The California Department of Education's Project Cal-Well aims to promote awareness of student mental health and improve access to mental health services for youth, families, and school communities. This brief introduces a series of Project Cal-Well Legacy Briefs that highlight successes achieved by Project Cal-Well partners. WestEd developed the…

A 2001 legislative budget proviso originally established the Washington State School Safety Advisory Committee and School Safety Center to address the complexities of school safety. House Bill (HB) 1216 (2019) revised the School Safety Center and placed it in state law, transforming the School Safety Advisory Committee into the new School Safety…

"Creating Communities of Care: How Charter Schools can Develop Systems that Support Student Mental Health" provides new tools to help charter schools adapt to the changing needs of their students and staff. This resource focuses on improving student mental health and well-being to help set the foundation for school community wellness.…

At the request of President Trump in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, a Federal Commission on School Safety was assembled to provide meaningful and actionable recommendations to maintain student safety in schools. This article summarizes the overarching points of the Commission's report and shares concerns raised the National Association of…

Students in foster care frequently experience barriers that influence their personal, social, and academic success. These challenges may include trauma, abuse, neglect, and loss--all of which influence a student's ability to be successful in school. Combined with these experiences, students in foster care lack the same access to resources and…

The Comprehensive School Safety Initiative (CSSI) is a large-scale, integrated research effort designed to increase the safety of schools nationwide. It was initiated in 2014 at the request of Congress. The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) administers the CSSI as a research grant program. Through the CSSI, the NIJ funds research-focused…

The Policy-Advocacy-Leadership (PAL) column is developed to initiate and facilitate important dialogue about health care and educational policy, and develop and share the knowledge, tools, and resources that enable all of us to be effective advocates for our clients and our practice and leaders in our practice settings and profession. In this…

In addressing mental health needs in honors communities, I first need to explain that I am not a mental health practitioner; I am a sociologist. The types of issues that interest me are structural: what can we do to set up supportive environments that help all our students. We need to respond appropriately to individuals, but we also need also to…

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) offers resources to help a school or school district improve the environmental health and energy performance of its facilities, and in many cases, apply the savings generated through improved energy efficiency toward facility improvements, for the betterment of students, faculty, and staff. As an…

The purpose of this compendium is to catalog NCER's and NCSER's contributions to social-behavioral research. Research undertaken as part of these projects is contributing to a knowledge base that ultimately aims to improve academic outcomes for students via improvements in students' social-behavioral competencies, teachers' practices, and the…

The tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, CT (USA) has brought the conversation about how to reduce violence, make schools safer, improve school climate, and increase access to mental health services to the forefront of the national conversation. Advocating for comprehensive initiatives to address school safety, school climate, and…

During an evaluation of a new middle grades reform initiative, the program participants (i.e., teachers, coaches, and principals) reported they perceived that students' social and emotional needs interfaced with implementation of the reform. In particular, participants perceived that students' need for a safe, supportive, and engaging environment…

Resilience is a very useful construct for framing school mental health services to children and is particularly applicable to mental health services in school settings. Still, resilience perspectives should not be overgeneralized to school mental health practice because risk and resilience wax and wane over time and daily decisions about students'…

Schools play a privileged and strategic role in the lives of children acting as their principle environment away from home. Additionally, schools act as part of the community linking families and neighborhoods. These characteristics make schools a relevant setting for mental health service delivery and support to children and parents. In this…

Saturating the Canadian landscape are media and health industry discourses representing childhood physical "(in)activity" and "obesity" as being at "epidemic" proportion. Increasingly identified as a focus of concern within such representations is the school setting, simultaneously positioned both as a cause of…