Building Policy Support for School Mental Health in South Carolina

Abstract

South Carolina (SC) is a leading state for the delivery of comprehensive school mental health (SMH) services, involving mental health education system partnerships. Currently, more than 60% of SC schools include mental health clinicians from the state Department of Mental Health; there is a widely endorsed goal 100% of SC schools to have at least one SMH clinician within a few years. Leveraging SMH helps address the systemic barriers for youth access to behavioral health services, particularly the effects of federalism and segmentation of services. The present article will discuss background on the development of SMH in SC, major policy initiatives and communities of practice that are propelling the work forward, best practices, and guiding principles for addressing barriers related to youth behavioral health.

Impact Statement Schools are an ideal location to provide mental health services to children and adolescents within a community. There is great variability between SMH within the United States, and SC has emerged as a national leader in SMH. We reviewed mental health initiatives for youth in SC, and we extracted guiding principles to inform future mental health initiatives for children and adolescents in SC and throughout the United States.

Keywords:

• school mental health
• policy
• best practices
• youth behavioral health

Disclosure

The authors have no conflicts of interest to report.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathleen Blackburn Franke

Kathleen B. Franke obtained her PhD in school psychology at the University of South Carolina in 2018, and she completed her doctoral internship at the Kennedy Krieger Institute at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. She completed a dual postdoctoral fellowship at the Autism Academy of South Carolina and the University of South Carolina, where she worked under the mentorship of Dr. Mark Weist to conduct research regarding effective school mental health services. Kathleen is a licensed psychologist and Board Certified Behavior Analyst, and she currently serves as Director of Clinical Services at The Unumb Center for Neurodevelopment in Columbia, South Carolina. Her areas of interest include early childhood mental health, promoting mental health for youth with autism spectrum disorder, and the use of applied behavior analysis to address challenging behavior in children.

Mariajosé Paton

Mariajosé Paton is a doctoral student in the Clinical–Community Psychology and Women and Gender Studies certificate programs at the University of South Carolina. She received her BS at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where her research focused on racial and ethnic differences in family processes and their associated child outcomes. She has since worked in schools as a residential counselor and a research assistant in a study examining factors related to middle school students’ interest in STEM. Her current research focuses on improving youth outcomes and health equity in nested systems.

Mark Weist

Mark D. Weist received a PhD in clinical psychology from Virginia Tech in 1991 after completing his internship at Duke University and is a professor of clinical–community and school psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of South Carolina. He was on the faculty of the University of Maryland for 19 years where he helped to found and direct the Center for School Mental Health (see www.schoolmentalhealth.org), providing leadership to the advancement of school mental health (SMH) policies and programs in the United States. He has edited or developed 13 books and has published and presented widely in SMH and in the areas of trauma, violence and youth, evidence-based practice, cognitive behavioral therapy, positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS), and on an Interconnected Systems Framework (ISF) for SMH and PBIS. He is currently coleading a regional conference on school behavioral health (reflecting integrated SMH and PBIS; see www.schoolbehavioralhealth.org) and leading two randomized controlled trials exploring strategies to improve the effectiveness and impacts of these programs.