Best practices in school-based mental health services emphasize prevention and wellness promotion, data-based decision making, collaboration and teaming (including school-community partnerships) and use of evidence-based interventions (Stephan et al., 2015). Promoting psychological wellness requires mechanisms for identifying students with room for growth in subjective well-being (SWB), and resources for connecting students with services.
This poster will showcase a collaboration between university and public schools, illustrated through two case examples. Presenters will share how an annual undergraduate service-learning course provides elementary schools with additional resources for supporting children’s SWB, and college students the opportunity to gain supervised clinical experience with positive psychology interventions in K-12 educational settings. We will describe the service-learning course (titled Positive Psychology in the Schools), the universal screening process used to identify children with diminished SWB, the training and supervision of undergraduate interventionists, and the implementation and evaluation of outcomes from children’s participation in the Well-Being Promotion Program (WBPP; Suldo, 2016). Participants (School A: 375 students in grades 3-5 screened, 17 received WBPP; School B: 213 students in grades 4-5 screened, 22 received WBPP) and procedures, results (significant growth in life satisfaction, shown through repeated measures analyses), and strategies for creating similar partnerships will be shared.