Dr. Gabrielle Wilcox, PsyD, is partnering with the Calgary Police Youth Foundation to evaluate the efficacy of their Integrated School Support Program (ISSP).
The goal of this child wellness initiative is to improve the academic performance and social, emotional, and physical well-being of children aged five to 12 by providing the essential services required in schools and communities.
"ISSP is designed to level the playing field for students facing barriers to certain supports due to various circumstances, including poverty," explains Wilcox, a registered psychologist and associate professor in the Werklund School of Education.
By furnishing wraparound supports, such as an on-site mental health professional, a positive police presence, a physical education teacher as well as nutrition and after-school programs, students will have a better opportunity to flourish.
Building connections with police
Wilcox says there have been growing calls for a multi-tiered system of support for mental health in schools.
"Supporting student mental health at universal, targeted and intensive levels is best served by someone who is embedded in the school and can establish relationships with students and teachers.
"Being in the school allows mental health workers to support teachers in implementing schoolwide programs to help students gain skills to thrive, but it also helps them to identify students who need additional supports."
Those additional supports can then be delivered within the school environment, or the worker can refer the individual to an appropriate community provider.
While maintaining a police presence in schools remains a topic of public debate, with ISSP the purpose is not to provide enforcement, but to establish constructive relationships between police and school communities.
"The positive police presence in ISSP schools helps students to recognize police officers in the community as trusted adults who are there to support and protect them," says ISSP Provincial Program Director Gillian Bowerman. "Through engaging with students at early ages we are able to break down negative, fear-based perceptions of the role police play in our community."
Adapting the program to individual schools
In 2022, the Calgary Police Youth Foundation received funding from the Ministry of Mental Health and Addiction to expand ISSP outside Calgary and evaluate the program's impact. Wilcox's team has completed one year of data collection and plans to conduct focus groups with parents and teachers as well as interviews with mental health workers to gain deeper experiential insights.
"One of the challenges and benefits of this kind of applied work is that there is a lot of flexibility in how aspects of the program are being implemented because different communities have different needs.
"We will look at the data across all schools, but we will also look at the data per school so that if there are parts that are effective broadly but not working as well for an individual school, we can provide that information to inform future decisions about how to improve implementation of ISSP in that specific school."
Wilcox says data collection will be completed by June 2025.
Gabrielle Wilcox is an associate professor in the Werklund School of Education. She is a member of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute and the Mathison Centre for Mental Health Research & Education at the Cumming School of Medicine (CSM). She is also a member of the Alberta Children's Hospital Research Insitute and the Owerko Centre for Neurodevelopment and Child Mental Health at the CSM.
