Coordination
Practices
Coordinating effective care between onsite school services and offsite health and wellness resources is essential to creating a healthy school climate. Your school can greatly benefit by integrating a health and wellness focus into all policies, practices, and procedures.
School Site Coordination
Since 2005, we have been developing and implementing Coordination of Services Teams (COST) as a strategy for school sites to coordinate learning and wellness supports for students. We do this by placing staff at schools to coordinate COST, and by providing training and technical assistance to support districts with universal adoption of the COST strategy. Implementing COST in schools has shown improved outcomes for students.
School District Coordination
After working with districts for several years to increase health supports at individual school sites, we recognized that district-level infrastructure was essential for a school district to sustain the continuum of services and partnerships necessary to support student success and wellness. We support school district coordination by placing and/or funding full-time Health and Wellness Coordinators who work at the school district level to build and coordinate health and wellness resources across the system, and by providing training and technical assistance to school districts to integrate a health and wellness focus into all policies, practices, and procedures.
KEY DOWNLOADS
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How it works
COST is a multidisciplinary group of school staff and providers who perform four major tasks:
1) Identify students through a schoolwide referral system.
2) Assess referred students by exploring their strengths and identifying opportunities to offer them additional supports at school.
3) Coordinate efforts to link students to appropriate supports, track progress, and build tailored interventions.
4) Expand learning supports at the school, make recommendations about resource allocation, and recruit new resources.
