Although youth are at risk for exposure to adversity and trauma, many
youth, especially ethnic and racial minorities, do not have access to mental
health care. Resilience-building curriculums can teach important internal
resilience skills and provide support to students who may not receive prevention
or treatment services. We adapted a resilience curriculum initially used for
military-connected youth facing adversities related to parental wartime
deployments, to meet the needs of low-income, predominantly racial and ethnic
minority students in a large urban school district. In this article we describe
the cultural adaptation, the implementation process, and the evaluation of the
trauma-informed resilience curriculum using pre-post surveys and focus group
discussions. We found significantly improved overall internal resilience scores,
as well as significantly improved scores on subscales of problem solving and
empathy among students receiving the curriculum. The focus groups revealed that
the curriculum enhanced connections among students, as well as students and
teachers, and served as a way to destigmatize mental health issues. The
acceptability of the curriculum, as well as implementation successes and
challenges are described. We provide suggestions for future steps for school
psychologists and school social workers for implementing this curriculum.
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