4 - (SYM 75) Strengthening the School Mental Health Workforce with Extensive Evidence-based Practice (EBP) Training in Graduate School: A Pilot Evaluation

As demand for mental health (MH) services for youth has continued to rise, a high percentage of children and adolescents are receiving MH care in schools (Mojtabai & Olfson, 2020). Although accessing care in schools reduces a number of barriers to pursuing other services (e.g., transportation, cost), the school mental workforce faces a unique set of challenges to provide high quality care for students. Notably, while some graduate training programs for school MH professionals (SMHPs) include extensive training in evidence-based practices (EBPs; Hicks et al. 2014), many other SMHPs first receive training in EBPs after graduation. Extensive literature on EBP trainings suggests that these postgraduate efforts can lead to increases in EBP knowledge and use (e.g., Frank et al., 2020). Still, strengthening EBP training during graduate education is a potentially promising path to improve the quality and availability of MH services in schools, and to ultimately benefit student MH outcomes (Shernoff et al., 2017). 

The current study is a pilot evaluation of a novel EBP training approach for school psychology doctoral students in collaboration with the TRAILS (Transforming Research into Action to Improve the Lives of Students) implementation program, which has trained a large number of SMHPs across the state of Michigan. The TRAILS adapted "train-the-trainer" model includes workshops, consultation, and coaching to promote the use of core CBT skills for students with anxiety and depression at the Tier 2 intervention level (Meyer et al., 2022). Specifically, SMHPs receive one semester (~10 weeks) of consultation to become trained as a TRAILS Coach, and then go on to support other SMHPs in their delivery of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). For the graduate student pilot, the course instructor is serving as the TRAILS Coach for graduate students providing modular CBT skills groups at their practicum sites. Change in graduate student CBT knowledge, perceptions, and use will be evaluated using the CBT Competency Scale (Rodriguez-Quintana et al., 2021) at baseline and following the delivery of the 10-session skills groups. Qualitative feedback will also be obtained from graduate students regarding their perceptions of the training experience, the TRAILS CBT materials, and their intentions to deliver this intervention independently in the future. Based on these initial findings with this limited sample, implications for the feasibility of using this training approach in other graduate programs and scalability of this model will also be discussed.