Mental Health Moment: School-based mental health support at risk

Justin Chenette COURTESY PHOTO

Justin Chenette, Senior Director of Public Relations and Advancement at Swe•

Imagine this headline: 100 Maine public schools stop providing youth mental health support.

That’s not a faint possibility. It’s an absolute reality if the state doesn’t fund a solution.

To set the scene, Maine is in the midst of a youth mental health crisis. Maine teen suicide rates exceed the national rates with Maine students who seriously considered suicide increasing to 19%. Nearly half of Maine teen girls reported feeling sad or hopeless with 36% of all Maine high school students reported feeling sad or hopeless. Around 14,000 Mainers ages 12–17 have depression.

To help meet this growing demand and need for preventative mental health services, Sweetser is meeting the moment, but at a great financial loss.

Sweetser provides therapy and treatment in over 100 public elementary, middle, and high schools, including many schools in our immediate area. Sweetser has approximately 80 school-based clinicians across our state and we served over 2,00 students last year in schools from Kittery to Bangor.

School-based therapists are embedded on school campuses, working with families and alongside the dedicated public education staff like school hired counselors and school social workers to form a continuum of care to support students’ mental health needs. Our clinicians work to support individuals regardless of when school is in session, often meeting with families outside of school, in the summer, and beyond typical school hours.

The problem is every single year this program loses money. In fact, Sweetser is poised to lose well over a million dollars this year alone. Not many organizations would keep a program with that sizable loss afloat, but we have because of the positive impact we are able to make. It’s where our heart is and speaks directly to our mission.

Sweetser places licensed professionals in schools at no cost to the school district. Instead, the family’s insurance is billed, but the insurance reimbursement rate only covers the actual face-to-face time that the clinician spends in session with the child. There is so much more to the position than simply back-to-back therapy sessions.

To be a successful school-based clinician, it requires full integration within a school setting. Common sense activities like meeting with educators on how to remove barriers to the students’ learning, and dealing with mental health or emotional crises that can ultimately arise are what make this type of program work clinically even if it’s not a billable part of the service. This creates a gap that we can't fill without state support. It’s not sustainable for any provider, not just Sweetser.

Speaker of the House Rachel Talbot Ross put forward a bill, LD 2002, to help stabilize this program by having the Department of Education establish a grant-like incentive for schools to contract with a behavioral health provider to provide school-based therapy services. This would help financially stabilize the program for providers like us and ensure students get the mental health support they and their families need. We appreciate the Education and Cultural Affairs Committee approving the bill and the strong bipartisan votes in the Senate and the House. Now it needs to be funded.

We hope with the state’s few hundred million dollar surplus, that youth mental health can be prioritized. Without a state solution, I fear Maine children and families will have less options for treatment, care, and support. The mental health of Maine’s next generation is at stake. Now is not the time to cut mental health in schools. If anything, we should be investing more in this critical prevention strategy.

Justin Chenette is the Senior Director of Public Relations & Advancement at Sweetser, which provides evidence-based treatment, support and hope through a statewide network of community-based mental health, recovery, and educational services. Learn more at www.Sweetser.org.