Mission Possible Program

The Mission Possible Program: A Ten Year Study of SBFC

 

Faculty and staff in the Center for Child and Family Development have just completed the tenth year of a successful School-Based Family Counseling program that is a university-school partnership. This program, called the Mission Possible Program, provides SBFC to children and families in over 60 public and private schools in the San Francisco Bay area. A similar program, also called the Mission Possible Program, administered by the Department of Counseling at California State University, Los Angeles, is in its eighth year of providing SBFC to children and families in more than 15 public schools in the greater Los Angeles area. Both the USF and CSULA School-Based Family Counseling programs are directed by faculty and staff who collaborate closely with each other, sharing ideas tested at each site. These two Mission Possible programs represent what is probably one of the largest and most extensive applications of SBFC (serving more than 100 schools and 5000 children and their families between 1985 and 1996).

Did you know? The Mission Possible SBFC programs have generated more than $700,000 in grants from government agencies, as well as private foundations. In San Francisco 17 of the 60 schools (28%) have hired their Mission Possible trainees/interns after trying out School Based Family Counseling. An additional 15 schools (25%) have not been able to afford to hire a School-Based Family Counselor, but have paid to increase the amount of service provided by the Mission Possible SBFC trainee/intern from one to two or more days per week.

In both the USF and CSULA programs, trainees are second-year students in the Marital and Family Therapy programs in the Schools of Education, interns who continue in the Mission Possible program after they graduate, or trainees/interns from other university MFT programs. At USF there are 32 SBFC trainees who are given both group supervision (in groups of 8) and individual supervision. The primary expense for operating the program is supervision which is provided by licensed Marriage, Family, and Child Counselors or licensed Psychologists. Funding of the CSULA program comes from government grants. Funding of the USF program comes from school fees (each school pays a yearly fee of $2000 for 5 hours per week of service) and from foundation grants which are used to provide service to schools that cannot afford to pay for the program. In-service training programs orient the trainees to the culture of the school and the practice of SBFC.

In conducting 10 years of SBFC we have found that this type of counseling is difficult, but very rewarding. We are reaching families that normally do not come to community mental health centers. The majority of families seen are low income and minority: Latino, Filipino, African-American, Asian-American, and Caucasian (in descending order of frequency). About a third of the families have a history of conflict with the school and the School-Based Family Counselors are trained to mediate and resolve this conflict so that the child is no longer triangulated between parent and/or between parent and principal. The fact that the SBFC trainee/intern is both a member of the school staff and a university “representative” facilitates the SBFC trainee/intern playing an independent, mediating role.

A survey of SBFC trainees/interns in San Francisco in 1990 suggested that for 80% of clients there was significant improvement in the presenting problem (Gerrard, 1990). A similar survey of SBFC trainees/interns in San Francisco in 1995 showed the following improvement rates for clients: classroom behavior (82%), grades (71%), at-home behavior (48%), and self-esteem (79%) (Gerrard & Perry, 1995). That a 48% improvement occurred in at-home behavior was significant in view of the fact that parents were generally seen for only 1 - 3 sessions. Clearly, more rigorous research is needed to determine the efficacy of SBFC as compared to traditional school counseling.

Identifying the client is frequently difficult (when the client is defined as someone who wants counseling). It may be the child, the parent, the teacher, the principal, or some other family member. The School-Based Family Counseling trainees/interns are trained to be flexible and to work with all parts of the child’s subsystems. Sometimes other therapists or agencies are also involved with the child or family and these therapists and agencies are also conceptualized as part of the ecosystem being worked with. We have come to view the School-Based Family Counselor as a multiple social systems change agent.