But school mental health screenings—which can alert schools if students are showing signs of depression, anxiety, or other mental health problems, and need help—have been slow to catch on in many districts despite being a strategy recommended by the National Association of School Psychologists, the National Center for School Mental Health, and a host of psychologists and youth mental health researchers.
Only 20 percent of schools screen students for their mental health, according to a 2020 study published in the National Library of Medicine . And, so far, New Jersey and Illinois are the only states with laws that provide funding and logistical resources for school mental health screenings. New Jersey requires the screenings in schools while they’re optional for districts in Illinois. The funding from the laws gives schools the ability to offer screening to more students, connect schools with local public health agencies to make sure screenings are research-based, and provide more robust communication to parents.
A handful of states are taking steps to follow suit. But some efforts to broaden screenings have run into resistance from some parents who claim that the screenings infringe on their rights and children’s privacy. Their opposition echoes the themes of a national debate on parents’ rights through which parents have argued for the ability to opt their children out of curriculum materials they object to and ban selected books from school libraries.
In Colorado, lawmakers passed a bill this week that would create a mental health screening program for 6th- through 12th-grade students. It just needs a signature from Colorado Gov. Jared Polis to become law. And last week in Delaware, lawmakers introduced a comprehensive mental health package that includes a line item to develop a process to screen and identify school-aged youth in need of mental health services.
“We now hear school principals, superintendents, talk about mental health as being a significant challenge for the students that they’re entrusted with,” said Angela Kimball, senior vice president of advocacy and public policy at Inseparable, a nonprofit that advocates for greater access to school-based mental health services. “We all want our kids to be safe, healthy, and happy, but we’re starting to realize, ‘Oh, we need to be paying attention to their mental health.’”
But even with the widespread acknowledgment of the problem, some efforts to establish screening programs have faced political barriers.
A bill in Montana failed to pass the state legislature in February. Lawmakers who voted against it argued that the state already had screenings for youth through the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, such as its Youth Behavioral Risk Survey, which is administered every two years and gives the state an anonymous snapshot of student mental health needs.
The bill in Colorado has faced opposition from parents’ rights advocates, who argue that it gives schools the ability to overstep their bounds by using a passive model of parental consent for the screenings, in which parents have to opt out of having their children participate rather than affirmatively opt in. Parental consent has been a key part of the push for parents’ rights policies at the local, state, and national levels.
“Quite frankly, it’s not the school’s role to subordinate the parent when it comes to their children,” said John Graham, president of the Colorado Springs School District 49 board, which adopted a resolution earlier this month to oppose the state’s bill.
