Developing and Testing a Model of Effective School/School-Based Health Center Collaboration

• In Event: Analyzing the Relationship Between School-Based Health Centers and Schools

Abstract

Objectives
We investigate the organizational conditions that contribute to the effective partnerships between schools and SBHCs, before and during the COVID pandemic. Reasoning that effective SBHCs create conditions for students to grow and thrive in school, we investigate the sources of variation in vaccination and attendance rates among students who attend schools with SBHCs.
Our analyses will answer the following research questions:
To what extent do student vaccination and attendance rates vary across Oregon schools served by SBHCs? To what extent do school characteristics account for this variation?
To what extent do cross-school differences in leadership, partnership, and organizational development account for variation across demographically-similar schools served by SBHCs?

Theoretical framework
We aim to update, elaborate, and test Richardson’s (2009) model of school-community partnership efficacy which, points to three crucial components:
A strong commitment to the partnership on the part of school leadership; Ongoing and two-sided communication between educators and community partners; Well-developed and adaptive organizational structures that sustain partnership activities.

Data sources
To do so we bring together data from:
Structured hour-long interviews with the 13 SBHC coordinators and 24 educational leaders working in Oregon public schools in which SBHCs currently operate conducted between spring and fall 2021. The interviews focused on interactions between the SBHC and the broader school community and the ways COVID affected these interactions.
School-level reports from the Oregon Department of Education describing student vaccination and daily school attendance rates for the 2017-18, 2018-19, and 2021-22 school years.
School-level data describing student demographics, and teacher and other resources gleaned from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Common Core of Data.

Analytic Methods
Our sequential mixed methods analysis begins by analyzing vaccination and attendance rates across all 76 Oregon public schools in which SBHCs operated during the study period. These descriptive analyses and data visualizations will document the overall variation in vaccination and attendance rates in the pre- and post-pandemic period as well as the school and community-level characteristics that associate with vaccination and attendance. We then focus on the 51 schools for which we have SBHC coordinator and/or educational leader interview data. Drawing upon these inductively coded data, we will characterize school leadership commitment to the partnership, the nature and degree of communication between SBHC personnel and educators, and the nature and resilience of the partnership’s organizational structure.

Preliminary Results
Preliminary analyses point to a substantial degree of variation in health outcomes across Oregon schools with SBHCs. We are in the process of analyzing qualitative data in order to explain that variation.

Significance
As schools and communities forge new partnerships to meet student health and developmental needs, we articulate a model for effective school/community partnership and use this model to investigate variation in student health-related outcomes before and during the pandemic.

Authors

• Caitlin Elizabeth Kearney, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
  Presenting Author

• Thurston Domina, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
  Non-Presenting Author

• Andrew Saultz, Pacific University Oregon
  Non-Presenting Author

• Dara Shifrer, Portland State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Erika Carpenter, Portland State University
  Non-Presenting Author