Stage 2: Preparation

Proper preparation is key to successful implementation of programs and practices. It is critical to:

Learn as much as you can about how the program is working in other communities
Engage key stakeholders to ensure a receptive environment
Find the best people to deliver the EBP
Provide implementers with adequate training and support to ensure effective implementation

Below are some concrete action steps complied from best practices and from interviews with current and former SS/HS project staff that may help you prepare to implement your EBP.

Action steps for successful program preparation

1. Connect with Developer

The developer will often provide training, materials, technical assistance, and guidelines on how to implement the EBP with fidelity while adapting it to meet your community’s cultural and linguistic needs, as well as the needs of children and youth with disabilities.

See Working with the EBP Developer for more information.

Strategies

Working with the EBP Developer

Key Resources

Finding the Balance: Program Fidelity and Adaptation in Substance Abuse

2. Visit Nearby Schools

Use the SS/HS Grantee Locator to identify local communities that are using the same EBPs, and arrange to visit them.
Contact the developer to find other nearby schools that may be using the EBP with similar populations.

At one SS/HS site, the principal of a school that was using an EBP came to another school to introduce the program and invited teachers and administrators to visit his school to see it in action."

Tools

Grantee Locator

3. Involve SS/HS Partners

Ideally, partners were already involved during Stage 1: Selection. Partners can provide support and direction at this stage by:

Promoting community buy-in and ownership
Increasing staff capacity to implement the program
Providing opportunities for cross-agency training and planning
Creating a system for information-sharing around the EBP
Helping you develop a communications strategy for the EBP

Consider with your Core Management Team how to involve partners in the implementation of your EBP.

For more information on working effectively with partners, see Utilizing Partnerships.

Strategies

Utilizing Partnerships

Key Resources

Evidence-Based Programs in Action: Policy and Practice Insights from a Success Story

4. Select Program Implementers

Choosing the right program implementers is key to effective program implementation. Here are questions to consider in your selection:

Do potential implementers have the appropriate skill set and the background to deliver the EBP? EBP developers often describe the appropriate skill set.
How many implementers are needed to successfully deliver the EBP? The EBP developer can provide this information.
Which partners in the SS/HS Initiative would be the most appropriate implementers? For example, in one community, local law enforcement officers deliver a gang-resistance EBP within the schools.
Do implementers have cultural and linguistic competence relative to the target population?
Can the implementers commit to full participation in professional development, such as training, to prepare them for implementation?
Are there leaders in the school or community whose enthusiasm for the EBP can bring others on board?

We actually have ATOD educators assigned to implement the EBP at each site, typically two days a week. And they work with the students, the faculty, and the administration to implement the program, and that seems to be going well."

— St. Lawrence-Lewis BOCES, New York

A fantastic, highly motivated person, who was committed to the program implemented, PATHS. The teachers and the kids love her personality."

— Cabool, Missouri

5. Plan for Professional Development

New programs require staff to develop new skills and knowledge. Before implementing an EBP, staff need a workshop or training to:

Introduce them to the program and practices
Foster ownership
Build in-depth knowledge of the program and the key elements required to implement it with fidelity
Have opportunities to practice teaching a lesson or using program methods and receiving feedback
Identify potential challenges and solutions to implementation

You will need to choose the means of providing professional development, and how it will be best carried out in your school, district, or community. For example:

If you have a large staff, it may be more cost-effective to bring the developer to your school or district and host the professional development event onsite. If this is the case, you will need to find a facility and attend to a variety of logistical details.
If you have only a few staff, you may want to find an offsite training offered by the developer. Another strategy is to co-sponsor a professional development event with a nearby school district and share the developer’s training fees.

Another important factor to consider in your planning is how you will provide professional development support for the program once SS/HS funds are no longer available. SS/HS grantees have used the following strategies:

Sent key staff to a training-of-trainers event. This builds your internal capacity by equipping staff leaders with the knowledge and skills to provide professional development to new staff who join the school or district in the future or to existing staff who will take ownership of the program once the SS/HS grant ends.
Built the EBP training into their school’s existing ongoing professional development.
Hired a prevention specialist with expertise in the EBP to implement the program, with teachers as observers for a set period of time. Teachers then slowly transition into the implementer role, with support from the prevention specialist.
Made sure a critical mass of staff is trained in the program so that the program becomes institutionalized, and program capacity does not disappear with staff turnover.

In our original grant application, the way it had been designed is that we would implement PATHS for three years in the classroom. During that time period, the teachers are required to stay in the classrooms and implement the lesson with the full-time implementer, with the understanding that when the grant funding runs out and that implementer is no longer available, the classroom teachers will then take over. . . . And so for three years, every week, the teachers have been observing the PATHS lesson, and, in fact, all the teachers are getting ready to go through PATHS training here in August.."

