Evidence-based programs provide vital support to young students, parents

For decades, Johns Hopkins University researchers have leveraged federal grants to establish public school programs in Baltimore, throughout Maryland, and across the nation to help teachers and parents support children's socio-emotional development and reduce aggressive and disruptive classroom behaviors by elementary school students.

Since the 1980s, the Bloomberg School of Public Health's Department of Mental Health has led multiple large-scale studies that have helped to implement what's known as the Good Behavior Game in schools across Maryland—thanks to grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the Department of Education's Institute for Education Sciences (IES).

And since the early 2000s, researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing have been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health to establish the Chicago Parent Program, currently used in 21 Baltimore city public schools.

Both the NIH and Department of Education have proposed massive cuts in grant funding, threatening the two evidence-based programs.

"Such cuts would be brutal," said Nicholas Ialongo, a Johns Hopkins research scientist who has led many of the Good Behavior Game studies. "It would be impossible to conduct such large-scale studies without the support of federal grants."

Deborah Gross, a child psychiatric nurse who co-founded the Chicago Parent Program, agreed.

Image caption: Nicholas Ialongo

Image credit: Guilford Press

"NIH funding has been the main reason that we've been able to help families using the Chicago Parent Program," Gross said. "It supported all of the early development and validation. You cannot be evidence-based, an agency requirement, unless you have federal funding to support the science."

The Good Behavior Game is an incentive-based team activity, established in 1969, that is proven to deliver immediate classroom benefits in elementary school and result in higher college enrollment, lower drug use, and fewer risky behaviors later in life for game participants.

Over the last four decades, researchers have trained more than 1,000 teachers, teacher aides, school psychologists, and social workers in the game and other promising interventions. Those school-based professionals have, in turn, implemented the game and other programs with upwards of 20,000 elementary and middle school students in nearly 300 public schools in Baltimore and across Maryland.

Currently, Ialango is leading a $3.2 million IES grant that is studying whether online training of teachers in the game can be as effective as in-person instruction.

Without federal support, the Chicago Parent Program would have been able to help only a small fraction of the more than 15,000 individuals who have gone through the program nationwide. CPP, which is known as ChiPP in Maryland, is active in 21 Baltimore City public schools and has reached more than 1,000 parents of children who are 2 to 8 years old—a period considered to be the most critical for mental health interventions.

Gross said the 12-week parenting program stimulates conversation among participating parents and trained facilitators about effective strategies for supporting young children's mental health and well-being and preparing pre-K children for school. Research shows that 95% of parents who have gone through the program said their child's behavior is "better than before" or "much better than before" they started the program.

"Our fear is that they will cut all of our funding, making it impossible to conduct the type of research needed to support families and young children," she said.