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Prior to 2018, there was no financial support for student mental health programs in the Michigan state budget.
According to education advocates, this lack of investment has come at a cost with students not being able to succeed in the classroom as they continue to struggle in learning how to navigate their lives both in and out of the classroom.
According to Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 2022 KIDS COUNT data book, 242,000 kids in Michigan are struggling with anxiety or depression. The state ranks 32nd in overall child well-being and 40th in education, an increase of 22,000 kids from 2016, which appears to show how the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and decades of underinvestment in youth mental health services has impacted children.
The data, derived from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ 2016 and 2020 National Survey of Children’s Health, shows that 13.5% of Michigan youth, ages 3-17, report feelings of anxiety and depression.
Heading into 2023, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and state lawmakers agreed to use a $7 billion surplus to fund a record-breaking $19.6 billion education budget that includes investments to support mental health services for students..
Along with increasing the state’s per-pupil aid from $8,700 to $9,150, the highest in state history, the budget also directs around $250 million into student mental health services to help them learn how to navigate their lives inside and outside the classroom.
It includes $150 million to support school districts with mental health needs to hire support staff, implement screening tools, and provide behavioral health consultations for school personnel; $50 million for districts to implement the Transforming Research Into Action to Improve the Lives of Students (TRAILS) program that provides training and resources so school staff can respond to the mental and emotional health needs of their students; $25 million for on-campus mental health centers and open 100 school-based health clinics; and $25 million to increase mental health grants to intermediate school districts to hire mental health professionals and launch school-based mental health centers.
Also included is $214 per-pupil in mental health and school safety funding for every student, in every public school district. Statewide.
For decades, Diane Golzynski, director of health and nutrition with the Michigan Department of Education, said the state did not include mental health funding in the education budget.
“Prior to 2018, the only thing … for our kids on the mental health side was with federal grants that we were able to secure, and those were often for only one or two districts at a time,” she said.
Golzynski said the department now has a statewide strategic education plan, for the physical and mental health of Michigan’s youth. The state’s 2023 budget aligns with the various goals of this plan, said State Superintendent Michael Rice.
Michigan kids
Monique Stanton, CEO of the Michigan League for Public Policy, said the state is coming up short when it comes to meeting the overall well-being and mental health needs of Michigan students.
“I think the thing that stands out the most in Michigan is we’re actually doing worse when it comes to the mental health of Michigan children between the ages of 3-17,” she said.. “22,000 more Michigan children are struggling with their mental health…That’s pretty significant.”
This year’s KIDS COUNT data book emphasizes that children here and across the country are in a mental health crisis, struggling with anxiety and depression at unprecedented levels.
Stanton said the budget goes a long way to address the youth mental health crisis now, but that long-term and sustainable investments must be made to continue to improve both student mental health and to address the shortage of mental health workers.
“What we don’t want to see happen is that we make significant investments in student mental health and then a few years down the road are not able to continue these programs because we had to withdraw the funding,” she said.
To improve student mental health, the foundation has recommended policies:
- Ensure every child has access to the mental health care they need, when and where they need it. Schools should increase the presence of social workers, psychologists and other mental health professionals on staff and strive to meet the 250-to-1 ratio of students to counselors recommended by the American School Counselor Association.
- Bolster mental health care that takes into account a child’s experiences and identities. It should be trauma-informed, designed to promote a child’s healing and emotional security and culturally relevant to the child’s life.
Care in the classroom
Dr. Paul Salah, superintendent of Huron Valley Schools, said the district has seen more behavioral health challenges recently than in previous years, but has supported student mental health and emotional learning needs. This includes hiring on-staff counselors, behavioral interventionists, psychologists, and social workers for all secondary buildings.
The district recently received $700,000 in one-time support for student mental health.
Salah said the district has not decided what to do with the money, but knows it will be able to sustain a behavioral specialist position and double the behavior intervention support staff.
“The recent budget adopted by the legislature was the single largest investment we have seen in public education in my entire career,” he said. “We need dollars that are sustainable and not one time. We are so grateful for the resources in this upcoming year’s budget and ask that the legislature continue to invest in our future with dollars that will not go away after this year.
Wanda Cook-Robinson, Oakland Schools’ superintendent, said that she wants the Oakland County education community to know that the ISD will continue to use every available resource to help address the emotional well-being of students as they navigate the post-pandemic challenges.
One of the more significant parts of the state’s education budget is the $50 million appropriated for the TRAILS program.
The program is in about 700 schools statewide, including several in Oakland County.
Elizabeth Koschmann, founder and director of TRAILS, said the $50 million investment will help the program reach more schools and students to better address the mental health challenges and help the state emerge as a national leader responding to the global crisis of youth mental health.
Koschmann’s area of clinical expertise is psychiatry, specifically in the treatment of depression, anxiety, and PTSD in children and adolescents using cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness practices.
“We need to give these kids tools to navigate a really complicated world that they’re growing up in,” she said. “I think that our governor did an incredible job of working with the legislature to push forward an agenda that clearly centers student mental health at the forefront of their list of priorities. The demand for mental health services is huge and the funding is finally there to support some of that hiring.”
Koschmann said that teachers and school administrators need access to training and other resources to connect children to the right type of intervention..
“We’re really thinking about how we address the mental health needs in schools when there aren’t enough mental health professionals to respond to those needs,” she said. “We would never try to prepare a classroom teacher to become a mental health therapist, but we absolutely want to make sure that the adults in our classrooms can recognize signs and symptoms of mental illness and can teach their students … to build their own self-awareness of how they’re doing.”
Stanton said the program is critical because Michigan’s teachers are interacting with students on a day-to-day basis.
“They’re the ones that are hearing and seeing firsthand as a child struggles or might have an inclination that something is wrong,” she said.
A streamlined approach
There are a few programs to streamline the behavioral care treatment process and allow children to focus more on just being students and less on their mental state.
Scott Hutchins, school mental health and Medicaid consultant in the state education department, said the state has made Behavioral Health Works, a behavioral health software program, available to school mental health providers statewide. This program is run by intermediate school districts and allows schools to confidentially screen students and streamline communication with families and school staff to improve student mental health outcomes.
In addition to depression, trauma, anxiety, substance use, and eating disorders, the program’s screening assessments uncover risks for self-harm, violence, and suicide.
Another program that’s coming, the Behavioral Health Learning Collaborative, is a statewide online crisis platform where administrators, teachers, mental health professionals, and parents can go for real-time mental health information. The platform will allow school, mental health, healthcare, and government organizations to work together to identify and support at-risk students.
Hutchins said this collaborative should reduce youth suicides and meet other mental health needs by building a comprehensive statewide system.
For policy, Golzynski said state lawmakers should look at how the state can build comprehensive school mental health systems that get students connected to the right mental and emotional health resources if they’re not showing success in the classroom.
“I think that this initial funding allows schools to be able to start building those systems,” she said. These systems are about looking at some sustainable long term mental health solutions.”
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