A social work intervention for children with emotional and behavioral disabilities

Partners in Success is a school social work intervention for children with emotional and behavioral disabilities who attend school in a separate site or segregated placement due to the severity of the behaviors associated with the disability. The purpose of the study was to improve school outcomes for children who have been removed from the mainstream. The key intervention strategy was the engagement of parents through joint goal setting with school social workers and teachers. Several decades of research show that when parents are invited to participate in the education of their children, children show improvement in grades and behaviors. Engaging the parents of children who have emotionally and behavioral disabilities has been challenging. Feelings of misunderstanding, mistrust and the rejection of both parents and children by schools, and a lack of understanding and accommodations for parents and children have been barriers to effective home-school partnerships.;A partial crossover design, delaying the intervention for the control group was used to test the intervention. Parents and teachers completed questionnaires at pretest, the time of crossover, and at posttest. The dependent variables, functional reading and math scores and behaviors were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention.;Most children in both groups showed modest improvement. No significant differences between the experimental and control groups at posttest were found.