Panelists discuss efforts to address children’s behavioral health, implementation of mental health screenings in schools
The recent focus on addressing children’s behavioral health in Illinois has already made improvements, but experts said last week that more work needs to be done.
Panelists highlighted the work they are doing to address the issue during a Health News Illinois virtual event on Friday, as well as highlighted the importance of collaboration to improve mental health.
They also spoke about several state-led initiatives, such as implementing mental health screenings in public schools.
Panelists included:
- Matt Wolf, Plan President, Molina Healthcare of Illinois
- Dana Weiner, Chief Behavioral Health Officer, State of Illinois
- Dr. Shubhrajan Wadyal, Medical Director, Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Group Practice
- Dr. Mashana Smith, Associate Director of School Mental Health, Lurie Children’s Center for Childhood Resilience
Listen to the full event here.
Edited excerpts below:
HNI: What are some steps your organization has taken to address this issue?
Matt Wolf: In healthcare, we know we cannot do the work alone. We had to put together and work together with provider partners. We worked with Ada S. McKinley, and we provided grants to them to be able to hire some additional staff. There are staffing shortages all across the state of Illinois. Our care managers are consistent in working to improve follow-up at the hospitalization metrics and ensuring individuals are getting into their preventative care. So there’s a lot of work that’s being done on our end. But it’s just an overall partnership and collaborative effort on our end, because it just can’t be done by a managed care organization alone.
Mashana Smith: The Center for Childhood Resilience has actually been building on the capacity of adults to support the mental health and well-being of our children for over 20 years now. But rather than focus only on children receiving mental health services within our hospital’s clinics, we aim to provide training and resources to adults who are in the spaces where children live and learn and play. So this includes parents, it includes educators, park personnel, even Girl Scouts and troop leaders — folks who have countless opportunities to improve the mental health and resilience of children. Currently, our largest project is actually in partnership with the Illinois State Board of Education, and this project, Resilience-Supportive Schools Illinois, or RSSI, provides free — and it is optional — but free support to schools to help them really assess and improve their policies and practices in four areas. Those four areas are mental health, social and emotional learning, trauma responsiveness and cultural responsiveness. What it allows schools to do is through a data-informed approach. And it also allows schools to create tailored, specific action plans that they can identify those areas of resilience that are most relevant to their particular school community. So we’ve been doing that in partnership with ISBE for the past four years, and that’s our biggest bucket of work in this space, but that’s a little bit about what we’re up to and what we believe in our mission.
Dr. Shubhrajan Wadya: For the last 10 years or so, I’ve been the medical director of our inpatient child and adolescent unit, so that is my sub-specialty. I also work with children who are on the autism spectrum and run our group practice. So this is something I’m intimately aware of. In terms of initiatives, I think our main goal right now is trying to provide care to what could arguably be said to be the most underserved folks in our state. I tell people, when people ask what my job is like being an inpatient psychiatrist, I say it’s my job to call parents on the worst day of their life. And the hope is that the subsequent days will not remain that way. But I think our main goal right now is trying to provide as much access to care to all of the members of the state, and especially in my case, the pediatric space.
Dana Weiner: I’ve been serving since 2022 in the office of Governor (J.B.) Pritzker as a chief officer for Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation. In that role, I’ve been asked to work across the six child-serving agencies in our state. So you already heard about the Illinois State Board of Education, and I also work with (Department of Children and Family Services), (Department of Human Services), Illinois Department of Public Health, (Department of) Healthcare and Family Services, which is the state Medicaid agency, and the Department of Juvenile Justice, on improving and streamlining access to behavioral health resources for families, on adjusting capacity so that we have enough of the things that young people need, and on strategies to get upstream of problems so that we can intervene earlier. And then we also have two more systemic goals around improving the transparency of relationships between the state and the private providers that deliver many of the services to kids, and improving our agility as a state, that is our ability to pivot when we see that the needs of the population are changing.
HNI: Illinois is set to implement universal health screenings in public schools by the 2027-2028 school year. What will this implementation look like?
Dana Weiner: What we did in the very first year we started implementing in 2023, we worked with the Illinois State Board of Education to conduct a landscape scan to understand what schools are doing, or if any schools are conducting universal mental health screening. And indeed, we learned that about a third of them were screening every child, and two-thirds were doing some form of screening. So that also made us think that we needed to provide support and some consistent best practice approaches to doing this screening, because right now, all the school districts are doing something different.
In the next year, what we did was we looked deeply at those school districts that are conducting screening. We said, ‘What makes this work? What are the ingredients for a successful implementation of this?’ And we heard about five different things. We heard that the school culture has to be conducive. There have to be policies in place. There needs to be tools and technology. There needs to be partnerships in the community, like what Mashana had talked about, and there needs to be an effective way to communicate with families and with each other to get services to kids who need them. So we took all those ingredients, went back to all the school districts, surveyed them all to figure out who’s ready to do this and how ready they are. That’s how we got to this plan for universal screening being offered by the 2027-2028 school year, because then we had a clear view of what everyone’s doing and how ready they are.
ISBE is still working on the specific policy guidance, and it is due to be delivered in the fall of 2026. We are also working on some of the associated pieces that are necessary. So we don’t want to implement universal screening until we can put in everyone’s hands a resource referral tool that will allow anyone in that school building to make a referral or to provide resource information. That’s really important, and we’re working with HFS on that so that we can leverage Medicaid funds to build it. We also know that we need strong community networks. Fifteen-20 years ago, there were local area networks that were attended by school partners and community mental health partners, and now that’s been experiencing some divestment at the state level over the last 20 years, and so those networks are happening inconsistently. Now we’re trying to rebuild them with the help of some creative partnerships and collaborations.
HNI: How could this help children?
Mashana Smith: I am certainly a fan and believe in the importance of universal mental health screening. We’ve been talking about the importance of upstream interventions. Historically, we have done other screenings in our schools, whether it be a hearing screening or a vision screening. These are screenings that help with early identification and early intervention. I think universal mental health screening offers us the same possibility. I know there has been some pushback, and I, by all means, completely respect dissenting opinions and believe that parents should absolutely be involved in decision-making in this area. We should respect parents’ rights to choose. But also just knowing that… There are many parents on the ground we’re hearing from, a substantial number of parents, who want to be able to regularly monitor their children’s mental health. So I think some of the language and some of the pushback that we’re hearing, some of our arguments, simply don’t reflect what we’re hearing from parents on the ground, what we’re hearing from students. In fact, older students were instrumental in pushing through and delivering this legislation that we have. So we aren’t doing this alone. I think we’re listening to the community, we’re listening to youth, we’re listening to parents, we’re listening to educators. And I also think we’re listening to the data. Suicide is now the third-leading cause of death for Illinois‘ young people. In 2022 alone, we had 83 children who died by suicide. This is more than one every four days. And so I think this is an opportunity for us to truly practice a public health model within our school, have early identification and early intervention, and begin to really intervene and save and raise the quality of life for our children.
HNI: How can public-private partnerships help improve access to care?
Matt Wolf: These partnerships are everything. Being able to work together, collaborate among organizations, providers, payers, policy makers and doing what’s right for the individuals and being able to support them in any way we can. There’s no one organization that can do everything. There’s no one organization that is at the forefront to be able to provide all the support. So finding ways to be able to pick up the slack, or pick up the support as two different organizations who work on different ends of the spectrum. That’s ultimately the best way to be able to support and provide the need that everybody can. So we know, as a managed care organization, that we don’t have the doctors within our system. We have the care managers, but being able to connect individuals to transportation, and being able to connect individuals to receive waiver services that the state is able to provide.
