How Thriving Minds helped build school mental health systems in Massachusetts and Maine

The Thriving Minds initiative links three organizations in pursuit of one goal: strengthening school mental health systems. Over the past 5+ years, this initiative has brought the Rennie Center and our partners—the bryt program of the Brookline Center for Community Mental Health and the Massachusetts School Mental Health Consortium—into schools across New England, working with staff from more than 200 districts to help build safe and healthy learning environments for students in need of mental health support.

There are no Band-Aids in mental health. Students’ needs often go undetected for years, even decades. National data show an 11-year delay, on average, between the onset of mental health-related symptoms and the start of treatment. Mental health challenges, even significant ones, can lie just below the surface—while making their effects known in all aspects of a child’s life, including their ability to engage fully in classes, with peers, and in the school community.

Just as there are no easy ways to identify which students need support, there are also no quick fixes that schools can put in place to assist them. Providing short-term programming without intentional follow-up and outreach won’t get at the root of mental health challenges. Instead, schools must adopt a comprehensive approach, creating environments where all students feel safe, connected, and able to access the support and treatment they need to thrive.

Over the past few years, Thriving Minds has worked with numerous districts to do just that, including Medway Public Schools in Massachusetts and Spruce Mountain School District (Regional School Unit 73) in Maine. We began our partnership with Medway by visiting the district to observe team meetings and speak with multiple staff members about the context of what we were hearing and seeing. For Ryan Sherman, Director of Wellness for Medway, this was an essential part of the process: “Our counseling and administrative teams knew that [Thriving Minds] understood our district and made good recommendations. It really helped with the buy-in, which is often the hardest part.”

Similarly, in our work with Spruce Mountain School District, Thriving Minds began by carrying out a thorough needs assessment, visiting each school to map out existing student support roles, interventions, and data systems and evaluate how they work together. After identifying key strengths and challenges, we worked with staff to develop an action plan for improving mental health systems district-wide. This process was instrumental in highlighting how to move forward purposefully. “The goal was to come up with a comprehensive plan, and doing the assessment helped us identify our gaps so we can focus on that,” said Catherine Siggens, School Social Worker at Spruce Mountain Middle School. 

One of the key gaps identified during the needs assessment was a screening process to identify students who would benefit from additional support. Over the past two years, the district has worked on rolling out universal mental health screening, making it easier to recognize student needs. According to Chris Beaudoin, Professional School Counselor at Spruce Mountain High School, screening has brought about “so many different positive things. If students are struggling with anxiety or depression, those might be kids who we don’t meet with on a regular basis. Now we’re able to talk with them about mental health and mental wellness, so that has given us a lot of great opportunities.”

The work of building a school mental health system does not end with screening, however. Once students’ needs are identified, staff must have processes in place for connecting those students with appropriate services. This often takes place through Student Support Team (SST) meetings or similar structures. In Medway, where strengthening school-based SSTs was a key priority, partnering with Thriving Minds has led to “a much more structured and effective approach” for each school’s SST, according to Ryan Sherman.

“Before you walk into a Student Support Team meeting you will see a referral and data on a student so that even more meaningful discussions can happen,” Sherman explained. “During the meeting, teams will be looking at a menu of interventions, deciding based on the data what intervention to assign to that student, and figuring out what additional data we need to gather. Six weeks later they will meet again to talk about that student to see how they have progressed.” This step-by-step approach—from initial referral to service delivery to data-based decision-making—is frequently a growth area for schools and districts seeking to strengthen mental health supports, and one where Medway has seen tremendous progress.

Coordinating all the elements of a school mental health system can be a daunting prospect. Because of this, the Thriving Minds team frequently coaches schools on the importance of starting with manageable, but meaningful, steps (or, as we often put it, “Start small, but start”). In Medway, Thriving Minds was able to help ease the change process by offering models for action—“real-life examples of templates we can take and replicate,” as Sherman puts it. Additionally, rather than sharing broad recommendations that require substantial time to implement, Thriving Minds offered the district “a really actionable plan that we could work on over the summer, so when fall came we hit the ground running,” said Sherman. 

In Spruce Mountain, meanwhile, Thriving Minds helped staff generate a plan for working within the confines of existing resources while still pushing forward with improvements. As Chris Beaudoin explains, “Thriving Minds has shown us that it’s not about creating a new position, it’s about utilizing the staff you already have.” Sounding a similar theme, Catherine Siggens noted, “Before working with Thriving Minds our team all supported each other but worked solo. Now we are all working toward the same goal, like the screener.”

Thriving Minds also focuses on offering resources that can help practitioners build on the knowledge they already possess—“the toolkit to make change happen quickly,” according to Sherman. And with our external perspective, we are able to help our partners maintain their focus on larger-scale reform. As Siggens puts it, “In the past, we had all these plans and great ideas, but we would get sucked into the daily grind and lose sight of the goal. The Thriving Minds Team held us accountable.”

Through these efforts, we are already seeing and hearing positive results from our partners: “With the model that Thriving Minds has introduced we’ve been able to step up our game quite a bit in the level of service we give our students,” said Beaudoin.

Since the Thriving Minds initiative was founded in the spring of 2021, we have been fortunate to work with hundreds of school districts and more than a thousand practitioners, each of them deeply committed to serving as a resource—and a refuge—for students in need. During Mental Health Month, we are eager to publicly recognize and celebrate the dedication of leaders like Ryan Sherman, Chris Beaudoin, and Catherine Siggens. Through their efforts, and with support from Thriving Minds, students in Medway, Spruce Mountain School District, and many other communities are getting connected with the help they need to have more good days.

At Thriving Minds, we are also doubling down on our own commitment to supporting schools and districts by offering a new, nationwide Learning Lab to support universal mental health screening. Through a series of professional learning sessions, participants will learn how to roll out a thoughtful, step-by-step approach to screening, with opportunities to connect with our coaches and one another. Click here to indicate your interest, and email Amanda Chung with any questions about this opportunity.