The School Success Profile (SSP) is a powerful and comprehensive assessment tool for promoting academic performance and closing the achievement gap. Please take a moment to browse our Web site to learn how the SSP might be beneficial to your school or program.

Learn more about the SSP project and the team that develops and manages it. We work with several partner organizations, including Communities In Schools.

Contact us for further information about administration and pricing details. The SSP, ESSP, and SSP-Learning Organization assessment tools are now available through our partner company, Flying Bridge Technologies (schoolsuccessonline.com)

What's New

SSP Arrives in Durham, NC
March 2008

Dr. Gary Bowen, Kenan Distinguished Professor, is consulting with the board and faculty and staff of the Durham Nativity School (DNS) in Durham, North Carolina, a tuition-free, faith-based private middle school for sixth-through eighth-grade boys of low socioeconomic status. The primary aim of the Nativity School is to identify and implement school- and community-based strategies to increase the extent to which parents are fully engaged in the educational lives of their children who attend the school. Strategies will be determined in full concert with parents, students, faculty and staff, and community stakeholders through the use of a strategic visioning process. A secondary aim is to promote the culture of the school as a learning organization. The hope is that long after the completion of the school improvement effort, the school will continue to function as a learning organization and persist in creating innovative solutions to problems. The initiative is currently underway, although it is likely that project will continue beyond the 2007-2008 academic year.

Dr. Joe Moylan, President, DNS Board of Directors, requested Dr. Bowen’s assistance with the school improvement effort. Dr. Moylan, who is a retired physician from Duke University Medical Center, founded the school with his wife, Ann, in 2002. According to Dr. Bowen, the School of Social Work is committed to working in partnership with community schools, like the Durham Nativity School, in order to design, implement and evaluate interventions that promote social justice and the ability of all children and youth to succeed in life. The invitation to become a partner in the Durham Nativity School’s initiative is consistent with both the School of Social Work’s mission to provide leadership in addressing social problems and the obligations and commitment of a public university to community service.

The School Success Profile (SSP) is the core component of pre and post assessments. In addition, specialty SSP forms have been developed and administered to parents and to teachers to augment the information gathered about the students’ perceptions. The parent form includes a Parent-School Partnership scale. The School Success Profile Learning Organization assessment tool has been administered to school employees to assess and monitor 12 organizational capacity indicators that have been associated with the functioning of schools as learning organizations.

Dr. Gary Shaffer, Associate Professor, is working with Dr. Bowen on the project. MSW student assistant, Rebecca Branovacki, and School Success Profile (SSP) research assistant, Brenden Miller, are assisting Drs. Bowen and Shaffer. The Twelve Labours Foundation provided partial funding for the project. For more details about the project, please contact glbowen@email.unc.edu.

SSP Arrives in Brunswick County, NC
February 2008

To test a parent-school engagement model targeting middle school youth with excessive absenteeism, a team from NC State University is using the School Success Profile (SSP) to guide the process. Dr. Karen DeBord, Professor and Director of Graduate Program at North Carolina State University’s Department of 4-H Youth Development and Family & Consumer Sciences, project manager, Stephanie Jones and a graduate student are partnering with Brunswick County Schools to test the model in two middle schools with low attendance ratios. The process involves administering the online version of the SSP to students with excessive absences, then engaging students and School Success Support Teams in a plan toward higher academic involvement. The School Success Support Teams are comprised of student-nominated supportive people from the student’s home, school, and community to use the SSP to review the student’s strengths as well as areas of potential concern. A guide has been developed to facilitate a problem solving sequence. The goal of the project is to identify and engage supportive figures in the lives of students to work together to help students become more successful at school. The model seeks to improve attendance, grades, and increase strengths while reducing areas of concern through a collaborative effort involving home, school and community resources. For more detailed information, please contact stephanie_jones@ncsu.edu.

SSP arrives in Romania

December 2007

The Romanian Center for Program Management of the Ministry of Education and Research has financed a grant that aims to introduce the SSP in Romania. Professor Maria Roth from Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania, is leading the project (pictured below). The project has been extended to four other universities and two NGOs. The SSP is considered the most suitable instrument for validation in Romanian Schools for its potential to evaluate key social and interpersonal dimensions that define school success. The research team, which also includes Theo Haragus and Maria Pantea from Babes-Bolyai University, will pilot test a Romanian and a Hungarian version of SSP in urban and rural schools with over 2000 pupils aged 11-18. The research team will also spearhead the development of a national center to provide evaluation services and intervention recommendations. The project’s long-term objective is to enhance school social work services by designing a methodology for interventions following the application of SSSS (School Success Social Scale, the Romanian version of SSP). The aim is to decrease risk factors and increase protective factors for school success through the design of evidence-based interventions that make a meaningful difference for children, schools, families and communities. The Romanian team will be visiting Dr. Gary Bowen and Dr. Jack Richman in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in March 2008.

SSP arrives in Portugal

December 2007

The SSP is currently being adapted for the Portuguese population. The Psychotherapy, Development and Training Institute (Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of Porto University) is leading this project, financed by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. A multistage cluster stratified representative sample of 1698 Portuguese 11^th grade students was built based on the Public High School database.

The research team Mariana Veloso-Martins (behind and right), Tânia Gouveia (behind and left), and Emília Costa, PhD (center) is interested on the psychological context in which success factors operate, considering that the quality of the subject’s significant relationships (i.e., parents, teachers and peers) throughout life has significant influence on school experiences and success. For more detailed information on this project please contact mmartins@fpce.up.pt.

• SSP/ESSP/SSP-LO Assessment Tools Go Online
• New Book Available: The Reliability and Validity of the SSP
• See all news items...

"The entire SSP process has greatly changed the way we are looking at school improvement... We must develop plans that engage the entire community and look at the needs of students in the context of school, home and community to ensure that all students are challenged, nurtured and successful.”   - John Ringo, Area Assistant Superintendent, Wake County Public School System, Raleigh, NC

The development of the SSP was supported by the BellSouth Foundation, the W.T. Grant Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and in partnership with Communities In Schools, Inc.