Helping Newcomer Latinos Adapt to Schools in the United States: An Exploration of Mental Health Services Integrated into a Suburban High School

Newcomer Latino youth face compounding resettlement stressors, yet school-based mental health supports for them remain understudied. Using a single-group pretest-posttest design, we examined change among newcomer Latino high school students (N = 27) in STRONG (Supporting Transition Resilience of Newcomer Groups), delivered in Spanish by a bilingual clinician. Composite distress did not change significantly (p = .309, d = -0.24). Nine students reported reductions, and four reported increases, of at least five points. Students with higher baseline distress showed larger reductions, consistent with regression to the mean. Because the study lacked a comparison group, findings should be interpreted as preliminary.