—Cabool, Missouri

The Escondido (California) Unified School District SS/HS Initiative, CARE Youth Project (CYP) requires extensive training and support. It is a comprehensive approach that includes Early Childhood readiness training for providers, integrates the PBIS preventative school-wide and classroom system of supports, provides an anti-aggression/pro-social skills program for selected middle school students, and implements ATOD and bullying prevention programs. The initiative supports each CYP program by providing intensive trainings:

Site administrators learn about positive disciplinary practices.
School site-based teams are trained in implementing the PBIS school-wide framework.
Site Support Specialists provide ongoing training to school site staff on barriers to student learning.
Attendance Intervention Specialists provide ongoing training to support staff, including clerical staff and administrators, on attendance policy and the intensive intervention team process that links students with supportive interventions.
The Behavioral Specialist offers classroom management trainings to teachers and other instructional assistants.

We have a contracted consultant who comes in every month and meets with [the] school sites . . . very successful . . . people know who she is . . . know she’s accessible to everybody if people have questions or run into problems."

—Pittsfield, Massachusetts

Strategies

Providing Professional Development

6. Pilot the Program

By piloting the program on a small scale and demonstrating success with your school population, you can build support and a sense of ownership for the program and then spread the word to other district schools and staff.

Some key considerations for a successful pilot include:

Select a pilot population that is representative of the community.
Choose skilled implementers and provide them with adequate professional development and ongoing support during implementation.
Set up a monitoring mechanism and closely monitor the implementation to ensure implementers’ fidelity to the core elements of the program.

One site sent a teacher from every grade level to a two-day training of trainers for the EBP (Too Good for Drugs). Each of eight schools had representatives at the training, and these teachers piloted the program in their respective classrooms. When the pilot was completed, the teachers convened to discuss their experiences with the EBP. Teachers reported that the students liked it. They felt the program was valuable, a good use of classroom time, and user-friendly. SS/HS staff presented an overview of the program and teachers’ feedback to the school board and recommended that the EBP be adopted as a K–8 curriculum district-wide. The school board agreed. Now the school district has an expert at every grade level, and these trainers provide on-site training to their colleagues."

—San Diego County School District, California

The Albuquerque (New Mexico) Public Schools designed and implemented the pilot project Prevention Intervention Program for Youth (PIPY), aimed at providing prevention and early intervention services to young people who are at risk of entering the juvenile justice system. The PIPY project was piloted at one of the largest middle schools in the district, which has a high number of referrals to juvenile detention. Bookings for delinquent acts occurring on PIPY pilot school grounds have decreased 53 percent. The school administration also reports that the number of repeat offenders has gone down from previous years—a change that they attribute to on-site caseworkers preventing violence through conflict resolution and immediate referral to prevention programs.

We piloted [the program] at two of our schools . . . the teachers were happy with the program . . . had wonderful things to say . . . “Wow, this does really work, and I can continue teaching instead of [having] to stop for discipline issues."

—Anaheim, California

7. Develop a Monitoring System

In order for EBPs to be effective, they need to be implemented with fidelity. This requires a mechanism for monitoring the implementation to determine if the core elements of the program are being implemented as designed and to identify supports that implementers may need.

The data you collect about program implementation can help you improve your implementation efforts. Use the EBP Implementation Checklists and your logic model to monitor and document your implementation progress.

There are a variety of methods schools or districts can use--alone or in combination--to monitor program delivery such as:

Checklists completed by program staff at the end of each session: You may ask implementers to check off or list content areas and activities that were completed, and document the extent to which they were completed. You may also want to include a space where they can describe deviations from the session’s content or activities. The checklist can be paper-based or online. One community put its implementation questionnaire online via Survey Monkey to facilitate teacher participation.
Direct observation: A supervisor or independent observer may attend sessions and complete a checklist documenting the content and activities that were completed. He or she may also observe and report on other aspects of delivery, such as relationship with students and level of enthusiasm.
Videotaped observation: Sessions can be videotaped to be reviewed and coded at a later time using the same checklists used for direct observation.

For more information on evaluation needs and available strategies at this stage, see Working with Your Local Evaluator and Evaluation.

