Secondary and Tertiary Intervention
in School-Wide Positive Behavior Support Systems:
Experimental Studies in Research to Practice  

ABSTRACT

The Surgeon General's 2000 report on children's mental health estimated that 20% of American children and adolescents have mental or emotional problems. The President's New Freedom Commission on Mental health stated in Achieving the Promise: TransformingMental Health Care in America, "If the system does not appropriately screen and treat them early, these childhood disorders may persist and lead to a downward spiral of school failure, poor employment opportunities, and poverty in adulthood. No other illnesses damage so many children so seriously" (American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 2004). Many advocate that the nation's schools are a key setting for screening and prevention efforts, "If antisocial behavior is not changed by the end of grade 3, it should be treated as a chronic condition much like diabetes. That is, it cannot be cured but managed with the appropriate supports and continuing intervention" (Walker, Colvin, & Ramsey, 2003). Walker and Gresham (2003) recently made the case that (1) too many children are coming to school with prior exposure to family and societal risk, (2) the K - 2 population with behavior disorders is underserved by schools; and (3) strong research based interventions for these students have been shown effective yet are underutilized. Clearly, the gap between research discoveries and standard practices for at risk students is readily apparent in urban schools (Greenwood & Abbott, in press; Kamps et al., 2002).

One evidence-based systems approach to closing this gap is School-wide Positive Behavior Support, SWPBS (Homer et al., 2000). In schools implementing SWPBS, universal supports such as instruction in clearly stated behavior expectations, and the use of consistent fair consequences better serve at-risk students than traditional discipline and zero tolerance policies. In spite of reported general improvements however, such as reductions in office referrals and suspensions, research suggests that SWPBS teams need assistance bridging the gap between research and practice at the classroom and individual. i.e., secondary and tertiarv levels of support. "Systems of PBS must be systematically manipulated and studied with the goal of creating a prescriptive model to guide implementation" (Scott & Eber, 2003). Current school policies suggest that even with SWPBS, team responses are still largely reactive to more challenging behaviors, rather than proactive in nature. Further, an alarming sixty percent of children served under IDEA are identified too late to receive full benefit of effective interventions (OSEP, 2001). These findings suggest that schools need systematic screening (currently not emphasized in SWPBS practices) to determine students in need of intensive support, and a set of research based practices in secondary and tertiary intervention to extend the benefits of SWPBS. At the classroom level, teams need help providing class-wide or small group interventions. At the individual level, teams need help selecting and implementing function based interventions. For both levels, there is a need to embed research based intervention strategies within the framework of SWPBS in such a way that school teams can readily implement and monitor them.