Schools are increasingly tasked with doing more to support students’ mental health in the same breath as being asked to do more with less.
Depending on your school, you might be expanding your dedicated mental health staff, or working to puzzle out how to support increasing mental needs without additional headcount.
Today we’ll address both approaches and discuss tips for each scenario.
Doing More with Less
Are you being asked to figure out how to proactively address student mental health needs, but don’t have the luxury of hiring additional staff? You’re not alone.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, “49% of public schools reported providing diagnostic mental health assessment services to evaluate students for mental health disorders, and 38% of public schools offered mental health treatment services for mental health disorders” (for the 2021-2022 school year).
Keep those percentages in mind. Now consider that “as of April 2022, 69% of schools reported an increase in mental health concerns among their students”.
At the top of the list for limitations on offering support? You guessed it: staffing. Nearly 40% of respondents cited inadequate access to licensed mental health professionals as a major limiting factor.
When you’re trying to do more with less, there are a couple things to keep in mind. You need to make sure you’re getting the most out of your resources: your time, your people, and your tools.
Your time is possibly your most valuable asset. There are likely parts of your job that you will always need (or want) to be hands on for. Maybe that’s time with staff or students, or answering emails. And the same goes for your team. If your providers are spending time taking notes during sessions and then spending additional time to re-write those notes into a spreadsheet or SIS, that’s time that’s wasted.
There’s a reason why teacher and staff shortages are hot topics: people matter. And having the right people in the right position can make a measurable difference for student learning. Retaining top talent is always important, but when you’re trying to do more with less, retention becomes paramount.
Working in school healthcare can feel incredibly isolating, so the onboarding process is your chance to set the tone. You may not be able to change the fact that they won’t have a large team to work with, but perhaps you can help foster connections between people who can empathize with their day-to-day. Urging them to connect with their state associations can help them connect with other professionals in the same role.
Even your tools might offer opportunities for connection. Frontline has communities for users of School Health Management as well as webinars for clients led by the product team, and these are opportunities designed to help clients connect.
Finally, the tools themselves. Trying to do more with less can make trying new things feel impossible. Like Medicaid, for instance. If you’re in a Free Care state, you may have heard about the opportunity to collect reimbursement for mental health services, but thought that there is no way in your current structure you’ll be able to do so.
If you’re using a dedicated electronic health records system for documentation, it’s entirely possible that you wouldn’t need to do much “extra” to get that revenue. And once you’re able to report on the revenue you’re contributing to the district, you’re laying the groundwork for a more constructive resourcing conversation.
An additional point about tools: if you’re not sure whether you’re getting the most out of your tools, you may need to talk to your vendor.
What a Successful School-based Mental Health Program Looks Like
Hopefully you’re in the fortunate position to expand your program with additional personnel dedicated to mental health support. Still, you likely know that there’s no easy path to expanding your program. Recruiting and hiring is crucial. But we’re going to talk about a few things to keep in mind when you’re scaling your program.
If you’ve been a really small team or even a team of one, that has plenty of its own challenges, but there is a silver lining that might reveal itself as your team grows. With a tiny team, you likely know every detail about your documentation. As you add more people, suddenly the documentation practices you’ve used for years aren’t the only practices in use.
Standardizing documentation becomes more important as your team grows simply because you have more people approaching a process differently.
With more people working, you might have multiple people supporting the same students depending on availability or scheduling. If this is the case, that documentation piece becomes even more important. It’s crucial to rely on fact-based observations so that everyone is speaking the same language.
A Few Suggested Steps
- Assess Your Current Needs: You know your program best, so this idea might be a no-brainer. What are your current needs? What are your students struggling with most? Are there certain populations that require targeted support? Those populations might be students of color, economically disadvantaged students, or students with disabilities. All of these factors may factor in to the candidates you search for to fill your positions.
- Roles, Responsibilities, and Community Partnerships: As you know better than most, mental health is not a straightforward challenge, and there isn’t a straightforward solve for students’ struggles. With so many specialists in the mental health realm, your program can quickly become quite complicated. That’s one reason that having a role-based system for documentation can be really helpful. Once you’ve sorted out what your district needs most, you may want to investigate options for community partnerships to fill any other gaps.
- Holistic Onboarding: Now that you have the opportunity to hire more people, the last thing you want is to go through the process again after finding the perfect candidate. Most onboarding programs are a couple weeks at most. But with health-related staff, these are professionals who will likely be working independently most of the time. So ensuring they feel comfortable before being set “free” is paramount.
- Measure Success and Evolve: As your program grows, data collection and analysis grows in importance. Of course we’re biased, but an electronic health records system can be transformational as your program grows. It simplifies the data aspect, and makes contemporaneous charting easier. And if you want to explore Medicaid billing for mental health services, it makes that easier, too.
Final Thoughts
Expanding a mental health program is both a challenge and an opportunity. With thoughtful planning, strategic partnerships, and a commitment to your team’s well-being, you can create a program that not only meets the immediate needs of your students but also fosters a culture of wellness and support for years to come.
Elise Ozarowski
Elise is a writer and member of the award-winning content team at Frontline Education. A former member of Frontline’s events team, she is passionate about making connections, whether that be in person at events, online via social media or directly in her writing.