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3C Institute

Improve Your School or District Mental Health (for Free!)

Most schools have a handle on how they’re doing academically, but what about when it comes to student mental health?

“The research is clear that students’ mental health is essential to their academic success,” says Sharon Stephan, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and co-director of the Center for School Mental Health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

With funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the center has partnered with 3C Institute to develop the School Health Assessment and Performance Evaluation (SHAPE) System, a free, private, web-based portal that helps schools and districts improve the quality and sustainability of their comprehensive school mental health systems.

A comprehensive approach to school mental health promotes partnerships between schools, districts, their communities, and families to deliver a continuum of the best evidence-based mental health services. Anyone from a school system—administrator, educator, provider, parent, student—can join.

“SHAPE gives us a way to improve your multi-tiered system of school mental health supports for all students,” says Stephan.

SHAPE provides free resources and planning tools to help schools and districts make the most of all their available resources. Team members can use SHAPE to:

  • Be counted in the National School Mental Health Census
  • Achieve SHAPE recognition to increase opportunities for federal, state, and local grant funding
  • Access FREE, targeted resources and customized reports to help improve your school mental health quality and sustainability
  • Advance a data-driven mental health team process for your school or district

“The SHAPE System has been such an important way for our school mental health program to understand whether students and families are getting the right services at the right time from the right provider,” says Denise Wheatley-Rowe, RN, MSN, director of educational services at Behavioral Health System Baltimore.

Join today, and help shape the future of school mental health in your school and across the nation!

Your school mental health system includes any group of individuals working together to support the social, emotional, and behavioral well-being of students, their families, and schools.

Contact us at services@3cisd.com or 888.598.0103 to discuss how we can help you easily track and assess outcomes for your program with our innovative online data collection and analysis tools.

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    DEB CHILDRESS, PHD

    Chief of Research and Learning Content

    BIOGRAPHY

    Dr. Childress obtained her PhD in psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to coming to 3C Institute, she served as a research associate and a postdoctoral fellow in the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill working on a longitudinal imaging study aimed at identifying the early markers of autism through behavioral and imaging methodologies. She has 19 years of autism research experience, during which she has examined the behavioral, personality, and cognitive characteristics of individuals with autism and their family members. Dr. Childress also has experience developing behavioral and parent report measurement tools, coordinating multi-site research studies, and collecting data from children and families. She has taught courses and seminars in general child development, autism, and cognitive development at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

    Expertise

    • autism
    • early development
    • behavioral measurement
    • integrating behavioral and biological measurement

    Education

    • Postdoctoral fellowship, Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities (Institutional NRSA-NICHD), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
    • PhD, developmental psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
    • BS, psychology (minor in sociology), University of Iowa

    Selected Publications

    • Elison, J. T., Wolff, J. J., Heimer, D. C., Paterson, S. J., Gu, H., Hazlett, H. C., Styner, M, Gerig, G., & Piven, J. (in press). Frontolimbic neural circuitry at 6 months predicts individual differences in joint attention at 9 months. Developmental Science.
    • Wassink, T. H., Vieland, V. J., Sheffield, V. C., Bartlett, C. W., Goedken, R., Childress, D. & Piven, J. (2008). Posterior probability of linkage analysis of autism dataset identifies linkage to chromosome 16. Psychiatric Genetics,18(2),85-91.
    • Losh, M., Childress, D., Lam K. & Piven, J. (2008). Defining key features of the broad autism phenotype: A comparison across parents of multiple- and single-incidence autism families. American Journal of Medical Genetics (Neuropsychiatric Genetics), 147B(4):424-33.
    • Wassink, T. H., Piven, J., Vieland, V. J., Jenkins, L., Frantz R., Bartlett, C. W., Goedken, R., … Sheffield, V.C. (2005). Evaluation of the chromosome 2q37.3 gene CENTG2 as an autism susceptibility gene. American Journal of Medical Genetics (Neuropsychiatric Genetics), 136, 36-44.
    • Barrett, S., Beck, J., Bernier, R., Bisson, E., Braun, T., Casavant, T., Childress, D., … Vieland, V. (1999). An autosomal genomic screen for autism. American Journal of Medical Genetics (Neuropsychiatric Genetics), 88, 609-615. doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1096-8628(19991215)88:63.0.CO;2-L
    • Piven, J., Palmer, P., Landa, R., Santangelo, S., Jacobi, D. & Childress, D. (1997). Personality and language characteristics in parents from multiple-incidence autism families. American Journal of Medical Genetics (Neuropsychiatric Genetics), 74, 398-411.
    • Piven, J., Palmer, P., Jacobi, D., Childress, D. & Arndt, S. (1997). Broader autism phenotype: Evidence from a family history study of multiple-incidence autism families. American Journal of Psychiatry, 154, 185-190.