While every state, school district, and individual school is unique, there are some common themes that occur in school programs and initiatives that meet the needs of children and families. These are just a few programs that can support and connect what we can do in human services directly to what happens within school systems. Integration of systems is crucial to help de-silo and demystify support systems for our clients, as many people don’t know how or who to reach out to when they or their families have needs.

Mental Health Programs

The CDC has identified mental health as a leading health issue for children and adolescents. More than one in three students report experiencing persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. Depression, anxiety, and feelings of isolation are experienced by 70 percent of teens age 13 and older.

One in six U.S. youth aged six to 17 experience a mental health disorder each year, and half of all mental health conditions begin by age 14 (National Alliance on Mental Illness [NAMI], 2022). Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), behavior problems, anxiety, and depression are among the most commonly diagnosed mental disorders in children. Yet only about half of youth with mental health conditions receive any kind of treatment.

School-based mental health services bring trained mental health professionals into schools and connect youth and families to more intensive resources in the community. They play an important role in identifying needs and helping children get help early. School-based mental health services may reduce barriers to access for communities of color, immigrant and refugee families, and low-income students.

Trained mental health professionals deliver school-based mental health services. Sometimes school districts employ mental health staff, such as psychologists, counselors, and social workers. In other instances, school districts provide space for community mental health partnerships that can include school-based medical clinics with other health services that can serve students with Medicaid coverage, underinsured students, students with no insurance, and even at times students with private insurance. Many schools use a combination of school employees and community programs. This approach to help support students’ various needs has become widely popular. Human services providers may be serving as peer support, case managers, confidential advocates, skills trainers, or sexual health educators.

One key aspect of school-based mental health is providing services on-site and during the school day. By removing barriers such as transportation, scheduling conflicts, and stigma, school-based mental health services can help students access needed services.

Early diagnosis and treatment are effective and can help young people stay in school and on track for achieving their life goals. The earlier the treatment, the better the outcomes and the lower the costs. However, accessing mental health can be a long process, with wait times that stretch to several months. For teens exhibiting signs of psychosis, NAMI found there is an average wait of seventy-four weeks for consistent, non-crisis care to be established. School-based mental health programs are an effective means of getting mental health care to children and families in a timely way, improving learning and mental health outcomes for the individual, the family, and the school community.

Houselessness and McKinney Vento Act

Education can provide houseless children a way out of housing instability. Still, practical barriers, such as residency restrictions, medical record verification, and transportation issues, often keep houseless youth out of school. The original McKinney Act, passed in 1987, focused on assistance to the houseless. The McKinney-Vento Homelessness Assistance Act, as reauthorized in 2015, attempts to overcome these barriers by mandating equal opportunity for free public education for houseless students.

Under the reauthorized McKinney-Vento, school districts must appoint a local liaison to ensure, among other things, that (1) children and youth eligible under McKinney-Vento are identified; (2) that they immediately enroll in, and have a full and equal opportunity to succeed in, the schools of the district; and (3) they receive educational services for which they are eligible, and referrals to health care services, dental services, mental health services, and other appropriate services.

In the state of Oregon, there are 197 school districts. In each of those districts, there must be an identified McKinney-Vento liaison whose role is to provide not only resources for identifying houseless families but also training for school district staff on the legal responsibilities that the districts have to students and families. The current amount of money that the state of Oregon has dedicated to support these students, including the salaries for these liaisons, is only $1 million. This is calculated according to the school districts’ reported number of houseless students and their families from previous years.

One of the biggest issues is that this is a severely underreported number of impacted students. This is due in part to the stigma of asking questions around houselessness. There is also lack of support and standard training for McKinney-Vento liaisons, and school districts are not required to have a full-time position for a liaison. That means many liaisons must perform multiple jobs.

A position as a McKinney-Vento liaison could be ideal for human services students. The skill sets and areas of study in this field enable students to not just see the families from an individual level of need but from a systemic one also.

There are conversations happening within the Oregon Department of Education about how the department can better support liaisons, including setting baseline standards for training expectations for liaisons, administrators, liaison supervisors, and even front desk staff, as they are the most likely to have contact with students and families. This is a great time for students to enter the field and impact the way families will experience support.

Special Education Programs

Passed in 1975, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA) required all schools that receive public funds to provide equal access to education for all children with disabilities. The act addressed four main objectives:

1. To ensure that special education services are available to children who need them;
2. To guarantee that decisions about services to students with disabilities are fair and appropriate;
3. To establish specific management and auditing requirements for special education; and
4. To provide federal funds to help the states educate students with disabilities.

The act also states that students with disabilities should be placed in the least restrictive environment that allows the maximum possible opportunity to interact with non-impaired students. Separate schooling may only occur when the nature or severity of the disability is such that instructional goals cannot be achieved in the regular classroom. EHA was revised and renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 1990 to improve special education and inclusive education.

IDEA

The IDEA requires that public schools create an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) for each student found to be eligible under both the federal and state eligibility/disability standards. The IEP provides an overview of a student’s academic ability and achievement as well as an assessment of how a student’s disabilities affect or would affect the child’s involvement in their educational environment. The IEP also specifies the services to be provided and how often, plus accommodations and modifications to be provided for the student. An IEP must be designed to meet the unique educational needs of that child in the least restrictive environment appropriate to the needs of that child.

