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She called the number on her syllabus offering counseling. No one picked up.

March 25, 2024
©Lisa Kurian Philip/WBEZ: Isabelle Dizon contacted her campus counseling center when she hit a low point during her sophomore year of college, but never heard back. Now a junior at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she hopes the school hires someone at the center to, at the very least, pick up the phone.

High need, low accessibility: Oglethorpe County residents face barriers to mental health care, even as teens and schools are willing to have the conversation

March 25, 2024
©Navya Shukla/The Oglethorpe Echo: Katie Edwards, a counselor at Oglethorpe County Elementary School, helps third-grader Londyn Wilson with a work- sheet during a guidance lesson last month. The lessons are regularly held to guide students' empathy, emotion regulation, perseverance and more.

For many Black sickle cell patients, care must reach deeper

March 14, 2024
©Mark Weber/The Daily Memphian: Sickle cell patient Alexis Tappan, right, is checked out by Rana Cooper on at the Methodist Hospital Cancer Institute and Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center. Memphis is home to one of the nation’s largest populations of adults living with sickle cell disease.

Here are the ways Fort Worth schools provide mental health care to students

©Cristian ArguetaSoto/Fort Worth Report: Students raise their hands to answer a teacher’s questions at Como Elementary in Fort Worth on March 11, 2022.
©Cristian ArguetaSoto/Fort Worth Report: Students raise their hands to answer a teacher’s questions at Como Elementary in Fort Worth on March 11, 2022.

Fort Worth Report, by Jacob Sanchez and Dang Le, November 26, 2023: Carly Kandel ensures Briscoe Elementary is a good place for her students.

Nearly all of the Fort Worth ISD school’s students come from low-income homes, and their basic needs aren’t always being met, said Kandel, a program manager for Communities In Schools of Greater Tarrant County.

Kandel does all she can to make students feel safe and as ready to learn as possible — food, warmth, clean clothes — whatever students need.

“We can’t get to that higher level of thinking until we address all the things that are going on holistically for our kids,” she said.

School districts in Fort Worth use Communities In Schools as part of their toolkits to care for students’ well-being. They also offer counselors, telemedicine options and programs tailored to meet the specific needs of students. Research supports Kandel: Students whose mental health needs are addressed tend to perform better in school.

Communities In Schools has found 90% of students it serves see improved grades as well as better behavior — and 96% of students are promoted to the next grade.

Texas is among the states with a higher prevalence of mental illness and lower rates of access to care for young people, according to the national nonprofit Mental Health America. The group ranked the state last in mental health access in 2022.

Half of school districts in Texas have no mental health services. The rest offer some access or telehealth only — few have adequate resources.

In October, the Fort Worth Report reached out to all 12 school districts in the Fort Worth area to ask how they handle their students’ mental health. Aledo, Burleson, Castleberry and Lake Worth ISDs did not respond by publication time.

Read more from the Fort Worth Report here.

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