Schools have long needed comprehensive mental health supports for students and staff. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, one in five children and adolescents experience a mental health problem during their school years.

At the most basic level, the best teacher in the world cannot effectively reach a student who is having a mental health crisis. For a long time, we have expected teachers to handle the mental health issues of students in their class in addition to teaching. We need to recognize that mental health is no different than physical health in that they are both real needs that require specially trained professionals to address—and that when left untreated, they can significantly inhibit the ability of a student to learn. Classroom teachers can provide some basic mental health support like comforting a student who is upset. However, asking teachers to run a classroom with students who have untreated mental health issues or asking them to figure out how to treat them is different. The fact that mental health issues are often more difficult to see, combined with years of mental health stigmatism, has led to these issues being largely ignored in education. However, recent efforts to advance the cause of mental health access for students have caused many schools to rethink their approach.

While some schools have found ways to add the required resources through complicated funding and staffing structures, others have struggled to get even one mental health professional on campus. With the sudden influx of federal Covid-19 relief funds, the financial barriers to providing these services in schools are disappearing, at least temporarily. As schools head into summer planning, they should be considering how and where to add these services—and even more importantly, how to ensure the long-term sustainability of funding that will let them remain in place after the federal relief dollars expire.

Read the full article about funding mental health resources for students by Sarah Broome at The Thomas B. Fordham Institute.