Emotional and behavioral (EB) problems in youth are one of the nation’s greatest unmet healthcare needs, with one in five students experiencing EB challenges. Yet less than half of these students receive any services, with particularly intense needs among South Carolina students. This award will help to strengthen the South Carolina School Behavioral Health Community (SCSBHC) through two annual conferences and supporting research forums. These conferences will focus on enhancing training, dissemination, and research efforts in collaboration with patients and stakeholders. The SCSBHC will increase opportunities for and empower patients and stakeholders to actively engage in improving school mental and behavioral health using research as a vehicle to meet this goal. Our efforts will focus on schools, mental health, and other youth-serving systems working together with researchers to implement and expand high-quality research-based school behavioral health (SBH) programs that will improve the social, emotional, behavioral, and school functioning of South Carolina children and youth.

Project collaborators include members of an advisory board including patients, clinicians, researchers, youth system leaders, and other stakeholders; leaders from relevant community, state, regional, national, and federal organizations; and graduate students and faculty colleagues at the University of South Carolina and other universities in the southeast region of the United States. 

Projected outputs include a consecutive series of four special issues of the Report on Emotional and Behavioral Disorders in Youth (16-20 papers and broadly disseminated by hard copy and PDF); a stakeholder-guided research forum and a high-impact training/dissemination conference involving over 300 diverse participants in each of two years, in April 2016 and April 2017; and eight quarterly forums on dimensions of a Framework for Excellence in SBH (FESBH). The website documents the work of the SCSBHC and will be improved and expanded throughout the duration of this project.