2 - (SYM 75) Bringing Mental Health Knowledge to Schools Through Academic-community Partnership: A City Year Tale of Equal Service to Training and Research

Care extenders (volunteer educators, AmeriCorps Members, community health workers) work in and out of schools to promote mental health and academic progress by reducing the percentage of students with elevated symptoms or impairment (Ginsburg et al., 2021), especially in communities where extensive and intensive mental health needs reflect historic and ongoing systemic inequities. The impact and success of care extenders in schools rely on empirically informed models for workforce support (Walker & Smith, 2015; 2017). City Year Miami, the local site of a national education nonprofit, serves the nation’s fourth-largest school district, Miami-Dade County Public Schools (MDCPS), where AmeriCorps Members (ACMs) serve as small-group interventionists and behavior/attendance coaches for the county’s lowest performing students. Our collaboration with City Year Miami supplements their routine workforce support with a series of provider-informed trainings based on content our team has developed over many years for youth care extenders in multiple settings. City Year Miami wanted to elevate ACM training around youth mental health, and they invited our academic team to provide professional development via trainings with City Year Miami Team Leaders (TLs) and ACMs focused on a variety of mental health topics. This included a four-part series on how to apply The Cognitive Triangle by bringing compassion and intentionality to their work with students, school partners (e.g., teachers, teammates, and administrators), and to their own self-care. Data sources (n = 12-15 TLs and ACMs) will include: (1) pre-training survey data, (2) permanent product data such as attendance data and exit polls, and 3) post-training semi-structured interviews with ACMs. We will use qualitative methods to explore transportability via the question, “What will it take to infuse mental health knowledge into routine practice?” In this symposium presentation, we will present an overview of our collaboration, the training development, content, and format that emerged. We will also examine associations between provider characteristics and perceptions of mental health knowledge; and how provider perceptions of mental health knowledge relate to its infusion into youth care routines. Emphasis will be placed on the role of City Year Miami organizational leaders and providers at all stages of research and implementation, as well as lessons learned in this community-partnered, school-based work, including takeaways related to positionality, partnership, and research.