Mental Health in Schools: Engaging Learners, Preventing Problems, and Improving Schools

Abstract

Mental Health in Schools: Engaging Learners, Preventing Problems, and Improving Schools By Howard Adelman PhD, & Linda Taylor PhD 22010, Corwin, USA, 310 pp. $41.95, ISBN: 9781412975384 Reviewed by Courtney Matz, M.A. Growing numbers of children are suffering needlessly because their emotional, behavioral, and developmental needs are not being met by the very institutions and systems that were created to take care of them. -U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2001) found in Adelman and Taylor (2010) In public schools across the United States school administrators, teachers, psychologists, counselors and other support staff face the challenge of ensuring their students receive needed mental health services despite budget cuts and other significant logistical constraints . For example, with the elimination of AB 3632 funding in 2010, Local Educational Agencies across California are feeling immense pressure to deliver mental health services to students who previously received assistance from the Department of Mental Health. A timely addition to the educational literature, authors Adelman and Taylor comprehensively address this juxtaposition of need and constraint in their most recent book, Mental Health in Schools: Engaging Learners, Preventing Problems, and Improving Schools. Within the text, readers are provided with valuable information regarding the restructure, development, and enhancement of school-based mental health programs. The authors open with a review of the history and current state of mental health in schools and move toward making suggestions for how to better address the mental health needs of students. They advocate persuasively for effective collaboration among stakeholders when providing mental health services in the public school systems. School psychologists, in particular, may find the guidelines provided by the authors useful in paving the way for school-based mental health service delivery models because they will undoubtedly be responsible for creating comprehensive programs to address student needs. PAST School based mental health service providers have historically been tasked with large number of referrals for the provision of mental health services and it is estimated that the ratio of school psychologists to students will continue to rise from 1 to 2,500 to even larger numbers (Ringeisen, Henderson, & Hoagwood, 2003). Adelman and Taylor begin their analysis of mental health services with an historical review. The authors evaluate the proliferation of legislation and public policy, which has sparked various movements in the delivery of school-based mental health services. They argue that these undertakings, including the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health (2003) and the 2007 Progress Report on the President's New Freedom Initiative, have created conflicting agendas. These initiatives call for schools to be involved in the provision of mental health services while at the same time demanding that they maximize their focus on instruction in the school setting. As a result, practitioners are often perplexed about how to balance these demands and implement these services in the schools and their surrounding communities. School systems have traditionally operated under a deficit model of mental health service delivery, which consists of the marginalization and compartmentalization of services seen as auxiliary or unnecessary for the betterment of the whole. For example, student support programs and services are often added to the educational curriculum on an ad hoc basis, via student support personnel who are rarely part of the school's overarching organizational structure. Adelman and Taylor assert that this compartmentalization of service, does not effectively address the challenges our students have encountered and will continue to face. Thus, the only way to meet the needs of the students is to develop a comprehensive approach of service delivery. …