The California Children’s Trust, in partnership with the National Center for Youth Law, and with guidance and funding from the California Health Care Foundation and Hopelab, is excited to release School Mental Health 101: A Primer for Medi-Cal Managed Care Plans.
The goal of the primer is to facilitate effective partnerships between Managed Care Plans (MCPs) and schools to better address the well-documented and growing mental health crisis among school-age youth.
California’s $4 billion Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative (CYBHI) opens the door to a new approach that acknowledges the challenges of the current health care system and reaches children and youth where they are—in schools—by including approximately $400 million to incentivize MCP and school partnerships. This Student Behavioral Health Incentive Program (SBHIP) is a first-ever opportunity for MCPs to develop and deepen partnerships with schools to expand the reach and impact of mental health services for students (see slides 12 - 15 for targeted interventions).
Additionally, the MCP re-procurement and re-contracting process gives the state another opportunity to guide MCPs in partnering with the single largest child and youth-serving organization in the state—our public school system.
Partnering with schools is key to any scalable solution to address the youth mental health crisis. However, schools as essential actors in a reimagined behavioral health system do not represent a hand out to health care systems—they are a hand up. MCPs must make the effort to understand the needs of students and families, engaging their wisdom and lived expertise in designing solutions with schools.
As CCT and our partners advocate to reinvent systems that will better serve the mental health needs of children and youth, our call to action is to remain diligent in both monitoring and supporting MCP accountability to low-income children—by reaching children where they are, improving access to services through care coordination in schools and communities, and expanding the mild-to-moderate benefit to stop pathologizing adversity.
We acknowledge that funding alone is not going to heal our youth. The reality is we are all working in entrenched systems that are just coming to terms with 400 years of structural inequality, which will require disruptive and creative innovation to change. But California now has a clearer path, and a strong vision from state leadership to help make it happen.
Upcoming Webinar
Stay tuned for a webinar in the coming month to discuss how the tools in School Mental Health 101: A Primer for Medi-Cal Managed Care Plans can be used to support partnerships between MCPs and schools.
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