Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #113971

Gregory Yee Mark, D Crim, Department of Psychiatry, University of Hawaii, 1441 Kapiolani Boulevard, Suite 1802, Honolulu, HI 96814, (808) 945-1517, markgr@csus.edu

School violence has become a public health issue of growing significance over the past decade. Based on the theoretical principle of increasing the community's protective bonds and institutional connections, the University-School collaborative is increasingly seen as a promising strategy to facilitate a participatory decision-making process for supporting locally driven, comprehensive, community-based solutions to interpersonal youth violence prevention in schools. This proposal describes the lessons learned from a research collaborative between the University of Hawaii's Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Violence Prevention Center and three public high schools on Oahu, Hawaii as part of a risk and protective factor research project aimed at better understanding the schools' student populations and improving their educational curricula and student/parent services in an informed manner. First, this presentation will outline the severity of interpersonal youth violence amongst the schools partaking in the collaborative research project. In addition, this presentation will overview the development of two innovative high school programs - ethnic studies courses and service learning projects - that attempt to prevent youth violence by improving students' ability to contextualize cultural differences and by interfacing at-risk high school students with university students. Evaluation strategies for these school-based violence prevention initiatives will also be discussed.

Learning Objectives:

• At the conclusion of the session, the participant in this session will be able to articulate the process by which university and high school faculty can collaborate to develop innovative violence prevention programs.
• At the conclusion of the session, the participant in this session will be able to develop an ethnic studies program for at-risk high school students.
• At the conclusion of the session, the participant in this session will be able to develop a service-learning program for at-risk high school students.

Keywords: Community Collaboration, School Health

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.