“Dr. Rushworth is a postdoctoral fellow with the Center for Mental Health. She earned her PhD in School Psychology at Temple University after completing her MS in School Psychology at Eastern Illinois University. Dr. Rushworth completed her APA-accredited pre-doctoral internship at Sarah Reed Children’s Center, focusing on outpatient behavioral health, trauma-informed care, and school-based consultation.

Dr. Rushworth’s professional interests include collaboration with under-resourced schools, communities, and families, school-based consultation, academic mentorship, and implementation of evidence-based interventions with consideration of culture, structural inequity, and trauma. Dr. Rushworth also has experience in data analysis, primarily the use of multivariate and measurement statistics for improving equitable measurement of social-emotional constructs. Presently, she is working under Dr. Courtney Benjamin Wolk on the BRIDGE and TeamSTEPPS projects.

Current Projects:

BRIDGE: BRIDGE was developed by Dr. Elise Cappella of NYU and colleagues, integrating teacher consultation and mental health models into a school-based consultation framework. BRIDGE was designed to support under-resourced schools in urban areas. Our team is partnering with Community Behavioral Health to bring BRIDGE to the School District of Philadelphia. Through BRIDGE training, coaching and collaboration, behavior consultants are empowered to provide teachers with targeted and class-wide interventions to suit the academic and behavioral needs of students. Our team is comprised of clinical and school psychologists, behavior analysts, and counselors with experience in implementing evidence-based practices.

TeamSTEPPS for School-Based Mental Health: This is a AHRQ-funded project (5R18HS026862-02) seeking to improve collaboration among school mental health teams by adapting a team training intervention from medical healthcare. TeamSTEPPS is designed to build competencies in leadership, situation monitoring, mutual support, and communication and has been associated with improvements in teamwork and communication as well as in patient outcomes. Through trainings, observations, and ongoing consultation, we take a participatory approach to collaboratively identify solutions to challenges in school-based mental health services based upon the feedback of stakeholders.