The Pueblo City School District (CO) SS/HS initiative implemented the Positive Behavior Intervention System (PBIS) to positively change school climate and reduce suspensions and expulsions. The district spent time and resources to develop the right monitoring system to support and accompany the use of PBIS in their schools. The PBIS Specialist worked with the district data staff to add fields and categories to the district system, creating a more comprehensive data collection system to better track and address students’ behavior. He also added an interactive software program, Tableau, to visually map, aggregate, and cross-examine discipline behavioral data with other school data. Using Tableau, the PBIS Specialist can examine underlying data for any point or day or student. Data is updated daily and the integrated database system is used in a variety of ways to track practices and improve discipline outcomes:

Staff map the time of day, location on school property, and day of the week when most discipline issues are happening in an individual school or across the district. Then they ask: What is happening? Where is it happening? Why is it happening? The initiative uses this data in various ways. They have shared it with the School Resource Officers (SRO) at roll call to distribute SROs to the “hotspots” of the school at the appropriate times of day.
Data is shared with school principals in PBIS teams and leadership teams. In one school, they found an increase in problem behaviors in the lunchroom. Staff used this data to figure out the underlying problem and ended up changing the number of lunches offered to reduce the amount of students in the lunchroom at the same time, and discipline referrals decreased dramatically.
The data system allows the district to identify how students with special needs or students from different ethnic groups are affected by disciplinary practices to determine any disparities in enforcement.
District staff can also track data across programs and services to capture trends over several years and identify the collective impact. They use this data to make decisions on where to put resources within the Response to Intervention (RTI) model.
SS/HS staff share aggregate level data with school staff and teach them how to interpret the trends. School administrators and PBIS teams can drill down to system level, classroom level, and individual student level data for their specific buildings.

Strategies

Working with Your Local Evaluator

Tools

EBP Implementation Checklists
Logic Model Worksheet

8. Build Program Ownership

There are often challenges to getting teacher and administrator ownership:

Teachers already have very full plates, and they are under pressure to have students pass state tests.
Administrators may not want to add additional burdens to teachers’ workloads.
Both teachers and administrators have seen programs come and go without much impact.

You will need to make clear the connection between the EBP and students’ academic success and the potential benefits of implementing the new program.

Here are some strategies to consider:

Involve teachers and administrators in choosing EBPs that are easy to implement, can be integrated into existing curricula, and relate to the state standards.

When teachers see what a success the program is and that it isn’t as difficult as they thought, they understand the benefits of the program to kids and also to the teachers in creating better classrooms."

—Anaheim, California

Have one-on-one conversations with administrators, who are usually their schools’ gatekeepers of staff time and resources—their support for the EBP is key to a successful implementation. Taking time to meet individually with principals and other administrators to discuss the benefits of the EBP and offering assistance when needed will help build a strong relationship and ongoing support for the program.

We got [ownership] by talking, talking, and more talking . . . demonstrating that it was a useful curriculum . . . meetings with them one on one . . . It was constant the first year."

—Boston, Massachusetts

Demonstrate how the EBP supports learning (e.g., decreasing time spent on discipline issues and increasing student engagement) so that teachers understand that an investment in the program is worth their time.

After students who experienced the program at one site in Tennessee started doing much better in school, other teachers became interested and asked to attend the professional development sessions. It was a natural buy-in."

—Franklin, Tennessee

Give teachers and administrators an opportunity to be professionally trained. Providing professional development on the EBP helps staff increase their knowledge and repertoire of skills so that they feel more competent and capable.
Hold information sessions on the EBP before it is implemented. Provide staff with details about the program and its expected outcomes.

For successful implementation, you will also need ownership from the community. Be intentional about engaging the community in your initiative. SS/HS sites have used the following strategies:

Showing videos about the EBP at PTA meetings and at Back to School Nights.
Holding a community coalition meeting, open to different stakeholder groups, to inform them about the Initiative and the programs being implemented.

Community members were encouraged to join subcommittees focused on specific age groups, which got them involved at their level of interest. For example, the subcommittee on early childhood-age children helped to develop literacy kits and found creative means of distributing them."

—Black Oak Mine, California

Forming a relationship with local media to introduce the community to the SS/HS Initiative’s work and to highlight future program successes
Inviting community partners to the EBP trainings, even if they will not be implementers, to build their awareness of and support for the program

Newport-Mesa (California) Unified School District is a large and diverse district, economically and culturally in Orange County. The district’s SS/HS Initiative began its efforts by addressing the needs of older students who had been suspended or expelled or who had low academic achievement. Many of these students came from low-income Latino families. Bilingual Outreach Advocates, with experience in both education and social services, contacted the families of these students by phone and in person at their residences to offer to help change the students’ behaviors by providing services and a skills program for parents. The SS/HS Initiative used a bilingual (English-Spanish) EBP parenting program, Parenting Wisely, which features materials friendly to families with limited education. The Family Outreach leader, a Hispanic woman with broad credibility in the schools and community, said that the most important thing in working with this community was to be respectful, compassionate, and a good listener: “Even though I am Hispanic, I do not know more about their reality than they do.”

After the first six months, the project began seeing improvements in student attendance, discipline, and social behaviors, and a decrease in truancy of almost 50 percent. By the end of the first semester, the district saw improvements in students’ academic achievement. In addition, the number of referrals to mental health professionals greatly increased. Word started spreading about the benefits of participating in the program, and families shared stories of improved communication with each other. After the first year, the program had a waiting list.