A school mental health program: Development and design

Abstract

This paper describes the development of an educational-clinical mental health team model that has been effective on all levels of a medium-sized public school system, from the grass roots of classroom teacher to the administrative offices of principal, school superintendent, and school board members. Essentially the program served to reinforce the generic role of teachers in the classroom with a team-oriented opinion. While the team approach often served to reinforce what was already taking place in the classroom, it also helped to make such classroom experiences both more psychologically intelligible and more consistently constructive within an ego-building frame of reference.