After 13 weeks of discussion around school-based mental health services, Hamilton County families will now have multiple choices for their children to receive counseling at school.
On Nov. 20, the Hamilton County Board of Education approved agreements with five mental health providers to offer school-based services.
The approved vendors include Centerstone Community Mental Health Center, a Nashville-based mental health care provider; ELU: Counseling, Consulting and Coaching, a Chattanooga-based Christian counseling service; the Helen Ross McNabb Center, a Knoxville-based behavioral health agency; PsychPlus, a Houston-based mental health care provider; and Thrive Therapies Group, a Nashville-based organization that specializes in serving students with disabilities.
The agreements are the result of an open call for mental health care providers that Hamilton County Schools put out in early October. All five groups that applied were approved.
(READ MORE: Hamilton County school board approves five mental health providers)
Previously, the district had an agreement with Centerstone for over a decade, but in August, the school board voted not to renew that contract, immediately cutting off the service.
At well-attended school board meetings the following two months, Republican board members opted not to consider updated agreements that would have immediately reinstated Centerstone’s services, voting to table the discussion in September and to remove the item from October’s agenda. Both votes fell along party lines.
The intention behind having multiple provider options, Chief of Student Supports Jasmine Fernández said, is that students — regardless of which school they attend — will be able to sign up for those services. The district hopes that students will be able to get counseling as soon as possible once classes resume next week after the holiday break.
“We actually think this is a great opportunity for more families to be aware about the services we provide,” Fernández said in a video interview. “In the past, some families knew, yeah, we have counselors, social workers. Some families might have been working directly with Centerstone or with Helen McNabb, but now this provides an opportunity to further educate families that there is an array of different vendors who have different strengths.”
The approved providers will — at no cost to the district — offer mental health services for the rest of this school year, with the possibility of being annually renewed for up to three more years. The providers are expected to bill TennCare or private insurance or receive government grants for the services.
Here’s a breakdown of how it will work.
PARENT CONSENT
Parent consent will happen in two layers, Fernández said.
When a student gets referred for mental health services, school staff will provide parents or guardians with an initial consent form, which will give the school permission to send the family’s contact information to an outside group. Parents will also get a fact sheet listing the five approved vendors in alphabetical order that includes the organizations’ mission statements, availability, types and methods of service and contact person.
Once parents return the consent form and tell the school their choice of provider, it will be the school’s responsibility to make the referral to the vendor, Fernández said. The vendor will have to follow up with parents to initiate services, explaining what they can expect in terms of the sessions and frequency of meetings.
Parents or guardians will then have to sign a second consent form, affirming that they are aware of what services their child will be receiving. From there, the provider will work with the school to coordinate scheduling the sessions and ensure it’s not disrupting core instructional time.
If at any point a student’s services have to be modified, the parent consent form will need to be updated again, ensuring families are aware of the changes, Fernández said.
LOGISTICS
Each school will identify a primary designee who supports general relations with mental health providers, Fernández said. That person will be able to answer questions from the vendors, such as what the school’s class schedule looks like or how to plan a family workshop.
For the day-to-day logistics of figuring out the spaces where students will meet with their counselor or who signs visiting therapists in, the person responsible will vary, depending on what a school’s administration decides.
“We are excited, and we’re ready to go,” Fernández said. “We also recognize it’s going to take a couple of weeks to really find our footing and be in full implementation because each vendor is going to be in a different space in terms of scheduling and personnel.”
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For instance, in the approved providers’ proposals, Centerstone and Thrive Therapies both said they would dedicate 20 or more therapists to the district partnership, while ELU said it would allocate 10 staff members.
One of the biggest changes with the new mental health providers is the introduction of telehealth. On the fact sheet that will be provided to families, all five mental health provider options list telehealth as a potential method of service, and two — PsychPlus and ELU — state that their services will primarily be offered at schools that way.
For kindergarten through third grade students who receive counseling via telehealth, the district will require an adult to be nearby to ensure the child can access the counseling session and everything is working properly, Fernández said. That person — who will vary by school and won’t necessarily be the same as the primary designee — won’t be in the room with the student for the session, but will come in periodically to check in.
Based on how that goes this year, Fernández said, the district will decide whether it needs to change which grades get that extra support.
PREPARATION
The day after the board’s vote, district officials met with principals to remind them of what is included in the organizations’ agreements with the school system, what the parent consent process looks like and operations and logistics, particularly around telehealth, Fernández said.
Officials also held a similar meeting with social workers, counselors and student support coaches to ensure the same language and protocols are being used throughout the school system, she said. As the district prepares to start the partnerships with the providers, the IT department is working to ensure the telehealth platforms will work on campus, and Human Resources is vetting the providers’ background checks.
Next week, the school system plans to host an orientation with all of the providers’ directors and clinical supervisors. That meeting, Fernández said, is an opportunity for the district to reiterate its expectations while also hearing from the providers about what they feel is needed to be successful.
(READ MORE: Hamilton County educators say new phone policy has created a positive shift)
Of the five approved vendors, two — Centerstone and the McNabb Center — have provided mental health services to county students before.
Centerstone had provided counseling in Hamilton County Schools for more than a decade until an August board vote cut the service off immediately. The McNabb Center has behavioral health liaisons, who provide therapy and some other mental health services, assigned to 10 district schools through a state-funded program. The board’s November vote will allow the center to place a behavioral health liaison in an 11th school that was put on hold during the proposal process, Regional Vice President Gayle Lodato said earlier this month.
The other three providers are new to working with Hamilton County Schools, though two have experience in school settings, Fernández said.
“It’s going to be a learning curve for us,” she said. “While we’ve had two of the vendors in the past, we know that they’ll quickly be able to get up to speed, and we want to make sure that our other three vendors are also set up for success in the same way.”
Contact education reporter Shannon Coan at scoan@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6396.
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