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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
Jan M. Wiebe, MPH, Grisel Ramirez, MPH, and Elizabeth Wax Boron, MSW. Office of Violence Prevention, Cook County Department of Public Health, 5912 W. Cermak, 2nd floor, Cicero, IL 60804, 708-783-9930, jan.wiebe@juno.com
While there are a growing number of violence and substance abuse prevention curricula available to schools, most administrators argue that they take too much time away from academics. This does not need to be the case. The Good Behavior Game is a classroom management strategy that has proven to be effective in reducing violence and substance abuse, and is cited as a “best practice” in documents such as Youth Violence: A Report of the Surgeon General. The “game” is easy to use and does not take away from academic time in the classroom (in fact, it increases it), and can be implemented on a low budget. In the first large-scale field implementation of this intervention, three staff from the Cook County Department of Public Health, with funding from Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative, implemented this in hundreds of classrooms in 25 elementary schools in 3 predominantly Hispanic communities in suburban Chicago. Preliminary data from 50 randomly selected classrooms demonstrates a 60% reduction in the number of classroom disruptions, with sustained effects 2 months after the intervention was introduced. This intervention is simple and more cost effective than most other violence and substance abuse prevention strategies, and it meets the needs of school administrators and teachers for more time-on-task and more cooperation in the classroom.
Learning Objectives:
Keywords: Violence Prevention, Substance Abuse Prevention
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.