Center for MH in Schools & Student/Learning Supports  
Mission, Goals, and Functions
 

  About the Center

Mission, Goals, and Functions

Operating under the auspices of the School Mental Health Project at UCLA, the national Center for Mental Health in Schools was established in 1995. In 2017, the Center's name was expanded to Center for MH in Schools & Student/Learning Supports.

 

Our mission and aims are to improve outcomes for young people by enhancing how schools adress barriers to learning and teaching and embed mental health concerns.

The Center is a policy and program analysis center co-directed by Howard Adelman and Linda Taylor.

Because we know that schools are not in the mental health business, all our work approaches mental health and psychosocial concerns in ways that integrally connect such efforts with school reform and improvement. We do this by integrating health and related concerns into the broad perspective of addressing barriers to learning and promoting healthy development. We clarify the need to restructure current policy, practice, research, and training to enable development of a comprehensive and cohesive approach that is an essential and primary component at every school. We stress that without a comprehensive component for addressing barriers to learning many students cannot benefit from instructional reforms, and thus, achievement scores will not rise in the way current accountability pressures demand.

The guiding principles and frameworks for the work of the Center emphasize ensuring (1) mental health is understood in terms of psychosocial problems as well as disorders and in terms of strengths as well as deficits, (2) the roles of schools, communities, and homes are enhanced and pursued jointly, (3) equity considerations are confronted, (4) the marginalization and fragmentation of policy, organizations, and daily practice are countered, and (5) the challenges of evidence-based strategies and achieving results are addressed. From this perspective and through collaboration, the Center strives not only to improve practitioners' competence, but to foster changes in the systems with which they work. Such activity also addresses the varying needs of locales and the problems of accommodating diversity among interveners and among populations served.

Specific attention is given to enhancing policy, practice, theory, research, and training to

The figure below highlights the nature and scope of the work.

Policy & Practice Analyses

Examples include:

In accomplishing the above, the emphasis is on strategic activity that

 


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