Kendall Fujioka joined the department in September 2021 as a Research Consultant for the UW School Mental Health Assessment, Research and Training (SMART) Center. Kendall is a Juris Doctor (JD) student in the UW School of Law class of 2023 and plans to specialize in Public Interest and Child Advocacy. At UW, she earned a BA in Early Childhood and Family Studies and a BA in Psychology, and then earned her Master of Social Work (MSW) at the University of Southern California with a concentration in mental health and school social work. As a district administrator for a public K-12 system in Los Angeles County, she provided direct service and program oversight for a team of school mental health providers, interns, and pupil support staff. She later coordinated evaluation and reporting of program outcomes related to school climate, social-emotional learning and youth mental health as a grant director for Project AWARE (Advancing Wellness and Resilience in Education).
(Training & Technical Assistance) As a key component of this mission, UW SMART has developed strategies and related infrastructure for providing training and technical assistance to state and local education agencies as well as individual school districts. The SMART Center’s “TACore” provides: 1) Training and consultation/coaching focused on developing workforce capacity (among school staff and community partners) to deliver research-based strategies, policies, and practice models relevant to the education context, 2) Technical assistance focused on building evidence-based, multi-tiered systems of school-based behavioral health, using collaborative decision-making processes guided by local data as well as research evidence, and 3) Program evaluation focused on collecting and analyzing existing (e.g., administrative datasets) and novel (e.g., surveys, focus groups) quantitative and qualitative data to determine the impact of new or existing programs, practices, and policies.