Sustainability of teacher implementation of school-based mental health programs

There is substantial evidence indicating that, when suitably developed and implemented, school-based mental health programs can show positive effects on children's behavioral and emotional functioning (Durlak & Wells, 1997; Greenberg, Domitrovich, & Bumbarger, 2001; Wilson, Lipsey, & Derzon 2003) As psychosocial factors play a significant character in influencing academic learning (Wang, Haertel, & Walberg, 1997) many programs targeting socioemotional functioning also note benefits for children's academic functioning as well (Durlak & Wells, 1997; Ialongo et al., 1999; Tremblay, Pagani-Kurtz, Masse, Vitaro, & Pihl, 1995) Thus, there is growing recognition that enhancing children's social and emotional competencies also facilitates their ability to learn and achieve academically (Adelman & Taylor, 2000; Greenberg et al., 2003; Zins, Weissberg, Wang, & Walberg, 2004) At the same time, increased confidence in the basic efficacy of school-based mental health programs has l to more wide-spread program implementation (Clayton, Ballif-Spanvill, & Hunsaker, 2001; Elliot, 1998) individual consequence of this movement toward the dissemination or scaling up of evidence-based programs is that more attention is being directed to understanding the complexities of program implementation below "real-world" conditions (Domitrovich & Greenberg, 2000; Elias, Zins, Graczyk, & Weissberg, 2003; Pentz 2004)

The literature upon scaling up of innovative practices in academys (e.g., Adelman & Taylor, 2000 2003; Connell & Klem 2000; Elmore, 1996; McLaughlin & Mitra, 2001) has nurseed to focus on "big picture" contextual factors, of the like kind as the development of the organizational infrastructure necessary to support and sustain change above time (e.g., capacity building, redeployment of resources, integration of services). However, research upon teacher/classroom factors that increase teachers' implementation fidelity and the sustainability of quality program implementation by dint of teachers has been relatively limited, particularly with regard to the integration of underlying processe into an inclusive mould Although they have received les attention, the processe that be found within the classroom that lead teachers to implement, and continue to implement, an innovative program with fidelity are no les critical (Kealey, Peterson Gaul, & Dinh, 2000; Rohrbach, Graham, & Hansen, 1993) The end of the present paper is to discuss teacher-level factors that influence program implementation and sustainability, with prize to classroom-based prevention and intervention mental health programs that are implemented by means of teachers.

We focus upon teacher-implemented mental health programs because it is teachers who repeatedly serve as program providers for school-based programs and because, given the limited resources available for mental health services relative to the number of children in ne of like services (Tuma, 1989; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1999) implementation of effective programs by dint of existing school personnel such as teachers or institute counselors represents one approach to making programs fiscally sustainable (Atkins et al., 1998) In addition, teacher-implemented programs can be integrated into the general classroom curricula and focused upon the whole classroom. Thus, as central change agents with a consistent neighborhood in the classroom environment, teachers can aid children's positive development and generalization of positive skills end their ability to provide children with of frequent occurrence opportunities to practice new skills (eg Grossman et al., 1997; Hawkins, Von Cleve & Catalano, 1991; Weissberg, Barton, & Shriver, 1997)

greatest in quantity programs that have been evaluated and reported in the literature are research shoot forwards financially supported by federal research grants or other sources of funding external to the gymnasium system that are not available upon an ongoing basis (Wilson et al., 2003) When the research cast is completed and external resources supporting program implementation are withdrawn, it becomes unclear whether an effective classroom-based program will continue to be implemented by dint of teachers who have been trained and previously monitored by the agency of the research project with regard to their program implementation. Several studies do insinuate that providing adequate training with implementation feedback can increase the likelihood that teachers will continue to implement a program, on the contrary degradation in implementation is a recurring question at issue (McCormick, Steckler, & McLeroy, 1995; Noell, Witt, Gilbertson, Ranier, & Freeland, 1997; Rohrbach et al., 1993) It therefore is essential that researchers examine mechanisms that can be integrated into the training proces in order to increase the fidelity with which evidence-based mental health programs are, and continue to be, implemented by means of teachers (Adelman & Taylor, 2003; Altman, 1995; Elliott & Mihalic, 2004) The examination of factors in the training proces that increase teachers' knowledge of program principles and that sustain a high horizontal of implementation fidelity is important also for the scaling up of programs (Coburn 2003; McLaughlin & Mitra, 2001) as maintaining quality implementation beyond the training phase is crucial for achieving the positive pupil outcomes promised by innovative programs as they are adopted and institutionalized by the agency of schools.