The Wisconsin School Mental Health Framework: Building and Sustaining a Comprehensive System

In Wisconsin, schools strive to create learning environments where all students and staff feel healthy, safe, supported, engaged, and challenged. To realize this vision, districts and schools partner with students, families, and the community to build a comprehensive school mental health system (CSMHS). A CSMHS increases health equity by ensuring all students and staff have access to the prevention, early intervention, and treatment supports that they need, when they need them, free of stigma. Wisconsin's Comprehensive School Mental Health Framework applies Wisconsin's equitable multi-level system of supports (MLSS) to school mental health. An MLSS is a data-driven, problem-solving framework that utilizes a continuum of evidence-based practices to improve outcomes for all students (OSEP 2021). It includes universal programming to support all students, early intervention, and intensive interventions for those students who need additional support. Wisconsin's equitable MLSS includes all students and staff, considers the whole child and system, and focuses on providing equitable services and resources (DPI 2017c). Rather than creating a separate system for mental health service delivery, schools can leverage existing structures of their equitable MLSS as it applies to academic and behavioral supports to integrate the six components of CSMHS: (1) a continuum of mental health supports; (2) collaboration; (3) needs assessment and resource mapping; (4) mental health referral pathways; (5) sustainability; and (6) data. This document provides an overview of necessary considerations for building and sustaining the six components of a CSMHS to promote mental health for all students and staff. [This report was written in consultation with Elizabeth H. Connors.]