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Toolkit for Improving Family Planning Services in School Settings

Partnership Strategies to Connect Students to Family Planning Services

Isabel Griffith, Samantha Ciaravino, Jennifer Manlove, Jenita Parekh, Katherine Cushing, Andrea Shore, & Donnie Greco

Connecting students to family planning services, both in and outside of schools, can reduce rates of unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections (STIs), improve students’ access to services, and dispel misconceptions and stigma around contraceptive use. However, there may be significant barriers to accomplishing these goals, such as pushback from school administrators or community members, or insufficient resources. Leveraging Partnerships is one way for schools—regardless of whether they have school-based health centers (SBHCs)—to overcome hurdles to connecting students to family planning services. As such, we consider it to be one of four foundational approaches to school-based sexual health services highlighted in this toolkit.

This section of the toolkit highlights partnership strategies that have benefitted practitioners in two school contexts: schools that currently have an SBHC and schools that do not. The strategies are based on interviews with service providers and administrators from SBHCs, high schools, and community colleges across the United States.

Using This Tool

The partnership strategies described below are targeted to individuals working in school settings who are interested in offering or enhancing sexual health services through partnerships. This can include SBHC coordinators, directors, and individual practitioners, as well as school staff. These strategies may also be applicable to health care or nonprofit organizations looking to partner with schools to provide sexual health education and/or services to students.

Each partnership strategy listed below includes:

  1. A brief description of the strategy
  2. Case examples of schools that have implemented the strategy
  3. Reflection questions to guide your team on how to implement a similar strategy

Each partnership strategy varies in complexity, funding, and scope and is adaptable based on context and resources. You may find that some strategies are more feasible for your setting than others, but we hope that all strategies can spark ideas for potential partnerships to enhance or expand sexual health services/programming in your unique setting.

Before getting started, we encourage you to reflect on any areas in which your sexual health services or programming could be improved and whether there are specific partnerships that could fill gaps or enhance services. To aid in this reflection, we provide a set of needs assessment questions to guide your thinking about existing partnership efforts. After you’ve read the partnership strategies, we provide a series of prompts at the end of this tool that can guide your thinking and set intentions about next steps.

Consider your organization’s goals for sexual health services and determine what is working well within your setting to engage students in these services.
  1. What partnerships, if any, do you currently use to facilitate sexual health education and/or services?
    1. Which of these are successful?
    2. Where is there room to improve?
Think about who is already doing sexual health work in your school (e.g., health educators, health teachers, coaches, etc.) and consider gaps and opportunities for partnerships.
  1. Who in the school can help fill these gaps?
Consider what resources are present in the school or community that could help create or expand sexual health services in your school.
  1. Who in the community can you engage to supplement current sexual health education and/or services? Potential partners can exist both within the school (teachers, coaches, administrators, etc.) and externally in the larger community (such as community-based, nonprofit, and health care-providing organizations).
Consider barriers for developing or expanding partnerships for sexual health services in your setting or school.
  1. What are the barriers to effectively reaching students in your schools?
    1. Who may be resistant to new partnerships for adolescent sexual health services?
    2. What existing or potential partnerships can help you overcome some of these barriers?

You can view the Needs Assessment questions as a PDF form here.

Partnership Strategies for Schools Without School-Based Health Centers

Even when it is infeasible for a school to establish an SBHC, schools are still a critical access point to family planning for young people. Partnering with community health care providers can facilitate linkages to care. The strategies in this section focus on leveraging partnerships to connect students to family planning services, either on-site or within the community.

Partnership Strategies for Schools with School-Based Health Centers

In schools with SBHCs, partnerships can establish family planning services at SBHCs that did not previously offer these services, or enhance family planning services that an SBHC already provides. In this section, we describe strategies that practitioners have used to establish and improve family planning services at schools with SBHCs.

Next Steps

Now think about next steps to increase partnerships around sexual health services and set some intentions. The following statements serve as prompts to help you identify your next steps.
Resources
This section of the toolkit is based on findings and content from the following brief: Ciaravino, S., Manlove, J., Parekh, J., Barnett, H., Kim, L., & Vazzano, A.  (2021). Family Planning Practitioner Perspectives on Developing Partnerships to Provide Services in Schools. Child Trends. Available here.

Suggested Citation

Griffith, I., Ciaravino, S., Manlove, J., Parekh, J., Cushing, K., Shore, A., & Greco, D. (2022). Leveraging partnerships. Child Trends. https://doi.org/10.56417/5723e7986d This publication is supported by the Office of Population Affairs (OPA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of a financial assistance award totaling $2,036,999 with 100 percent funded by OPA/OASH/HHS. The contents reflect the views of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement by, OPA/OASH/HHS, or the U.S. Government. For more information, please visit https://opa.hhs.gov/.
Sexual & Reproductive Health