As students continue to struggle with mental health needs exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, a local school superintendent is advocating state leaders to make it easier to identify children at risk for disorders before a crisis occurs.
Sto-Rox Superintendent Megan Van Fossan, as part of a group with the Pennsylvania Education Policy Fellowship Program, is working with state Rep. Dan Miller, D-Mt. Lebanon, to create a bill that would require every middle and high school across the state to screen for mental health needs.
The goal is to recognize students at risk for mental health disorders, which can impact health and learning outcomes.
“The earlier you catch a mental health need the easier it is to intervene and teach kids strategies on how to deal with anxiety, how to deal with peer pressure,” Ms. Van Fossan said. “We want to be proactive so that kids don’t end up in a psychiatric hospitalization or in a residential treatment program. Just like basic reading and math skills, kids need the social-emotional skills.”
The bill – which has not yet been introduced at the state level and includes input from other school superintendents, the Jewish Healthcare Foundation and officials from the state’s education department – comes as students continue to struggle with mental health needs.
A recent report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that feelings of sadness and hopelessness among teens were at their highest levels since the CDC began tracking that information in 2011.
In 2021 – when classes were largely held online because of the pandemic – 42% of students felt persistently sad or hopeless and nearly 29% experienced poor mental health, according to the report. Another 22% of students seriously considered attempting suicide.
That same year, 57% of teen girls reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless, the report found. Additionally, 30% of teen girls seriously considered attempting suicide, a 60% increase from 10 years ago. And those numbers were also reflected among LGBTQ teens, 52% of whom had recently experienced poor mental health. More than 1 in 5, or 22%, attempted suicide in the past year.
The data caused U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in May to label youth mental health needs as the “public health crisis of our time.”
For Ms. Van Fossan, the goal of the legislation is to find children who are struggling with mental health needs that do not show behaviors such as physical aggression or those who cannot be in the classroom because they are depressed or angry.
“Those are the kids that come to the surface,” Ms. Van Fossan said. “Our biggest concern is who are we missing? And those are the kids that suffer in silence. Oftentimes kids that are truly depressed and have really significant anxiety … they’re pretty compliant but they just cannot oftentimes make it through the day without having some type of additional support.”
The draft legislation would create a pilot program for universal mental health screenings and provide implementation grants to schools. According to Ms. Van Fossan, the testing would be similar to screenings already in place for things such as hearing and vision.
She noted that it would mirror a dyslexia pilot program, which identified kindergarten students who were deemed at risk for reading difficulties. At-risk students received support to improve future reading achievement and to reduce the need for special education in later grades.
And Ms. Van Fossan stressed that the pilot program would provide necessary screenings for children in poverty who often don’t have access to high quality healthcare. At Sto-Rox almost 95% of the district’s 1,240 students are economically disadvantaged. Another 40%, Ms. Van Fossan said, have mental health needs.
The bill would require the Pennsylvania Department of Education to provide technical assistance and training and professional development to school districts while linking students with services deemed necessary through the screening process.
And the proposed legislation would require state departments to identify ways to leverage school Medicaid dollars to create a sustainable funding stream that can be used to increase school-based mental health services and prevention.
“We’ve screened on reading, we’ve screened on math needs, we’ve screened on vision and hearing and we have scoliosis screening, weight, height, but we’ve not consistently had districts screen for mental health needs. … We think that we have an obligation to care for the whole child and this would be an avenue to do that because it would give us really good data and information,” Ms. Van Fossan said.
Looking forward
It was not clear if the legislation would move forward.
Mr. Miller, who did not respond to an email seeking comment, previously introduced similar legislation that would require a depression screening for each student by age 14. The bill, introduced in 2016, ultimately failed.
“I don’t know that it’s going to go anywhere because often times it becomes so political that people think we’re trying to play the role of parents,” Ms. Van Fossan said. “We’re not. We’re just saying that as school districts we know that kids can’t access rigorous and relevant instruction often because they have barriers, mental health being one.”
Across the country only 20% of schools screened kids for mental health needs, according to a 2020 study published in the National Library of Medicine.
But in recent years legislation requiring screenings has been popping up in response to mental health needs.
Colorado legislators in June passed a bill that will allow middle and high school students to receive free mental health evaluations at school starting this fall, CBS Colorado reported. The legislation was opposed by Republicans who claimed it infringed on parental rights. They pushed for an amendment allowing parents to opt their kids out of the screenings, but current law states that kids 12 and older can receive therapy without parent permission.
And the Bellevue School District near Seattle has offered screenings to students since 2019.
“More so now than ever we need to really have good conversations about the importance of mental health instead of the stigma,” Ms. Van Fossan said. “There’s just such a stigma out there about mental health and treatment. It’s just really sad.”
First Published: August 21, 2023, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: August 21, 2023, 1:53 p.m.
