Sep 27 Bridging the Gap for Youth Mental Health

Sep 27h in Bold Voices by

(September 27, 2024)

The statistics on youth mental health are bleak: in a survey of Allegheny County teenagers last year, more than 1 in 3 students reported experiencing depression and 1 in 4 had engaged in some type of self-harm. Nationally, 1 in 6 children between the ages of 2 and 8 have a diagnosed mental, behavioral, or developmental disorder.

For many of us who have children, work with children, know children, or ever were children themselves – these numbers may not be surprising. It’s HARD to be a kid. But what might be surprising is how little support schools and community-based organizations (CBOs) have to address mental health challenges among young people, especially considering students spend almost half of their waking hours in school buildings.

At Allies for Children, we spent the past year conducting research on this topic; talking to over 75 individuals from 51 schools, districts, and community-based organizations; and examining the data on our region’s youth. What did we learn?

There are real challenges to effectively supporting students’ mental health needs:
  • There are not enough staff, not enough of the right types of staff, and not enough diverse and culturally responsive staff to successfully support students, families, and each other.
  • There is a gap in coordination – between schools and districts, community-based organizations, mental and physical health providers, insurance companies, and more – that can get in the way of efficient and effective mental health services for youth.
  • School/CBO partnerships can be challenging without the right elements – supportive leadership and staff, time and dedication to relationship-building, and effective coordination.
  • Things outside of a school’s or CBO’s direct purview – like family engagement, transportation, and insurance – are often in the way of providing strong mental health supports to students.
  • There is not enough stable, recurring funding to consistently and effectively provide mental health supports for every student who needs it.
Despite these challenges, there are many bright spots to lift up in our region.

Our research uncovered countless examples of dedicated staff, innovative programming, and strong partnerships that are affecting change in the region:

  • There are programs that exist to create alternatives to truancy and school discipline, like the Youth Engagement Support Services (YESS) Team at Penn Hills and McKeesport, or the Titan Assistance Patrol at West Mifflin;
  • Unique partnerships have been formed to provide non-traditional forms of mental health support, like the integration of art therapy in Allegheny Valley, and a mentoring model for young men that are at increased risk of school dropout or justice system involvement;
  • Strong family engagement is occurring in the region, particularly with the support of CBOs like the Allegheny Family Network;
  • Collaborations between service providers and schools are providing mental health in schools in unique spaces like those offered by the Chill Project and the COOL Zone; and
  • There are guides and search tools to connect families and schools to resources throughout the region, like the United Way’s 211 or the County’s Resource Guide for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.
There are things we can do to make the system better.

Among a full list of recommendations outlined in our report are these highlights:

In 2020 and 2021, Allegheny County’s 43 school districts received $443.3 million and charter schools received $69.8 million from federal COVID aid allotments. Many schools used some of that funding to hire mental health support staff or implement new mental health programming. As the deadline to allocate those funds looms this month, many schools are being forced to make tough choices that ultimately impact their students’ and staff’s mental health and well-being. Increased federal, state, and local investments coupled with targeted non-public investments will be even more critical in the coming year to support students’ mental health needs as this critical funding stream ends. As one provider we spoke with said, “the lack of ability to cover the cost of services and to pay staff a living wage has created a crisis in an otherwise rich system of services for students and their families.”

Read more in our full report and tell us what you think!

Megan Nestor, Consultant