Highlands Community Services and district staff outline expanded school‑based behavioral health supports
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Summary
Highlands Community Services and district mental‑health staff described school‑based case management, therapy and a continued—but smaller—therapeutic day treatment presence, along with pilots of reset rooms and school support teams to boost student access to mental‑health care.
Highlands Community Services and Washington County Public Schools staff detailed an expanding set of school‑based behavioral health services during the board meeting, saying the programs aim to reduce barriers to care and keep students in class.
Crystal Miller, director of school‑based services for Highlands Community Services, said Highlands has provided behavioral supports in the county since the 1990s and that current services include school‑based case management and therapy across all schools, plus therapeutic day treatment at five elementary schools. "School based case management ... helps connect families to the proper services," Miller said, describing case managers as the "bus drivers" who coordinate referrals. She said those services reduce missed instructional time by bringing intakes and treatment into school buildings.
Miller described the post‑COVID evolution of services: therapeutic day treatment became financially constrained in 2020, and Highlands and the division pivoted to case management and school‑based therapy funded in part with CARES/ESSER and other sources. She said the provider network now covers most costs when services are combined and that Highlands assesses staffing annually by enrollment and need.
District staff described complementary in‑house work. Tracy Smith, the district staff member overseeing student mental‑health initiatives, summarized pilots of "reset rooms" (calm‑down spaces) in three schools (MetaView fully operational; High Point and Patrick Henry in progress), and new multidisciplinary school support teams that bring principals, counselors, community providers, school nurses and resource officers together to coordinate responses for students with academic and behavioral needs.
Administrators also announced a parent resource center proposal for families of students served under Individualized Education Programs (IEPs). Justin Godwell, a special education teacher at Abingdon High School, has applied for a grant to create a digital and rotating in‑person resource hub for families to learn about IEP meetings and available services, administrators said.
Board members praised the work and asked about rollout. Miller said services vary by school depending on referrals and enrollment and that Highlands continues to evaluate capacity and funding. Smith said the district wants to expand reset rooms and strengthen the student support team process, collect pilot data and consider a divisionwide tiered framework for student supports.
No formal board action was taken; presentations were informational. Administrators asked the board for continued partnership as services scale and for support identifying community partners to broaden offerings.