Yvonne Butchee

Yvonne Butchee, program associate with the Center for School and Community Development at North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, describes school-linked integrated services and notes that schools are an appropriate place to link to such services. Excerpted from a videotaped interview with Yvonne Butchee (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 1997).

"Integrative services is a partnership between schools and agencies like mental health, health services, and other social service agencies that come together collaboratively to address the needs of families and children and as they may do this in conjunction with the school on the school site or away from the school site, but the school is a very key part of the collaborative process. I think that it's important to link schools to integrative services for a lot of reasons. The first and foremost being that there's a very strong connection between educational or academic improvement and the other issues that young people face in their lives, so the children are in the schools, the schools are a key component in the communities they are very strong institution in the communities and that will be a natural fit. Therefore, for schools to achieve the goals that they have, they really do need to address these other issues, and that would be a very good way of addressing the other issues as well as helping young people improve academically."

This Critical Issue summary was written by Robin Fleming and Stephanie Lubin, program specialists with the Center for School and Community Development at North Central Regional Educational Laboratory.

Date posted: 1998