This chapter provides an overview of treatment integrity assessment foundations, guidelines for developing a treatment integrity assessment plan, analyzing treatment integrity and child outcomes together, and promoting treatment integrity. Together, this information may facilitate the development of high-quality, feasible, and defensible intervention evaluation in applied contexts. The chapter presents an overview of the current conceptualization of treatment integrity as a multidimensional construct, as well as commonly used assessment methods and possible response formats. It explains a multistep process for identifying the purpose for collecting treatment integrity data, determining the intervention level and type of treatment integrity data needed, and considering the level of risk for implementation failure and erroneous decisions. Mental health professionals regularly design and implement interventions with high situational risk, such as those related to child academic failure, possible special education classification, behavioral or social-emotional diagnosis, self-harm, and harm to others.

This chapter discusses comprehensive school crisis interventions, identifies the characteristics that define a crisis, finds ways to assess for the level of traumatic impact, and determines what interventions can be provided to help with response and recovery. It highlights the PREPaRE Model of crisis prevention and intervention. There are six general categories of crises: acts of war and/or terrorism; violent and/or unexpected deaths; threatened death and/or injury; human-caused disasters; natural disasters; and severe illness or injury. Children are a vulnerable population and in the absence of quality crisis interventions, there can be negative short- and long-term implications on learning, cognitive development, and mental health. Evidence-based interventions focusing on physical and psychological safety may be implemented to prevent a crisis from occurring or mitigate the traumatic impact of a crisis event by building resiliency in students. Crisis risk factors are variables that predict whether a person becomes a psychological trauma victim.

This chapter discusses issues associated with specific natural disasters, generalized issues associated with most natural disasters, and evidence-based principles and practices for supporting youth following a natural disaster. La Greca highlighted three phases of recovery following natural disasters and offers evidence-based interventions associated with each phase. These include the postimpact phase, short-term recovery and reconstruction phase, and the long-term recovery phase. The chapter outlines the effects of natural disasters on children and provides an overview of strategies for supporting children and adolescents following traumatic events. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is characterized as an anxiety reaction that emerges after witnessing or experiencing a traumatic event. The chapter summarizes three evidence-based approaches to support children in the aftermath of a potentially traumatic event, such as a natural disaster: trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy (TF-CBT), mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), and the Mourning Child Grief Support Curriculum (MCGC).

School violence as an identified topic of public policy and scientific research emerged in the 1990s out of a more general concern about adolescents’ involvement in violent crime and the occurrence of multiple victim homicides occurring on school campuses. This chapter aims to depict school violence intervention as a broad topic that requires comprehensive and integrated thinking about the behaviors and experiences within schools that should be considered as forms of “violence”. Social disorganization theory contends that an individual’s risk for involvement in problem behavior and perceptions of the environment are influenced by contextual variables suggestive of disorder. The Interdisciplinary Group on Preventing School and Community Violence, proposed an integrated pathway to safer schools, guided by four key elements: Balance, Communication, Connectedness, and Support (BCCS). The chapter provides the key components for implementing school-based interventions guided by the BCCS integrated model.

Youth suicide is a significant public health problem both in the United States and in other countries. Evidence-based interventions for youth suicidal behavior include both community- and school-based approaches. Suicidal behavior which includes suicidal ideation, suicide-related communication, suicide attempts, and suicide represents a continuum of behaviors that affects hundreds of thousands of adolescents, young adults, and their friends and families each year. This chapter discusses several of these interventions, social, crisis hotlines and social media, psychopharmacological interventions, hospitalization, dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), and school-based suicide prevention programs. School-based mental health professionals are typically the most appropriate persons to lead universal information sessions. The chapter provides a brief guide to the implementation of a school-based, three-tier model of youth suicide prevention. Students who are identified as being at risk of suicidal behavior typically have significant mental health problems, particularly mood disorders, substance-related disorders and disruptive behavioral problems, respectively.

Many children experience the death of someone close to them before the age of 18 years. This chapter reviews the effects of bereavement on children’s functioning and the risk and protective factors that exacerbate or mitigate grief-related problems. It provides step-by-step instructions for two evidence-based interventions for school-aged children and adolescents. Childhood traumatic grief refers to a condition in which children develop trauma-related symptoms that interfere with their ability to appropriately mourn a death. The Family Bereavement Program (FBP) is a theory-based intervention for parentally bereaved children and their surviving caregivers. The child component focuses on increasing self-esteem, reducing negative appraisals of stressful events, strengthening youths’ relationships with their caregivers, strengthening coping skills, and increasing adaptive emotional expression. The Grief and Trauma Intervention (GTI) is commonly implemented in schools and community-based settings after children’s exposure to a traumatic, violent, or disastrous event.

This chapter provides a description of peer-assisted learning strategies (PALS), a research-based classwide intervention that can be used as part of core instruction linked to multitiered models of prevention and intervention. During the past two decades, PALS has been developed and evaluated for children in prekindergarten to high school, and separate programs for reading and mathematics. PALS researchers worked for several consecutive years during the late 1990s with kindergarten teachers in Nashville to develop Kindergarten-PALS (K-PALS). PALS effects were not moderated by learner type, suggesting that PALS can be used successfully in classrooms in which students with learning disabilities (LD) are included. Each of the K-PALS lessons comprises three parts: a teacher-directed Sound Play activity that provides phonological awareness (PA) practice; a Decoding Lesson that addresses graphemephoneme correspondence (GPC), sight word recognition, decoding, and sentence fluency; and Partner Reading.

In 2013, 42% of fourth-grade students and 36% of eighth-grade students in the United States (US) performed at the proficient or advanced level on the mathematics National Assessment Educational Progress (NAEP) assessments, indicating that more than half of students at these grades are performing below proficient levels in math. Prevalence rates of math disabilities (MD) are difficult to estimate. More than 2 million school-aged children in the US are identified as having specific learning disability (SLD). There are three primary models for determination of an SLD in the US: IQ-achievement discrepancy, patterns of strengths and weaknesses (PSW), and Responsiveness-to-Intervention (RTI). Children with a math disability or comorbid math/reading disability are also more likely to meet criteria for a variety of internalizing and externalizing disorders such as oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), conduct disorder (CD), generalized anxiety disorder, and depression. Schema-based strategy instruction is an evidence-based procedure to improve achievement in math.

Writing is a fundamental communication skill that is important for everyday success. Children and adolescents use written language to communicate their thoughts, ideas, and knowledge to teachers in school; send messages to friends; write papers and reports; and engage in expository writing activities. Writing is an exceptionally complex task composed of multiple processes. Theories of writing development recognize three stages of writing, including planning or prewriting, drafting or composing, and revising or editing phases. This chapter focuses on writing instruction/intervention and student motivation. Effective writing instruction relies on evidence-based instructional approaches for developing and increasing writing skills related to planning, drafting, and revising tasks. In addition, it is important to consider student motivation as a primary reason for students not demonstrating success with written-language tasks. Self-monitoring has been shown to increase students’ academic engagement during writing as well as improve the writing performance of students with learning disabilities.