Rachel Barrett is a licensed clinical social worker (LICSW) and joins the UW SMART Center as the Program Manager for the Workforce for Student Well-Being following 20+ years in schools, community mental health, and out-of-district placements for students with significant mental health needs.
Rachel is involved in a variety of projects aimed at improving children’s access to quality mental health services in the communities in which they live. Rachel provides consultation to schools, teaches children’s mental health content at the UW School of Social Work, and supports the professional development of the next generation of social workers. She earned her BA in Gender Studies and Politics (2001) from Oberlin College and her MSW (2005) from the University of Washington.
Rachel has expertise in the areas of externalizing behaviors masking internal distress and the requisite therapeutic/school-based interventions needed for student success. Rachel has experience in developing suicide postvention protocols in community mental health as well as public school settings. She is trained in a variety of approaches to suicide intervention and regularly consults on students experiencing high acuity mental health symptoms in schools.
When not working at her main hustles or side hustles Rachel enjoys books about wizards, indulging in questionable television choices, and hanging out with her wife (also a social worker), her three kids, and two dogs.
(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.
In response, Washington state was recently awarded $6 million from the U.S. Department of Education to create a pipeline from Washington state’s five accredited Masters in Social Work training programs to Washington state’s K-12 schools. Called the Workforce for Student Well-being Initiative or WSW, 100 aspiring school social workers will receive conditional scholarships based on their financial need so the cost of getting an education is not a barrier to their getting an advanced degree and then committing to working in a high-need public or tribal school.
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Protocol for a hybrid type 2 cluster randomized trial of trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy and a pragmatic individual-level implementation strategy.(2021)Implementation Science16 (1):
