Grant: Operating Grant: Population Health Intervention Research - LOI

In June 2010 Eugene Coste Elementary School in Calgary will close. Children are having to deal with the prospect of starting up in a new schools, either closer or further away from their current homes, either with or without their classmates. Some children (mistakenly) think the closing is due to some fault of their own. By coincidence, in 2009 and early 2010, we undertook a baseline health and social well being assessment survey among Grades 4-6 students as the first step towards a two year whole school mental health resilience building intervention with the school. That project has now been abandoned. But this unexpected event represents a UNIQUE NATURAL EXPERIMENT OPPORTUNITY instead. We seek new funds to follow the children to their destination schools (of which there are just two likely main ones) and determine, by serial measurements over 20 months, the impact on their well being and learning outcomes. Each measurement in the new school will involve that whole school (and not just the migrating students). The reason why there might be an impact on health and well being is because a strong personal sense of connection to school is the largest single predictor of subsequent child and adolescent health risk behaviours. So dislocation might be detrimental. There seems to be no other site in the world where, by coincidence, baseline assessment on health and health behaviours, social networks and a biological measure of stress (salivary cortisol) were completed with a school prior to an unexpected policy decision of school closure. The two destination schools differ in size and ethnic makeup from the original school, offering unprecedented opportunity to look at how children adjust to different contexts. The policies that drive school closure decisions might be made differently if comprehensive data on student impact were made available.