As National SEL Week comes to a close, it’s impossible to ignore the pervasive youth mental health crisis that has emerged over the past decade and taken flight during the pandemic. Forty-four percent of students feel persistently sad or hopeless, and suicide rates among young people had already increased by 57% in the decade leading up to the pandemic. These troubling trends have continued to worsen, as over 80% of schools said that the pandemic negatively affected students’ social-emotional and behavioral development. This has contributed to upticks in classroom disruptions, student misconduct, and chronic absenteeism.
In response, many districts are working to expand access to social-emotional learning and mental health specialists. Districts hope and expect to see these programs bear fruit through improved attendance and reduced disciplinary infractions. While these outcomes are ultimately crucial, they are also the result of a wide range of in-school and out-of-school factors and cannot be solely relied upon to assess the effectiveness of social-emotional supports. In addition to these long-term metrics, schools need a reliable interim data point that directly assesses and monitors students’ wellbeing.
The good news? This metric already exists. Schools just don’t often use it.
Universal mental health screening can serve as a quick and cost-effective temperature check for how students are feeling throughout the year. However, according to a nationally representative survey from EdWeek, only 10% of principals and district leaders reported that they administer universal mental health screenings to every grade, and 68% reported not using them at all. Another study from the School Psychology Review claimed that 20% of schools at most engage in mental health screening.
Further, the same EdWeek survey revealed that schools primarily use the screenings to identify students for intervention and notify parents when necessary. Only 46% of respondents use the screenings to inform the mental health services that they offer, and 43% use the screenings to inform decisions on programs and curriculum, including social-emotional learning.
This represents a huge missed opportunity whereby few schools are implementing a widely recommended and useful practice, and those that do are not leveraging the data to its full potential.
Nonetheless, some states and districts are making big strides. For example, last summer, Colorado passed legislation to invest nearly $500,000 in school mental health assessments.
As part of a bigger research project investigating high-performing, high-poverty schools, we interviewed school leaders and administrators across Colorado. One school director in Denver reported that her school administers the BASC-3 Behavioral and Emotional Screening System (BESS) twice each year to assess and compare the effectiveness of student support initiatives. The assessment takes less than 15 minutes to complete and assesses students for elevated and extremely elevated risk across three indices: self-regulation risk (self-control and attention), internalizing risk (anxiety and depression), and personal adjustment risk (self-esteem and interpersonal relations).
The school leverages aggregated data to assess trends in mental health among the entire student body as well as to identify unique challenges among specific grades and student subgroups. For example, at the start of the year, their sixth-grade class had a large group of students with an extremely elevated risk on the Internalizing Risk index. Educators were able to leverage this data to select more targeted SEL lessons, adjust instructional approaches, and guide student interactions.
To be sure, universal screeners should not be used to diagnose students with mental illnesses; that should be left to mental health professionals using more comprehensive assessments. Nor should they be used to label and stigmatize students who may be flagged for elevated risk on any given index. Instead, schools should leverage this data to drive decision making for social-emotional programs and curricula, evaluate their effectiveness, and make adjustments when necessary. Schools can also use the data to make outside referrals so that students with extremely elevated risk can access additional specialized support. Further, equity, transparency, and parental consent are absolutely integral to implementation.
Nonetheless, when implemented with fidelity to these core principles, universal screening can serve as a remarkable tool to guide decision making during such a pressing time while ensuring that these new social-emotional investments are actually working.