Collaborative Practice: School and Human Service Partnerships

Tourse, Mooney, and their contributors argue that schools alone can no longer meet the complex needs of children and adolescents. The overwhelming needs of school children require that schools institute massive coordinated and collaborative efforts among various disciplines and agencies. The authors propose a restructuring of schools and social service systems to respond to the needs for interprofessional collaboration.

While they focus primarily on the collaboration of social work and education, they look beyond that to relationships with other allied disciplines in public schools and explore collaborative linkages with nursing, law, counseling, pastoral counseling, and other agents of society. The collection culminates with an examination of the realities of interprofessional collaboration in urban and suburban communities. This is an important guide for researchers, policy makers, and professional educators involved with school reform and systems change in the United States.

Examines the complex needs of schools and their students as well as the collaborative efforts required to meet them.

ROBBIE W. C. TOURSE is Director of Field Education, Adjunct Assistant Professor, and Coordinator of the Worcester/Paxton Off-Site Program at Boston College Graduate School of Social Work.

JEAN F. MOONEY is Associate Professor in the School of Education at Boston College working in the area of Teacher Education.