Improving Outcomes for Children in Schools
Published Dec 1, 2013, Child Health and Development Institute of Connecticut
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Over the last several years, Connecticut has established one of the country’s most extensive arrays of children's mental health evidence-based practices delivered in home and community settings. Despite this investment and expansion of high quality services, the mental health system of care continues to lack the full capacity that is needed to ensure the delivery of care to all youth in Connecticut with mental health needs. National data indicates that about one in five youth currently experience a diagnosable and treatable emotional-behavioral problem, which, when applied to Connecticut, represents about 160,000 children and adolescents in our state in need of mental health care.
Of those children, only about 20% are able to access the care they need and deserve, leaving approximately 125,000 Connecticut youth struggling with untreated mental health concerns. Unmet mental health needs have important implications for individual student achievement and the educational system as a whole. Research has shown positive impacts across a variety of indicators, including academic performance, through school mental health programs that address students’ unmet social and emotional needs.
Yet, the unmet mental health needs of students may be an important and largely unrecognized influence on broader indices of student achievement in school districts and statewide educational systems. In addition to their primary mandate to educate youth, public schools are widely considered a primary developmental context for youth outside the home and are increasingly becoming the setting for access to a wide array of physical and mental health services. Despite the enhanced array of community-based and in-home mental health care options, children receive mental health services in schools more frequently than any other setting.3 Delivery of mental health services in schools is a desirable complement to our community-based system of care, which has often struggled to achieve the capacity needed to meet the growing demand for services.
