Abbott touts counseling via telemedicine
Texas Tech program could expand to help troubled students
Gov. Greg Abbott asked state lawmakers to identify $20 million to expand mental health screenings for Texas students after the mass shooting that killed 10 people at Santa Fe High School.
Abbott’s office is touting a telemedicine program developed at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center that uses videoconferencing technology, similar to Skype or FaceTime, to screen and identify middle and high school students who pose a risk to themselves or others.
But while the Telemedicine Wellness, Intervention, Triage and Referral Project has been a success in 10 rural school districts in the Lubbock area, it could face hurdles in becoming a statewide model for identifying troubled students.
One potential problem: Sometimes, parents don’t follow through. Both parents and students must be screened by one of three licensed professional counselors before a student can receive telemedicine services with a psychiatrist.
At Plainview High School, about a third of the screening appointments are canceled because a parent fails to show up on campus, said Robin Sweeny, one of five counselors at the 1,400-student school.
Parental no-shows
Because the program requires parental consent each step of the way, the parent’s no-show bars a student from participating. And with 10 districts to serve, the counselors can only follow up one or two times before they have to move on, Sweeny said.
Counselors work with the parents to explore options for treatment outside of school. But ultimately there isn’t much they can do to guarantee a child gets treatment if a parent doesn’t follow through or declines the services, which are free to qualifying students and their families.
“We try to convince the parents that whatever resources they have in their lives, that maybe they could use those,” Sweeny said. “(But) the kids are their children and we can’t force that on a family.”
Ten school districts with a total of 42,000 students now offer the service. Since 2014, about 400 students have been referred to the counselors and 215 have been screened to assess whether they needed psychiatric care. Of those students, 25 were eventually removed from school for safety reasons, said Billy Philips, director of Texas Tech’s Office of Rural Health.
“The thing is, it’s a very, very small number of students who are really, really dangerous and troublesome,” Philips said.
Call for more counseling
After the Santa Fe shooting, Abbott repeatedly stressed the importance of school counselors and mental health professionals to spot troubled students early and get them help. He recommended hiring more counselors in Texas schools to reduce caseloads, allowing counselors to focus more on the mental health needs of students and less on academic issues.
Texas schools are not required to hire school counselors, psychologists or social workers. While the American School Counselor Association recommends that caseloads should be one counselor for every 250 students, there is an average of one counselor for every 430 students in Texas.
Many of the districts using the Texas Tech videoconferencing program are located in cities with less than 3,000 people. Philips said the program was designed for rural communities to shorten wait times for services and to assist communities lacking resources.
With profound shortages of child and adolescent psychiatrists in Texas, Phillips said wait times can be weeks or months for new patients. And for some parents, the drive to a psychiatrist could take an hour or more each way.
“We have to use technology to make up for those and to span those distances and that time,” Phillips said.
Tammi Mackeben, a counselor in El Paso and president of Lone Star State School Counselor Association, said 10 to 20 percent of students have mental health issues. With some schools having student-to-counselor ratios as high as 1,000-to-one, she said increasing both the number of counselors and adding resources such as the telemedicine program is the most realistic solution.
“It doesn’t replace the school counselor, of course, because we’re not a therapist to the schools,” Mackeben said. “But we do work with students usually five to six times and then we refer those students out anyway. … The more mental health providers that are in the community, the better the students will be.”
Texas Tech is already working to expand the program. The governor’s office estimates that taking it to 10 additional school districts would cost $500,000 per year.
In his school and firearm safety plan, Abbott said the ultimate goal is to give students on every campus access to behavioral health services through programs such as the one offered by Texas Tech.