Advancing IDEAS for School Health

Who We Are

In its fourth year, the IDEAS collaborative is a multi-institutional (primarily local universities), applied research collaborative funded by the Colorado Health Foundation to provide data, research, and evaluation supports for a statewide system supporting comprehensive school health in Colorado. Colorado’s statewide collective impact effort (the Healthy Schools, Successful Students system) seeks to improve alignment of systems to support school environments to integrate health and wellness equitably for all students and staff.

The Healthy Schools, Successful Students system initiative is committed to advancing the CDC/ASCD’s Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child model. IDEAS was specifically developed and funded to be responsive to the research, dissemination, and implementation needs of statewide agencies and organizations (system-level partners) and school districts and school community (local-level partners). This project includes developing and disseminating best practices, translating research to practice and issue briefs, and supporting schools to use data-based decision making and select best practices in supporting school health and behavioral health efforts.

What we do

Data Coaching

One of the hardest things about data is knowing how to make sense of it. We work with you to figure out how to use what data you have and identify what data you still need to gather.

Traditional and Empowerment Evaluation

To figure out whether a program is reaching its intended outcomes, we can perform traditional evaluations. We can also integrate empowerment practices into traditional evaluations to build your capacity and skills for future evaluations.

Research to Practice

IDEAS engages with teams of researchers across the country who seek solutions to address school health and wellness. We want to connect these resources to those working on the ground in Colorado.

Why Data?

To know whether a program is reaching the intended outcomes and what might make the program better
Communicate results, successes, and lessons learned
Strengthen the confidence of your stakeholders

Evidence-Based Practices

Using evidence-bases practices will help every student succeed.

School administrators and staff promote student education, safety, and wellness, and invest significant resources to do this. When these efforts are supported by evidence-based practices, they’re better able to produce successful outcomes for students and school communities.

Importance of Evidence-Based Practices in Schools

The Benefits Outweigh the Costs

EBPs are shown to:

increase academic success
increase graduation rates
increase student safety
decrease bullying
foster a more positive school climate

Schools Can Reach Nearly Every Child

Schools’ broad reaching ability to support children’s success, make them the ideal context to implement EBPs.

Recommendations

Check out the WSCC Menus of Evidence-based Practices on The Hub.

To make EBPs more easily understood and accessible to schools, university partners of Healthy School Successful Students have developed Menus of Evidence-based Practices for each component of the WSCC model.

Promote partnerships between schools and nonprofit or for-profit organizations.

The added support of external organizations (e.g, universities, and state or federal agencies) can alleviate existing challenges in using EBPs in schools.

Challenges

Due to inadequate communication strategies, there is a gap between available EBPs and school staff awareness.
To use EBPs effectively requires time and resources that are often in tension with other school priorities and demands.
EBPs that are not appropriately tailored to the school community can have weaker effects.

Issue Briefs

All the briefs provide an overview of the issue, signs that a student may be at risk of experiencing adversity, a brief discussion of what schools can do to address and mitigate the issue, as well as some programs and strategies to consider implementing in a school community.

Suicide Issue Brief