Kellogg Foundation Grant Supports School-based Service Providers

Madeleine's mother is addicted to drugs and her father is long gone. At 13, she is the oldest child in the family and the default head of household. She recently learned she is pregnant and dropped out of school. Madeleine receives attention from many professionals: her school nurse, a child welfare worker, a special education teacher, a school guidance counselor, and a therapist. Each is overwhelmed by an increasingly daunting caseload. None has time to talk to the other, to look at Madeleine as a whole person.

A grant from the Kellogg Foundation will help to support the Collaborative for Integrated School Services (CISS), an Ed School (HGSE) initiative that works on behalf of the school-based counselors, psychologists, social workers, and nurses who serve children and young people like Madeleine and their families. The $40,000 Kellogg funding will help CISS promote interdisciplinary professional development and a variety of programs aimed at strengthening and integrating the work of school counseling practitioners.

CISS co-directors Margot Welch and Robert Selman will use the grant for long-term organizational planning and documentation of effective practices. They will identify salient issues in the training of school-based service providers. Welch, an instructor, and Selman, a professor, are both members of the HGSE faculty.

First established as the Center for School Counseling Practitioners in 1992, CISS aims to help schools respond to the enormous range of challenges confronting children and their families. In 1995, The Children's Defense Fund reported devastating statistics about daily life in the United States: 1,420 teenagers give birth; 3,356 adolescents drop out of school; 8,239 children are reported abused or neglected; more than 100,000 children are homeless; about 135,000 children bring guns to schools; and three children die from abuse.

"As issues in children's lives become more complex and school counselors' caseloads increase, services for kids have gotten more and more fragmented," said Welch. "School-based service providers do not have the support or resources they need to work effectively--time, computers, office space, administrative assistance. Given all the fires they are asked to put out, it's hard for them to give each child the attention she needs."

CISS offers local and national conferences, and university and school-based workshops. It facilitates the creation of new networks for practitioners, supports for parents, and collaborations between schools, universities, and communities. It has published reports describing its national conferences about violence prevention which have addressed topics such as Coping with Violence in the Schools and Resilient Youth, Collaboration and Community Building. It also publishes a quarterly newsletter, Fieldnotes, which includes articles written by practitioners.

The Collaborative hosts special training programs that address issues such as the needs of early adolescents, understanding families in a multicultural world, pair therapy, and supervision. By helping to establish the Timilty Family Center, it has expanded a partnership between the James P. Timilty Middle School in Roxbury and the Massachusetts General Hospital. The Collaborative has also provided consultation for schools in Boston, Malden, Scituate, Watertown, Worcester, and Cambridge.

CISS's goals for the next few years include:

• continuing to offer programs that empower school-based service providers;
• strengthening its infrastructure and developing a community leadership council;
• disseminating information about collaborative, interdisciplinary models of services and training;
• and facilitating new school/university partnerships.

Current programs include a series of meetings about stresses on the school community and special workshops about supervision, mentoring, and adult development. It will also host an invitational symposium about the training of school counselors, psychologists, social workers, and nurses.

"Given the kinds of new networks that the Collaborative is fostering near and far, we expect it to have important impact on improving the lives of children and families," said HGSE Dean Jerome T. Murphy.

About The Kellogg Foundation

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation was established in 1930 to "help people help themselves through the practical application of knowledge and resources to improve their quality of life and that of future generations." Its programming activities center around the common visions of a world in which each person has a sense of worth, accepts responsibility for self, family, community, and societal well-being, and has the capacity to be productive and to help create nurturing families, responsive institutions, and healthy communities.

To achieve the greatest impact, the Foundation targets its grants toward specific areas such as health, food systems and rural development, youth, education, and higher education, and philanthropy and volunteerism. Funding is also provided for leadership, information technology, efforts to capitalize on diversity, and family, neighborhood, and community development programming. Grants are concentrated in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, and southern Africa.

"Kellogg's grant acknowledges the ever important need for integrating human services," said Welch. "The Collaborative is working to unite fragmented school and community services for children and families into an effective whole."