Purpose And Audience

Pathway 3 builds capacity among leaders and partners whose decisions affect the broader conditions in which school behavioral health systems operate.

Audiences may include county offices of education, county behavioral health and child welfare, probation and juvenile court partners, county boards of education, the Commission, state education and health agencies, and legislative members and staff working on children's behavioral health.

The pathway helps these partners understand school-based behavioral health information, connect it with systems and reporting processes they oversee, and use implementation learning from the participating sites to inform coordination, governance, financing, and policy.

Areas Of Capacity Building

Shared Leadership And Interagency Coordination

Participants examine how education participates in existing interagency leadership and coordination structures and how behavioral health information can support shared understanding of student needs, strengths, services, and implementation barriers.

Shared Goals And Reporting

Partners consider how aggregate behavioral health information can be used with information already collected by education, behavioral health, and other child-serving systems.

This includes identifying focused measures and examining how appropriate aggregate information may connect with existing planning and reporting processes.

Universal, Targeted, And Intensive Supports

Partners examine the services provided by different agencies across universal, targeted, and intensive levels.

Initiative inventories, roles-by-tier maps, and related tools can help participants understand existing supports, identify areas of overlap, and recognize opportunities for coordination.

Governance And Data Use

Capacity building addresses governance conditions relevant to behavioral health screening and performance management, including notice and consent, family rights, board policy, data handling, vendor agreements, interagency data-sharing considerations, high-risk response procedures, and appropriate aggregate reporting.

Specific requirements depend on the screening instrument, participating agencies, approved data uses, applicable agreements, and law. Decisions that have not been made through the pilot should remain open until the appropriate partners make them.

Financing And Sustainability

Participants examine how existing public funding, governance structures, continuous-improvement practices, community participation, and reporting processes affect the continuation of behavioral health practices.

Existing system-of-care tools may be used where appropriate, including initiative inventories, goals-and-metrics templates, needs-assessment inventories, sustainability self-assessments, and revenue maps.

Audiences And Intended Capacity

Learning Activities

Activities vary according to audience and system responsibility. They may include:

• reviewing implementation examples to identify where information, services, responsibilities, and funding intersect;
• mapping services across universal, targeted, and intensive levels;
• completing or updating inventories of programs, funding streams, and staff roles related to student behavioral health;
• identifying the interagency structures responsible for barriers that cannot be resolved at the school or LEA level;
• examining where aggregate school-based behavioral health information may appropriately fit within existing planning and reporting;
• reviewing governance and data-use requirements; and
• practicing communication of aggregate behavioral health findings to boards, agency leaders, and other decision makers using clear, asset-based language.

Evidence Of Progress

Evidence in Pathway 3 reflects the responsibilities of system partners and differs from the practice demonstrations used in Pathways 1 and 2.

Depending on the work undertaken and the authority of participating partners, evidence may include completed initiative inventories, participation in interagency leadership structures, changes to reporting, executed agreements, adopted governance documents, cross-agency service maps, or documented use of cohort findings in planning and oversight.