School-based prevention programs aim to enhance student success by providing school-wide education, skills training, and support.
These programs focus on developing interpersonal and communication skills, increasing self-awareness, and addressing risk factors that contribute to harmful behaviors.
[12] These results suggest that certain core skills may be critical to seemingly disparate desired outcomes, which may have implications for clinical decision making as well as policy.
Specifically, students participating in SEL programs demonstrated improvements in their ability to manage emotions, build strong relationships, and exhibit prosocial behaviors.
Organizations and policymakers have started to focus on providing schools with better access to resources, including training, technical support, and funding opportunities to facilitate the adoption of evidence-based programs.
However, ensuring long-term success requires collaboration between educators, policymakers, and researchers to create a system that supports ongoing professional development, funding allocation, and program adaptation to meet evolving student needs.
[17] These strategies include assigning highly committed individuals as project directors or coordinators; encouraging support and cooperation from school administrators, community members and principals; motivating and gaining the support and enthusiasm of teachers; training which will provide knowledge, skills, and desire to continue further; retraining a few years after to reinforce knowledge and continue the commitment of the teacher or school; and gathering feedback to provide instructors with how to improve their skills[14] Properly implemented programs are likelier to have good outcomes, which may incentivize policymakers to allocate more funding to these initiatives.