Behavioral Health/Mental Health

The SS/HS Initiative set an overarching goal to increase family engagement in schools. One key feature of this goal focused on the needs of parents and caregivers who struggled in navigating multiple child serving systems and in accessing services for their child with serious mental and/or behavioral health needs. As a result, Wisconsin’s state team partnered with Wisconsin Family Ties (WFT), the statewide family organization, to establish Parent Peer Support (PPS) providers in LEA’s across the state as a strategy to connect families, schools, and community.

Wisconsin’s SS/HS State Team and LEA’s worked in collaboration with the state Pyramid Model Implementation Team to expand early childhood social emotional learning (SEL) and development across the state through 1) broad implementation of the Pyramid Model, and 2) improving early identification of children at risk for SEL difficulties. By 2017, Wisconsin had 20 additional Ages and Stages Questionnaires: Social-Emotional (ASQ-SE) trainers with the capacity to reach 180 districts and community partners; and 103 new Positive Solutions for Families trainers.

In each of the three SS/HS LEA, 100% of early childhood staff were trained in early childhood social emotional learning and development, with “booster sessions” (e.g., coaching, additional workshops, follow-up to assessments) provided during the school year. In addition, 100% of children and youth in each SS/HS LEA have been screened for early social, emotional, or developmental delays and a follow-up screening process has been institutionalized. 

The number of students receiving school-based mental health services each year has increased to over 1,800 in 2015-16, which is 16% of all students across the three SS/HS LEAs in Michigan. SS/HS created sustainable collaborations with community partners and strengthened the infrastructure to facilitate student access to mental health services, track referrals, provide trainings and workshops for staff and families, and streamline data collection and sharing.

Disciplinary referrals were reduced by 28% from the 2013-14 to 2015-16 school year by implementing a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) and evidence-based practices, such as Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBS) and restorative practices, with fidelity at the elementary, middle, and high schools in all three SS/HS LEAs in Michigan.

The Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) and the PAX Good Behavior Game are evidence-based programs (EBPs) that appear on the National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices (NREPP). These classroom-based universal preventive intervention provides teachers’ strategies to grow nurturing classroom environments, foster social-emotional health, improve students’ attention and focus to academic tasks, provides trauma-informed prevention strategies to use as classroom management practices.

The Ohio Healthy Youth Environments Survey (OHYES!) is a free, voluntary, web-based survey to collect information that schools, communities leaders, and parents can use to identify important areas of need, access resources to reduce risk behaviors, create healthy and safe communities, schools. and family environments, and to track improvements in health and safety over time. OHYES! is a statewide survey of Ohio school students in 7th and 11th grades.

The State and community leaders partnered to develop the Healthy Schools and Communities Resource Team. The purpose of the team is to promote integration and alignment of the work among Ohio’s federal-funding initiatives, including Safe Schools/Healthy Students (SS/HS), Project AWARE, and School Climate Transformation Grants.

Greene County Educational Service Center (ESC) developed the ECMHC program to promote young children’s social and emotional development, to address challenging behaviors, and to assist parents/caregivers of young children in the region who have experienced high levels of trauma or toxic stress. The caregivers in early learning programs were not adequately trained on how to support the social-emotional development of children. In Greene County, 44 out of 57 child care centers were not yet participating in the Ohio’s quality rating and improvement system.

Approximately 20% of all children have some sort of mental health issue and only one third of those receive services.  Of those students who do receive mental health services, 70% get them in the school setting.