| Sustainability Defined | Sustainability and the Prevention Planning Process | Taft Middle School Prevention Plan | Why Sustainability Is Important |

There are at least three important and practical reasons to sustain your school's prevention initiative:

• To maximize resources. Launching a program entails significant start-up costs in terms of human, fiscal, and technical resources. Unfortunately, these resources may be wasted if program activities are stopped before they can be fully evaluated. Prevention activities that are sustained over time are more likely to achieve a high level of implementation, providing evaluators with the opportunity to measure their true impact.

• To produce long-term effects. It can be counterproductive to end a program that has produced positive outcomes if the problem the program was meant to address still exists or recurs. While many school-based prevention programs are effective in the short term, studies often report decaying effects in the long term. According to Gager and Elias (1997), "Programs that are of short duration -- whether due to financial constraints or districts' preferences or faddish, "revolving door" aproaches to bringing programs into schools -- are unlikely to have the breadth and depth of impact to [effect substantive change]."

• To establish a track record. If a prevention program is successful but not sustained, people will want to know why. Failing to sustain a program that is well-supported and effective may compromise your ability to garner support and/or funding for future initiatives.

References

Gager, P. J. and Elias, M. J. (1997). Implementing prevention programs in high-risk environments: Application of the resiliency paradigm. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 67(3), 363-373.