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Primary Submission Category: Place/Communities
Community-Wide Behavioral Health and Early Academic Achievement
Authors: Myah Houghten, Yoshie Sano, Brittany Cooper, Jane Lanigan,
Presenting Author: Myah Houghten*
Early success at school supports ongoing school engagement and connectedness, high school graduation, and positive adult outcomes across the life-course. Individual and family-level behavioral health factors are well known for their positive association with early academic achievement, yet few studies have examined community-level protective factors for their contribution to early academic achievement. This study integrates the risk and protective factor paradigm with the social-ecological framework to examine if aggregate community-wide protective factors in five dimensions—youth, family, school, peer, and community—contribute to early academic achievement and if that contribution is sustained even in the face of poverty. Publicly available secondary third-grade education data and youth behavioral health data were compiled from 178 public school districts in Washington State. Community-wide protective factors were measured with individual youth experiences averaged at the level of the school district and applied to each school district as a community characteristic. Multiple linear regression was used to examine if the aggregate community-wide protective factors are associated with higher levels of academic achievement for third-grade students, and the extent that community-wide protective factors retain a positive association with achievement when poverty is added to the analysis. Findings show that community-wide youth, family, peer, and community protective factors were significantly associated with both math and ELA achievement outcomes. Results also indicate that the impact of poverty reduces the strength of association with achievement for each of the protective factor dimensions. Study results confirm the importance of community-wide behavioral health to help offset the influence of poverty, while also pointing to youth-specific community characteristics and trust-building dynamics that help reduce the negative impacts of poverty on children’s learning.