Date of Award

Spring 5-15-2024

Degree Type

Capstone

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Department

School Psychology

First Advisor

Ashley Mayworm

Second Advisor

Don Sibley

Third Advisor

Cortney Bindrich

Abstract

Mental health has been a paramount priority for those serving children, as the percentage of children experiencing impairment due to anxiety, depression, emotional regulation, and other emotional conditions grows. The positive impact of parent education and parent training programs has been widely researched, providing parents tools and strategies to successfully support their child’s emotional struggles in the home setting. Furthermore, it is evident that schools have a unique opportunity to reach a large number of children and families that may not otherwise have access to additional services. However, limited resources and staff may make comprehensively supporting the mental health of a child difficult in school environments. Barriers to effective school-parent partnerships continue to be cited as a source of programmatic failure. To compound the challenges associated with providing mental health services to children in the school setting, it is difficult for school-based practitioners to help children make lasting changes when their parents are not in partnership with the treatment being provided. As such, this action research proports to create a plan that includes parents as leaders and facilitators of a school personnel delivered parent education model designed to complement the direct mental health services currently being offered in a suburban school located in a southeastern school district. The intervention is planned using Bertram and her colleagues’ (2015) implementation model. The early stages will allow a guiding coalition to explore interventions and select those that best meet the needs of the families and create cooperative relationships with other support departments to aid in intervention implementation. Later stages will see the implementation of the plan, with programmatic evaluation, including progress monitoring and feedback from stakeholders, to support improved execution as well as systematic changes necessary to meet the needs of the community. The expected outcomes include both improvement in parent efficacy when supporting their children with mental health struggles, as well as an increase in the trust necessary to develop and build cooperative and engaging relationships between parents and schools.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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