ABSTRACT
Given societal changes taking place in the United States, professionals in many fields related to child and family mental health have developed models of service delivery that emphasize the provision of support services within schools in a multidisciplinary and coordinated fashion. Terms such as school-family-community collaborative (Ysseldyke, Dawson, Lehr, Reschley, Reynolds & Telzrow, 1997), service integration (APA, 1993) school-linked services (Morrill, 1992), wrap-around services (Burchard, 1990), and system-of care (Stroul & Friedman, 1986), all argue for a model of service delivery where professionals, parents, and nonprofessionals share responsibility for the design and delivery of services in a cooperative fashion. Literature regarding service delivery to particularly difficult school populations such as children living in extreme poverty, violent youth, homeless families, children with emotional and behavioral disabilities, and abusive families are replete with calls for a shift to these models of service delivery. Attempting to assist teachers, children and parents who are living in a troubled and troubling world will tax the resources of even the most highly trained professional. Many have come to believe that attempting to do so from within a fragmented, categorical, and hierarchically organized social service system is not feasible.
