations that will be necessary to realize the promise of the promise of paraprofessional mentoring within public school systems.
Each of these considerations is discussed through lessons learned from coordinating and conducting seven randomized controlled trials of school-based mentoring. Key lessons include the importance of district policy, labor readjustments that promote supervision and training of paraprofessionals, and research-practice partnerships with existing large-scale professional and volunteer mentoring organizations. We present examples of infusing evidence-based practices within each of these contexts and discuss recent results from randomized trials.