A Growing Crisis

We have to be able to understand and become more familiar with the language of youth mental health if we are producing effective, healthier educational experiences. We consider good mental health to be a pre-requisite to performing not only occupationally and functionally but academically as well. As a nation, we are facing a mental health crisis and given the prevalence of mental health disorders in children and adolescents, the odds are that every classroom in America will have at least one student who has a mental health disorder. Approximately one in five children, adolescents and adults are noted to have a mental health disorder, and one in twenty children and adolescents have severe emotional disabilities as also produced in a report by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

More specifically and in our neighborhood, according to the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), twenty-one percent of youth aged 13-18 have a mental illness that causes significant impairment in their daily life. Imagine the number of classrooms with twenty students and 4 to 5 of them having some form of mental health disorder. This is the current reality.

We want to note that we are not experts on the topic of mental health but do want to highlight these statistics and further research the matter so we can reach a level of cognizance when engaging and working with schools, their students and families. On that, doing further analysis of the role of a school and its position to handling the matter of mental health, we came across a couple alarming discoveries. One being that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), a law that makes available a free appropriate public education to eligible children with disabilities throughout the nation and ensures special education and related services to those children, also makes schools be the "payor of last resort" for special education-related services including mental health. Which means, a vast number of schools are reluctant to foot the bill, leaving many students unattended to.

It is also clear that schools having some form of mental health plan in place is not a required practice and many of them do not have a Student Mental Health Guide*. This leads to the question of which roles should be responsible for designing such a plan and enforcing it. One major issue of the lack of supports in mental health is the lack of training of our educators to be able to spot symptoms and be the messenger for these types of issues. Compounding this gap is the wide variation in approaches toward student mental health disorders within school districts. Even within a district, there may be major differences in approach from school to school. schools are the most common settings where youth who have mental health disorders receive any services and they are also a gateway to additional services so therefore, educators play a pivotal role in children's mental health.