Pressing Issue/ Policy Moment:
Preventative and Proactive Mental Health Services
⚕ We think of prevention in healthcare in a very normalized fashion. Doctors direct prevention with healthy habits, routine screenings and physicals.
🔺 Mental Health: School-Based Shift: Integrating Prevention into the School-Based Model- To extend the equity of services access, school-based mental health is a growing infrastructure supported by school district budgets, state departments, and federal funds.
🔺 Access for students/ families is being hubbed through their child’s campus- regardless of and to mitigate financial, transportation, consistency of pediatrician office visits, and otherwise waitlists access to care barriers.
⭕ The policy friction: disconnect currently:
🔻 In moving to school-based mental health systems, preventative screening is often blocked by standard district data privacy agreements, rather requiring parent opt-in consent at a later point/ creating process to gather hundreds or thousands of signatures from individual families once school has already started/ creating access to prevention screening inequity issue
🔻 Parent’s Bill of Rights Policy being enacted by state ex. (TX and NC in comments) - with ultimate goals to give parents the power to “ direct the education and care of their child…To access, review, give permissions to all education and medical records”- move school administrators to being additionally cautious in requesting initial consent for prevention screenings and mental health services instead of standardizing a beginning of year- stakeholder (parents, school administrators, students) invested process for equitable services, and solutions such as- evidence-based screenings, parent review of questions, parent access to review screening records if prefer, mutually agreed upon pathways to support students with results, etc.
💡 Will be interesting to see how this is bridged to make sure parents feel empowered in the solution- and prevention can be a more standardized piece of school-based mental health. Would love to know any great examples you are seeing in your home states, districts, local policy, etc.
See Mental Health America Prevention Screening and National Alliance on Mental Illness Screening and policy recommendations in the thread
#mentalhealthadvocate #mha #nami #schooldistricts #preventivehealthcare #policy #education #educationalleadership #educationpolicy #samhsa
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4moJosh Golomb I agree, “…schools can play a pivotal role in identifying unmet mental health needs.” As a student advocate, avid school volunteer and PTO board member I see children everyday who need access to these pediatric behavioral health care services. Hazel Health and Vanessa Villaverde thanks for sharing!