Family-School-Community Interventions for Chronically Disruptive Students: An Evaluation of Outcomes in an Alternative School.

Abstract

In the current educational climate, educators are challenged to balance safety issues with compulsory attendance. The presence of violence, weapons, drugs, and alcohol at school disrupts and interferes with the educational process. Those students who interfere with the learning of others may need additional services to enable them to be successful in school. There is evidence to suggest that these students’ misbehavior results from unmet physical, emotional, or social needs. Certain types of alternative schools provide psychosocial and educational interventions for these students. However, divergent missions and lack of empirical evaluations have failed to identify effective interventions for students assigned to alternative schools for disciplinary reasons. Accordingly, this study was conducted in an alternative school at which the first author was the school social worker. Specifically, the study examined the following psychosocial variables: self-esteem, depression, locus of control, and life skills using a pre-test and post-test design to measure changes at post-assignment as a way of evaluating the effectiveness of the program. In addition, educational variables, absences, grades, and school status were examined using a simple times series design to study changes and to further evaluate program effectiveness. Participants evidenced statistically significant improvements in self-esteem, life skills, attendance, and grade point average upon successful completion of assignment to the school community journal