As crises continue to occur in schools across the country, post-crisis interventions are an important practice in addressing the psychological and physical well-being of students, faculty, and staff. In this video, Rebeccah Sokol, PhD, describes promising research into the effectiveness of post-crisis interventions, including key findings and recommendations from the systematic review conducted by the National Center for School Safety team.
At the time of recording, Dr. Sokol was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. She was working alongside a team of researchers to identify research gaps in the field of school health and safety. She is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work.
Citation
The content featured in this video is based on the following publication:
Sokol, R.L., Heinze, J., Doan, J., Normand, M., Grodzinski, A., & Pomerantz, N. (2020). Crisis interventions in schools: A systematic review. Journal of School Violence 20(2), 241-260. https://doi.org/10.1080/15388220.2021.1879098
Transcript
Dr. Rebeccah Sokol: I am currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education. My role with NCSS is part of a team. I am part of a team to help identify what the research gaps are pertaining to school health and safety, and then help produce systematic reviews evaluating the evidence regarding these research gaps to hopefully create some recommendations for the school communities around the country.
So unfortunately, schools across our nation experience crises every day. For example, six percent of public school teachers report that they have been physically attacked by a student. Eight percent of schools report that they experienced disruptions in the past years due to death threats or bomb threats. Since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, over 236,000 students have experienced gun violence at school. So all of this is to say that unfortunately, crises are continuing to affect school communities across our nation and there’s really a need to address the psychological and physical well-being of students and faculty and staff after these crises occur. And so there are school-based crisis interventions that are a tertiary prevention strategy that are focused on improving school well-being after crisis occurs. And now these school-based crisis interventions are occurring throughout our nation and we unfortunately don’t know how effective they are. So what our current systematic review did was evaluate all of the evidence for school-based crisis interventions. So we searched and sifted through the literature to identify any relevant article that described or created an evaluation of a school-based crisis intervention over the past 20 years. And then we look through those articles to really call out any relevant information regarding what the school-based crisis intervention did and/or how it was evaluated.
So these crises can take a variety of forms. They can be a natural disaster, they can be a student death, a faculty death, or a mass violence event. And although communities and organizations have made great progress in preventing these occurrences from happening in the first place, unfortunately they do still occur. So there is a need to have these school-based crisis interventions that happen after the fact, after the crisis occurs. And although these school-based crisis interventions exist, prior to this systematic review that we conducted there really wasn’t any systematic evidence or clear evidence regarding how effective these crisis interventions are at improving the school community and the school environment after a crisis occurs. So that’s what we sought to do in the systematic review is really evaluate the evidence regarding school-based crisis interventions and see how effective they are at a variety of outcomes for improving student well-being and staff well-being after a crisis occurs.
So the lack of evaluation studies that we found in our systematic review really precludes our ability to endorse any one specific crisis intervention model as evidence-based practice. But we have gleaned a set of recommendations for school-based crisis interventions that we suggest be the subject of future interventions and evaluation. We recommend three different things. First, we recommend that school-based crisis intervention teams include various actors both within and outside the school community. So this would include people like teachers, administrators, parents, but also individuals within the community such as community-based mental health practitioners, law enforcement, and so on. And we expect that such an interdisciplinary team would allow the crisis intervention to better respond to the safety and psychological needs of the school community post-crisis. The second thing that we recommend that school-based crisis interventions implement are explicitly stating the roles of each member on the crisis intervention team. We expect that such an explicit statement of roles and responsibilities can help protect against the diffusion of responsibility when it comes to actually implementing the crisis intervention plan. Third, we recommend that crisis intervention plans view intervention as an ongoing and evolving process. Specific activities should change along steps of this process to help the school community return to safety, engage in productive and adaptive coping, heal what can physically and psychologically be repaired, and prevent long-term trauma.
The area of school-based crisis interventions is really exciting because I think it has large promise at improving the lives of many staff, students, and faculty. The only thing that’s missing is more rigorous evaluation research to identify what specific strategies are the most effective at doing so.