The Dallas Independent School District (DISD) approved a partnership with a mental health clinic on Thursday to provide health services and mental health care for students and their families.
DISD voted for the new partnership to help students with their mental health needs, reported Community Impact.
The arrangement is with Healing Hand Ministries (HHM) Health, which describes itself as a “patient-focused community health center.”
According to information released by DISD, there will be no financial impact on DISD as a result of the partnership. However, the partnership agreement seems to suggest otherwise, with the district on the hook for substantial personnel commitments.
DISD has to provide administrative, janitorial, and security services at every district partnership site. It must also staff the following positions for each site:
“[C]enter manager, administrative assistant, clinician, part-time contractual and supplemental pay staff including child and adolescent psychiatrists and therapists.”
It is unclear how much taxpayer money from DISD’s colossal roughly $2.2 billion annual budget goes towards funding non-academic programs. When it comes to mental health, at least one local activist believes that parents need to be at the center of any intervention.
“Schools should only be involved with children’s mental health in situations where a child is clearly upset about something … If there’s a child who is suffering emotionally, a teacher should work with the child’s parents to determine how to best handle the situation,” Kelly Neidert of Protect Texas Kids previously told The Dallas Express.
Still, broadly speaking, Texas public school students have been lacking as far as mental health care is concerned, the Dallas Observer reported last year. More than half of all Texas schools are without mental health services, according to CBS News.
Following the 2018 school shooting at Santa Fe High School, where 10 people were killed and 13 others were wounded, Gov. Greg Abbott said Texas schools needed more mental health resources.
“We need to do more than just pray for the victims and their families,” Abbott said, per CBS News.
The 17-year-old suspect who allegedly committed the school shooting was pronounced incompetent to stand trial.
“No one listened to us, students,” Zach Muehe said at the time to CBS News. “The mental health problem, I believe, is the root of it all. It is just never talked about and I don’t know why.”
Half a million students in Texas do not have any access to mental health counseling, according to a CBS study based on data from the Texas Education Agency. This includes nearly 600 school districts with no school psychologists and no option for telehealth.
Texas Child Health Access Through Telemedicine (TCHATT) was set up after the Santa Fe High School shooting to help students needing mental health resources. TCHATT “provides telemedicine or telehealth programs to school districts to help identify and assess the behavioral health needs of children and adolescents and provide access to mental health services,” according to the TCHATT website.
However, the service is not currently available to all students in Texas.
HHM Health is set to partner with DISD for three years, according to Community Impact.
