Getting School Buy-in Posted on January 20, 2009 Hilda M. Pantin (bio) says that support at the school level needs to be cost-effective and based on outcomes.

Making programs sustainable has been a real challenge to the field, and what we're trying to do is to get enough buy-in from the school system that they would be willing to implement this on an ongoing basis because it would be cost effective and because the outcomes would be such that would warrant their investing time into this program.

So at this point they seem to be very interested, and I think that we need to prove to them by working together on a bigger scale. We've done it up til now several schools at a time with very good results.

But on a bigger project where they really have control, they'll be able to see if this is something that they can really make work for them within their system, so we work very hard to try to solve problems and barriers to implementation and to help them to be successful.

We have meetings with the people who are the decision-makers in terms of organizing the studies, and also we will have clinicians that will be from our team who will be supervising who will be involved with the schools directly and working with them on a regular basis once the study begins.

When you move to the next level, which is really to try to impact the population on a broader scale, there's a real need to develop interventions that are very, very cost effective, and so for us, this is our new challenge is how we will do this.

How will we make it so that maybe a paraprofessionals or teachers or even PTA parents could deliver these interventions by giving them appropriate tools that would make the facilitator have to be less highly skilled in their training?

Right now we use Master's level people to date, so the school counselors that we're going to be working with may not have the same level of clinical training, but they'll be close. So we now want to move it so that it's more widely applicable.