Chaddock staff have led SPARCS groups at Quincy High School, Quincy Jr. High, Hannibal High School, Hannibal Jr. High, Adams County Detention Center, Adam County Probation, as well as Chaddock School, Chaddock Alternative School, and Chaddock's Foster Care program. In addition, although originally designed as an intervention for Jr. and Sr. High aged youth, Chaddock worked with the developers and was the first site to adapt the program for grade-school age youth. As a result, we also offered SPARCS groups at Baldwin Intermediate School, and offered Multi-Sensory Groups, which contain SPARCS concepts, at Baldwin, Madison, Dewey and Adams grade schools, and Cheerful Home Daycare Center. We are again working with the SPARCS developers to pilot "SPARCS ST" which is a five-week, skill based psycho-educational (rather than therapeutic) adaptation of the intervention.

Our goal is to make these groups self-sustaining, and so we have trained a number of master's level counselors and therapists from the public school and other organizations, at no cost to the participants, to transition toward providing the groups on their own. This will allow our SPARCS trained therapists to focus their energies on bringing SPARCS to other schools. Our goal is to reach an additional 750 youth in the coming year.

We are working with Northwestern University, the developers of the intervention from North Shore Hospital in New York,  and the National Child Traumatic Stress Network on research regarding the impact of our SPARCS groups. Of those local youth whose parents/guardians signed consents for them to participate in the research project, the students averaged 4.85 traumatic experiences. What exactly does that mean? If a child has witnessed domestic violence, even if it has happened on numerous occasions, that counts as one traumatic experience. Other traumatic experiences might include physical abuse, sexual abuse, traumatic loss, community violence, school violence, natural disaster, etc. There has been a good deal of research showing there is a strong connection between four or more adverse childhood experiences (traumas) and increased physical health issues such as diabetes, COPD and heart disease. SPARCS is one way that Chaddock is striving to give our local youth, and the professionals who serve them, the tools our kids need to be resilient in the face of traumatic experience.