The Coordinated School Healthcare Program, Part 3
Question 1: Explain what the SIP is and where the school nurse can find guidelines for it.
Answer 1: SIP stands for school improvement plan. The State of Illinois requires any school that is in academic status (not making adequate yearly progress) to submit a SIP that covers two fiscal years. The SIP is also a requirement of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The SIP gets revised every two years while the school remains in academic status, and after the fifth time that authorities deem the school is not making adequate yearly progress, it gets restructured. As a planner, the school nurse obtains a copy of the School Improvement Plan Guide and obtains hints from the SIP template at the Illinois Interactive Report Card Web site. The nurse needs to find out how many families are currently receiving services and from which agencies; how much overlap exists between agencies; how much money is spent on activities for students and families and how efficient distribution is; and what programs are in greatest demand and who needs them.
There are lots of good resources about Healthcare Program that you can find available.
Question 2: List the steps for implementing a developmentally appropriate health program that supports a safe and healthy learning environment.
Answer 2: There is no single correct way to implement a school health program; check your school’s policies procedures (PP) manual for guidelines. In general, the school nurse acts as the project manager, but your school may have an official coordinator of planning and implementation (CPI) appointed by the board of education. The nurse assembles a committee of stakeholders to plan and implement the health program. The committee brainstorms to generate a list of ideas and selects the best ideas to be included in the program. The nurse oversees small pilot programs to test the effectiveness of the overall program. When the outcomes are measured, the nurse empowers the committee members to implement the finished program. Finally, the nurse collects feedback (e.g., anonymous surveys) and usage statistics and she tracks costs to evaluate the success of the new program and determine if it needs revisions.
Question 3: Explain how the school nurse determines if the school health assessment method is reliable and valid.
Answer 3: The committee must first create a pool of questionnaire items based on known risky behaviors and several different behavior theories. The committee chooses the items to include in the finished questionnaire by testing them first with a small focus group. When the list of items is refined, the committee arranges for a small pilot study and factor analysis. The validity and reliability indices are established. A large pilot study is undertaken. Its test/retest reliability coefficient must be at least 0.66. If the questionnaire contains environmental items, their Cronbach’s alpha coefficients must be at least 0.331. If the questionnaire contains behavioral items, their Cronbach’s alpha coefficients must be at least 0.737. If the questionnaire contains cognitive items, their Cronbach’s alpha coefficients must be at least 0.573. The questionnaire is then deployed in the target population.
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