School-linked mental health services

Therapeutic Teaching Model

School-linked mental health that provides therapy on site is an effective, proven intervention in public schools. But, when students are referred out of their home districts to an Intermediate School District, their needs are often much greater than therapy alone can address. Students from the West Metro come to Intermediate School District 287 because they have complex needs that other schools aren’t equipped to support. In order to provide the district’s youngest students with effective, early intervention, the district is implementing a Therapeutic Teaching Model in partnership with the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation.

Beyond on-site or in-home individual and family therapy, children and their families have access to additional intensive supports. The cornerstones of the Therapeutic Teaching Model include:

• Education + Therapy in the Classroom: An embedded therapist in the classroom helps the day flow naturally between academics, emotional regulation, and social skills
  
  
• Individual Therapy: The student receives individual therapy during and after the school day, in addition to in-classroom therapeutic approaches
  
  
• Family Therapy: The family receives family therapy in the home or in the community
  
  
• Family Resources: A family resource navigator offers care coordination and basic needs support for the families — assistance for things like securing housing, jobs, food and other needs
  
  
• Professional Development for School Staff: Extensive professional development for teachers, educational assistants, therapists, school safety staff and other school support staff

Over two years and in three Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade classrooms located at the North Education Center in New Hope, this pilot will demonstrate the gains that are possible when experts from each area work hand-in-hand to support students whose needs have not been met by traditional systems. Over time, the goal is to help children heal, families stabilize, and students return to their home districts to connect with traditional school-linked services.

Northeast Metro 916 Intermediate School District is partnering with Canvas Health in order to offer comprehensive and innovative services to students in Level IV special education programs at all grade levels. These services are aimed at improving the academic and social-emotional skills in students who have the highest needs so that they can be successful in school and life. Services include:

• Early Childhood Intervention and Treatment Program: By intervening early with young children experiencing trauma and behavioral challenges, chronic and long-term mental illness and school failure can be prevented. We aim to return students to their neighborhood school by age 6.
  
  
• Mental and Chemical Health Wellbeing: To address student addiction and chemical health needs, training will be offered to students and staff on signs and symptoms of addiction, as well as outpatient treatment located at Bellaire Education Center for students and referrals to outside treatment centers.
  
  
• Educational Mental Health Classroom: Classrooms have been created at Karner Blue Education Center, Blaine and Pankalo Education Center, Lake Elmo where school-based mental health staff work side-by-side with teachers to provide high-level academic and emotional/behavioral support. This temporary intervention prepares students to be successful in a typical 916 classroom.

Reflections Day Treatment Programs: SouthWest Metro Site, Shakopee:

Students who are not able to function adequately or safely in their home school environment as a result of serious mental health concerns receive intensive diagnostic and therapeutic services in a school setting.

• Referred youth ages 10 – 18 receive comprehensive diagnostic assessments
• Treatment programs are separated by age, developmental maturity and clinical needs
• Three groups daily provided by a licensed mental health professional as well as individual and family therapy
• Highly integrated team of therapists and teachers provide education and therapeutic services in a clinical, goal oriented, strength-based and trauma-informed setting
• Parents are very involved through family education nights, multifamily therapy groups, family therapy and individualized treatment planning
• Planning with home districts begins at entrance into the program and continues through consultation and support after a youth discharges and returns to home district.

Mental Health Support to SouthWest Metro Intermediate Level IV Programs:

• Mental Health Professionals provide consultation and training to school staff
• Diagnostic assessment and therapy for students in Level IV programs
• Classroom observation and individualized plans with teachers that outline the interventions and approaches which best assist the student in reducing mental health related symptoms and behaviors, which interfere in the classroom
• Therapists provide trauma-informed techniques that can be utilized in all Level IV classrooms

New Beginning Pregnant and Parenting Youth Program: SouthWest Metro Eagle Creek Family Center, Chaska:

A Mental Health Professional is embedded in the program for diagnostic/developmental/attachment assessment, individual group and family therapy for the pregnant and parenting teens and their children.

• Multidisciplinary team, including teachers, nurses, child care providers and teen parent case managers, provides consultation, training and integrated services to pregnant and parenting youth and their children/families.
• Children of the youth attending New Beginnings may also have mental health symptoms and can access diagnostic and therapeutic services on site.
• Interdisciplinary team meets weekly to ensure wraparound and integrated services for students and their children.
• Program provides a trauma, mental health informed academic environment with substantial support for development and skills/resources needed for healthy and adaptive functioning.

ISD 917 ECSE TEA (Therapeutic Education Alternative) Therapeutic Preschool Program

At the core of this program is the understanding that for young children, development occurs in the context of relationships. When young learners are unsuccessful in their childcare setting or preschool placement due to emotional and/or behavioral difficulties, a change in setting is necessary. The program provides trauma informed interventions and practices to support the emotional needs of each child. ISD 917 provides the TEA program at Pine Bend Elementary, Inver Grove Heights and Riverview Elementary, Farmington. 

The framework utilized by the ECSE TEA program is Conscious Discipline, a comprehensive classroom management program and social-emotional curriculum. While academics are embedded in the program, the focus is on healthy social emotional development for young learners ages 3 - 5, using the Diagnostic Criteria for birth – five years old (DC:0–5) in an integrated education and mental health program. The program is five days weekly, approximately four hours each day. A mental health professional and special education teacher co-facilitate the program. 

As young learners make progress in the program towards their education and mental health goals, they are provided opportunities to integrate into a less restrictive educational setting with their same aged peers. The goal is to provide rigorous instruction to young learners to facilitate kindergarten readiness.

Greater Minnesota Family Services is partnering with the Southwest West Central (SWWC) Service Cooperative to add school-based mental health services to all five of its Setting IV programs, plus an additional sixth site that is due to open in 2020. Because of the distance students have to come to SWWC Service Cooperative’s Setting IV programs, students who receive mental health services outside of IEP programming were often missing partial or entire days of school to attend those sessions. In addition, there are students attending SWWC programs who were receiving school-based mental health services in their home districts that had to be discontinued upon placement in Setting IV programs because they were no longer accessing those services during the school day. Greater Minnesota Family Services has practitioners and therapists in each building two days a week to provide on-site school linked mental health services in every SWWC Service Cooperative Setting IV building.

The SWWC Service Cooperative is an educational service cooperative that serves 18 counties and over 50 school districts. SWWC has five Setting IV sites located in:

• Belview Learning Center, Belview, MN
• Blue Mound Learning Center, Pipestone, MN
• Cosmos Learning Center, Cosmos, MN
• North Central Learning Center, Willmar, MN
• Red Rock Ridge Learning Center, Windom, MN
• Construction on new site in Montevideo, MN

These sites' Education Learning Centers (ELCs) serve over 150 students on IEPs, in all grade levels, who have behavioral and complex needs. The ELCs are unique, in the fact that they cover such a large territory geographically and are very rural in their locations. Mental health resources are not as easily accessible due to the locations of the centers and the location of the resources themselves. Students are bussed daily to the programs, and those trips can be up to 90 miles one way. With Greater Minnesota Family Services in the building students are receiving Diagnostic Assessments, Individual Treatment Plans, Individual and Group Therapy, as well as Individual and Group Skills, during their school day.