Some youngsters who transfer into a new school are high-risk candidates for school and later life difficulties. During a school transfer, children are faced with the task of gaining peer and teacher acceptance, learning about the school's rules and regulations, and meeting new academic standards. Those transfer children who fail in these tasks often are from low SES backgrounds, evidence academic lags, and are confronted with multiple life stressors that detract them from focusing on the task of mastering the demands of the new setting. In the present study, 10 schools will be randomly assigned to an experimental condition and 10 schools to the control condition. The intervention will involve providing a high risk group of transfer children a comprehensive intervention involving an orientation program and tutoring. In the proposed project, parents will be actively involved in the tutoring project, and they will support and augment the overall effort to enhance academic skills. Preventive interventions that include school based strategies and involvement of parents to support these efforts might be most effective. Comprehensive intervention packages, for example those that enhance academic competencies in schools through tutoring combined with the promotion of more positive parent-child interactions, are becoming more common. Children turn to a number of individuals for social provisions, and the importance of the relationship with parents should not be underestimated. Children obtain affection and reliable alliance more from parents than from friends. It is hypothesized that at postpoint and follow-up times, those children provided the comprehensive preventive intervention, with a strong parent component, will evidence significantly better functioning in a variety of measures than control children. The findings will be replicated with a second wave of children.