The key component of an effective IEP is collaboration, which is visualized as a circle in figure 8.4. When a child qualifies for services, a team is convened to design an IEP. In addition to the child’s parents, the IEP team must include at least:

• one of the child’s regular education teachers (if applicable);
• a special education teacher;
• someone who can interpret the educational implications of the child’s evaluation, such as a school psychologist;
• any related service personnel deemed appropriate or necessary; and
• an administrator or Committee on Special Education (CSE) representative who has adequate knowledge of the availability of services in the district and the authority to commit those services on behalf of the child.

IEPs are based on the full educational evaluation results. This team collaborates to write an IEP for the individual child to provide free, appropriate public education. Access can start before kindergarten, which is where an Individualized Family Service Plans come in. IFSPs are used for children and their families before they enter kindergarten and require special education support, such as speech pathology or occupational therapy. Some students graduate from services and do not require IEPs when entering kindergarten. Others will have transition meetings, which are intended to be led by the family, to guide the best next steps for making their child’s education path the most successful possible.

This last point is not a legal requirement; however, it may be an ethical one. As you gain decades of experience in education, you learn that some of your biggest assets are classified staff, including transportation staff, instruction assistants, front desk support, and special education case managers. As human service students today, some of you may already be working in these roles. You may not always be invited to IEP meetings, but you have a wealth of knowledge regarding how students you work with express their education needs daily, including what does and does not work for them. This information is critical for the IEP team to know. Your voice is important, and many times, you help make the plans successful.

We must also not forget to bring cultural, linguistic, and community partners into these meetings, as many families will not understand all the acronyms spoken. Jargon is used in these meetings, and the families may share an identity with you. The pool of paraeducators and instructional aides tends to have the most diverse educators working with students. When we are in these meetings, it is important to both help families advocate for themselves and model asking questions when families may not feel comfortable asking those questions themselves.

Youth Programs

One of the most common ways to work with youth in the context of human services is through youth programs. Sports, music, after-school clubs, and summer camps are but a handful of ways to invest in youth development. Youth programs may be organized through centers, such as the Boys and Girls Club of America, who often provide after-school care in addition to a variety of community programming. City and county sports and recreation departments may provide opportunities for youth to organize around a shared interest or be a source of summer camp experiences. These programs depend on energetic, knowledgeable, and passionate staff to provide opportunities for youth to grow and develop intellectually, emotionally, and physically.

Licenses and Attributions

“Child Welfare” by Nora Karena is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Figure 8.4. The IEP Team by The IRIS Center is licensed under CC BY NC ND 4.0.

Technology Programs

Have you ever made a robot out of Legos? Or turned a soda can into a solar-powered car? These kinds of activities have become a regular part of after-school activities made available through partnerships with public schools and youth programs. Kids can even learn computer programming while playing Minecraft!

Technology labs introduce new forms of hardware and software, and provide instruction on using technology safely. Youth programs that provide increased opportunities to learn about and creatively apply technology are important in addressing gender, race, and ethnicity differences in technology careers, bridging differences in rural and urban technology opportunities, and closing the gap in socioeconomic status by supporting lower-income neighborhood schools.

One way communities have introduced technology programs is through the use of 21st Century Community Learning Center (CCLC) grants. These federally funded grants are an example of public-private partnerships to improve educational outcomes. They are awarded to K–12 schools and youth partnership programs to expand resources through after-school programs, youth club activities, and summer camps. Communities can launch programs and work to make them self-sustaining. Projects accepted for the program will receive 100% funding for one year, 75% for the second year, 50% for the third year, and 25% for the fourth year. This provides time to evaluate the benefits of the program and work toward a community solution to sustain it.

As you can see, there are many ways to work with children and families in a school setting without being a licensed teacher. You may choose to work in any of the programs described here, or in a similar program in your local community.

As the increase of the use of technology happens in classrooms, so does the need for human services providers to understand how this impacts the work we will be doing. We also need to understand the ethical impacts technology has on the communities that we will be working with. The diversity of skill sets that human service providers come with will be crucial for how services will be delivered in the future, from how to set up a virtual classroom that can meet all student needs to creating online trainings that are trauma informed. All levels of educators must continue to understand how their own professional development will impact their students.

Just as we consider DEI with every aspect of the work we do in the field, we need to likewise consider technology. Which communities typically get first access to technology? Who is represented in the media when you first think of STEM fields? We often forget the likes of Rodolfo Neri Vela, the first Mexican-born scientist and engineer to travel into space, or organizations like Black Girls Code. Its CEO, Cristian Jones, has made it the program’s mission to increase the number of girls and gender-nonconforming youth who have coding skills as well as to increase leadership skills through training and resources. Black Girls Code partners with local schools and organizations and holds graduation events, as seen in figure 8.5.

As human services providers, we must encourage community connections and partnerships like these not just to diversify the tech sector but to center communities that have not been considered as users of technology. Human services students can not only become peer mentors in tech but also help create a curriculum that decenters the typical stories and diversifies who students see in these spaces.

Licenses and Attributions

Open Content, Shared Previously

“Serving Children and Families” is adapted from “Children and Schools” by Terese Jones, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Revised by Martha Ochoa-Leyva.

Figure 8.5. SXSL2016_08 by DoDEA is licensed under CC BY NC ND 2.0.