Transforming school-based mental health by connecting kids to clinicians at school

Our Mission:

Provide mental health services on campus to every student who needs them

Counselors for America (CFA) is a nonprofit training and placing more mental health clinicians in public schools in underserved communities. Building a clinician pipeline is part of our larger effort to help schools establish comprehensive mental health systems that are proactive in supporting student wellbeing. We aim to serve over 200,000 children over the next decade, placing over 6 times more clinicians than currently exist to do so.

We are re-envisioning the purpose of public school: to recognize and promote the unique, miraculous development of each child into a self-aware, empowered, and happy dreamer-doer in their community.

Mental health awareness and care is crucial for students’ personal, social, and academic stability and success. We strive to create a learning environment where mental health care is not only destigmatized and normalized, but ultimately trusted and embraced.

The Problem:

Schools are under-equipped to adequately support students’ mental health needs

Public schools in underserved communities do not have the resources to provide comprehensive campus-based mental health services their students need to thrive.

The dominant models of mental health in schools are reactive. Since there aren’t enough clinicians on campus, schools rely on problematic referral systems that only flag kids for help when they are behaving badly or when their problems become too big to ignore. To offer services, schools use community-based partnerships that either offer therapy off-campus, putting the onus of transportation on overworked families, or create fragmented coverage on campus by contracting with part-time providers.

In rare cases where there are full-time clinicians on campus, the student-to-provider ratios far exceed the reach of an individual clinician’s capacity for cases. According to the ACLU, the national average is 2106 students for every social worker. The recommended ratio is 250 to 1.

It’s a grim picture: there aren’t enough clinicians in schools, and the ones that are there are overworked, under-supported, and disconnected, which means kids are not getting the services they need.

CFA’s Solution:

Embed more full-time clinicians in schools to enable more proactive interventions

CFA is dedicated to systems change on both fronts— for schools AND for mental health clinicians. Systems change can be complex, but our mission is simple: we want schools to be able to serve the needs of the whole child.

CFA places more full-time mental health clinicians in public schools in underserved communities and helps those schools implement comprehensive mental health systems.

We’re solving for the shortage of clinicians by recruiting recent Master’s graduates in clinical therapy and incentivizing them to pursue school-based work by paying competitively and subsidizing professional development. These clinicians will be fully integrated staff members at the school site. They’ll administer universal mental health screeners to make sure every student’s needs are being recognized and offer services ranging from targeted therapeutic interventions to universal mental health support.

We’ll make sure the clinicians aren’t alone in their work; we’ll support school leaders with establishing comprehensive mental health systems capable of gathering, organizing, analyzing, and acting upon data related to student mental health needs in order to improve school climate and culture. 

We’re building a stronger pipeline into school-based mental health work

Creating viable and stable job prospects for clinicians helps retain clinicians in schools. We will also provide resources, supervision, and financial support to clinicians to obtain clinical licenses. School-based care works best when the same clinicians are able to work with students from a particular community; our push for accessibility to this field helps both clinicians AND students.