From Risk to Resilience: Promoting School–Health Partnerships for Children

Abstract

Across the globe, educational and health practitioners wrestle daily with the paradoxes of risk and resilience. Though the causes of risk are generally outside the control of professionals, manifestations of disadvantage directly affect service delivery and the realizing of accountability benchmarks. This article proposes a shift in attention from risk to resilience as being empowering and proactive for students and those vested in maximizing their potential. Given that resilience has been deemed an ecological phenomenon, the ecology of human development framework posited by Uri Bronfenbrenner (1979) was applied to advance the rationale for resiliency partnerships between schools and school-based health clinics.