Research-Practice Partnerships for the Development of School Mental Health Interventions: An Introduction to the Special Issue

The rising prevalence of mental health challenges among youth has created a pressing need for effective, feasible, equitable, and contextually relevant interventions. Educators and school mental health professionals face critical challenges in helping students overcome such barriers to school success. This makes the need for school-based intervention development research particularly that conducted in the context of collaborative research-practice partnerships, greater than ever. Despite the critical importance of iterative intervention development work, such work often receives less in attention in the published literature compared to studies about the outcomes of interventions. The goal of this special issue is to highlight innovative and rigorous research that describes the process of iteratively developing school mental health services in partnership with educators. Each paper in the special issue describes how education partners (and others including students, families, and other community partners) contributed to the development of an intervention or implementation strategy (i.e., a method or technique to enhance intervention adoption, implementation, or sustainment), how data informed iterations of the intervention or strategy, considerations related to contextual appropriateness, and lessons learned related to community-partnered school-based intervention development. In this introduction paper, we provide a context for this work and highlight innovations across papers in the special issue.