This thesis first examines the history and contemporary landscape of school mental health, offering evidence for schools as an essential component of the child and adolescent system of care. It then provides contemporary discussion around the importance of design in public administration, as well as analyzes the current design model…
This thesis first examines the history and contemporary landscape of school mental health, offering evidence for schools as an essential component of the child and adolescent system of care. It then provides contemporary discussion around the importance of design in public administration, as well as analyzes the current design model of school-based mental health services, including key actors, normative assumptions, and underlying conceptual models to demonstrate the outdated presumptions that have led to a model that is not designed to adapt to the unique needs of students, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on contemporary theory of design in public administration, I argue that the largely fragmented, decentralized, bureaucratic, complex, and underdeveloped design of school-based mental health services mainly developed in the 1970s and 1980s has reached its limits and cannot adapt to new societal variables. Lastly, I discuss said limitations of this model to argue for a conceptual and practical re-design of the current system of school-based mental health systems in the United States.
Leadership, as a field of study, has suffered under the dialectic between an ephemerality which keeps the true nature of leadership difficult to quantify and an ardent desire to have leadership fully understood so that societal institutions may improve. It is the primary focus of this research to view leadershi…
Leadership, as a field of study, has suffered under the dialectic between an ephemerality which keeps the true nature of leadership difficult to quantify and an ardent desire to have leadership fully understood so that societal institutions may improve. It is the primary focus of this research to view leadership as the collection of skills that an individual develops over time which allows them to demonstrate leadership ability regardless of their actual position within an organization. Through a review of the leadership skills literature, a potentially unifying framework for understanding and measuring leadership skills was extrapolated: Mumford, Campion, and Morgeson’s Leadership Skills STRATAPLEX (2007). In order to determine the ability of the framework to serve as a unified model between the divergent characteristics of the public and private sectors, a limited replication study was performed on a targeted sample of Human Resources (HR) leaders in the public and private sectors. The study consisted of a twenty-three-question survey which captured the HR leaders’ years of experience, sector type (sector of employment), and their self-rated measurement of the twenty-one leadership skills needed to perform in their position. Through the limited replication study, it was found that there existed no statistically significant difference between the sector type and any of the twenty-one leadership skills within this replication study. Although it should be noted that some of the leadership skills did approach statistical significance, a more robust replication of the STRATAPLEX for the explicit purpose of determining a relationship between sector type and the twenty-one leadership skills would prove useful in determining the veracity of these results. The results of this study serve to doubly inform leadership researchers of the possibility of creating a unified leadership skills framework as well as demonstrating to organizational leaders the value in producing leadership training which models this framework as its foundation for all leadership positions.
