Coping Power in the City: Promoting Coping in African American Male Students

Abstract

This article describes efforts to adapt an adolescent version of the Coping Power program, called Coping Power in the City, for use with high school students attending an urban school district with high concentrations of students exposed to community violence and challenges related to elevated tensions between youth and police. The goal of this group-based preventive intervention is to provide a comprehensive, school-based approach to stem rates of violence, discipline problems, and related mental health concerns for adolescents. A novel feature is the integration of a school police component into the intervention model with concurrent supports for students, parents, and teachers to supplement school counseling efforts. We present an overview of the program and a rationale for its adaptation to meet the needs of African American males in urban high schools. We summarize baseline data for 514 ninth graders (46% African American males) across 10 urban high schools participating in a randomized controlled trial. We also address lessons learned and implications for school-based counseling practices for African American male students and engagement of school police officers in urban high schools.

Group Counseling for Black Male Students: A Strengths-Based Approach

“…The Professional School Counseling journal also released a special issue focused on supporting males of color that included 14 articles specific to Black male students. Researchers provided outcomes, insight, and strategies for social justice advocacy, to foster resilience, and to promote wellness for Black male students (Johnson, 2021; Minor et al, 2021; Thomas et al, 2021). Despite this, many school counselors report the need for more training and strategies to support them in this work (ASCA, 2022b).…”

Coping Power-Rural: Iterative Adaptation of an Evidence-Based Preventive Intervention for Rural Upper Elementary and Middle Schools

“…The session provides an orientation to CP-R as well as caregiver training in general behavioral management strategies. We also developed a series of infographics for caregivers that could be delivered via text message or email, providing a brief overview of the weekly lesson content and related tips, based on our work with Coping Power in urban high schools (Thomas et al, 2021). Technology-assisted approaches are increasingly used to promote engagement of rurally located caregivers with promising results (Castleman & Page, 2017;Ingersoll & Berger, 2015).…”

“…However, as we encountered several challenges with caregiver attendance at the sessions in our EACP trial (H. L. , we opted to further reduce the caregiver content to something more transportable and feasible to implement, particularly in rural communities. Modeled after the nudges used in our high school study of Coping Power (Thomas et al, 2021), we developed a series of caregiver infographic "nudges." Our initial plans to pilot a single session kickoff in spring 2020 were interrupted by COVID-related school closures.…”

“…This broader contextual shift makes it difficult to meaningfully compare whether these new strategies may mitigate the challenges we and others experienced using different strategies pre-pandemic. Nevertheless, the infographic messaging was well received and appears promising as a method for delivering program content to caregivers in rural areas, overcoming some of the barriers to in-person programming (also see Thomas et al, 2021 for prior Coping Power work with urban high school parents).…”