Remarks by
A. Kathryn Power, M.Ed.
Director
Center for Mental Health Services
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Leading for Implementation and Systems Change:
Safe Schools/Healthy Students Grantee Meeting
December 13, 2006
Arlington, VA
Attached is the text prepared for delivery; however, some material may have been added or omitted at the time of delivery.
Good morning. For the past two days, you’ve been immersed in learning about leadership: what it is, how it works, and its role in bringing about change. Now, I want you to take a few minutes to explore why we are here at this meeting. What is it that we hope to achieve through leadership for implementation and change?
To begin with, we are here as representatives of the Safe Schools/Healthy Students (SS/HS) grant program. This program is driven by a vision: that all children will be able to reach their full academic and personal potential by feeling safe in their schools, their communities, and themselves.
Safe in their schools means that the hallways of learning will be free of bullying, violence, and other threats to the physical and mental well-being of students.
Safe in their communities means that parents, educators, justice and mental health professionals, and others will work together on behalf of children. The common objective of this collaboration will be to create secure environments in which mentally healthy students learn and thrive.
Safe in themselves has multiple meanings. To succeed in school as well as in life, children must believe that they can. They have to trust in their own ability to make good choices and to follow through with them. Many children struggle to achieve this level of self-trust. Childhood is a long period of uneven and often uneasy development. It may be rocked by circumstances not of a child’s making, such as poverty, trauma, or family instability. Approximately 10 percent of children experience a mental health problem severe enough to cause difficulty at home, in school, and in the community. At least half of them will not receive the mental health services they need.
The SS/HS program makes it easier for children to feel safe in themselves by reducing the factors that place them at risk for failure and by increasing the protective factors that contribute to success. Through SS/HS programs, children are encouraged to:
- develop the social and emotional skills that support learning,
- build resilience in facing life challenges, and
- avoid substance abuse and other behavioral problems that can lead to school failure, delinquency, and other costly consequences.
The common denominator of our program efforts is to promote and protect the mental health of children as the essential foundation for education. Why are we so concerned about their ability to learn? — Because an education prepares children for life. For children, and particularly for children whose mental health challenges may place them at risk of failure, an education can be the difference between a life lived on the edge of promise and one filled with promise.
I believe that single fact explains why we are here at this meeting. We are here because the SS/HS program offers an opportunity to ensure that all of our children can look forward to a lifetime of promise. But what is it that we hope to achieve through leadership? The answer is systems transformation. Before we can transform lives, we first must transform how community-based systems work together to promote the mental well-being of students. Entire communities must come to understand mental health and how it affects the overall health and development of children, including their academic development.
Let me talk for a few minutes about transformation. I also am a captain in the Naval Reserve. This past summer, I attended a military executive training course on leading transformation. Part of this course was a discussion on the dimensions of transformation.
The first dimension of transformation is culture — the understandings, beliefs, and practices that define and shape decisions about change. John Kotter, the author of Leading Change, maintains that new approaches are fragile and vulnerable to regression until change sinks down deeply into a system — which may take years of effective leadership. Transformation also involves capabilities, or the techniques and tools needed to support change, and processes, or the steps that must be taken to execute a specified course of action.
We can point proudly to the SS/HS program as a catalyst for transformation at the community level, beginning with a cultural change in the ways a community approaches mental health. SS/HS programs are based on the awareness that the mental well-being of children is not the sole responsibility of the family and a mental health provider. Instead, mental health care is increasingly recognized as a public health issue. As such, the mental health status of children affects every member of the community and is the responsibility of every child-serving organization within the community.
To illustrate, consider the tragedy of a school shooting such as Columbine — lives lost, families shattered, and a community torn by grief. Now compare that outcome with the experience of the North Star school district in Fairbanks, Alaska. Last April, a concerned parent became aware of frightening rumors. Some students at North Pole Middle School reportedly were planning a Columbine-like school shooting. When local law enforcement officials were alerted, they reached out quickly to the school district’s safety officer, a position created through SS/HS funding. The safety officer immediately brought both school administration and the local SS/HS initiative on board.
The end result was that — through the SS/HS collaborative partnership — the crisis was averted safely and the different agencies were able to coordinate their response. According to SS/HS Project Director Heather Stewart, “We knew we needed to work together with parents, and we needed a community plan — not a just a school plan.” Law enforcement focused on the investigation and subsequent arrest of six students. The school district, in collaboration with the local SS/HS initiative, took on the task of thoroughly informing the community about the crisis. Together, they also engaged a variety of organizations in providing critical follow-up support services to students and their families.
The Fairbanks SS/HS program worked as intended by uniting a community in prevention and intervention in children’s mental health. As this anecdote illustrates, the SS/HS program is a vehicle for instilling transformative values throughout a community. With effective leadership:
- partners develop a shared vision among community agencies and schools to create safer schools and healthier students;
- agencies learn how to collaborate, using a common language and focusing on a common outcome; and
- a community creates an integrated infrastructure that supports collaboration and coordinated services.
The SS/HS program also expands the tools and techniques that support change — another dimension of transformation. The SS/HS program offers universal remedies for community-based organizations to respond to the universal challenges of serving youth and families: Childhood mental health problems can be complex and may affect multiple child-service systems. Within the juvenile justice system, for example, the majority of youth may have a diagnosable problem. Within the child welfare system, nearly half may have a clinically significant emotional or behavioral problem. Left untreated, these mental health problems can present barriers to learning. In fact, students with serious emotional disturbances have the highest rate of school failure — 50 percent will drop out of high school.
The SS/HS program works by bringing multiple service systems together to address overlapping concerns. Through collaboration, the mental health, education, and justice systems are making greater use of evidence-based practices that take a comprehensive approach to prevention and treatment. Additionally, these systems are improving outcomes through shared data and decisionmaking.
I’d also like to note another transformative tool of the SS/HS program — the promotion of cultural competence in program choices, implementation, and service delivery systems. This measure directly responds to the transformation goal of eliminating disparities in mental health services. Cultural and ethnic minorities bear a disproportionate burden of disability from mental health problems. They also have higher rates of misdiagnosis than white people. The U.S. Department of Education, for example, suggests that African American children are twice as likely as white children to be labeled as emotionally disturbed. (They also are more than three times as likely to live in poverty…and the effects of poverty on children are manifestly important.) Minorities are more apt to receive less care and care of lower quality. By stressing cultural competence, the SS/HS program is helping to ensure that community-based systems develop a stronger capacity to prevent, diagnose, and treat childhood mental health problems appropriately.
The final dimension of transformation I’m going to mention is processes, or the steps that need to be taken to achieve an objective. We at the Federal level are taking steps to facilitate transformation across our organizational boundaries. This effort is a direct outcome of our Federal Partners Workgroup, which engages nine different departments in collaborative efforts to align our programs, policies, and funding for mental health Among these departments are health and human services, education, and justice — the same departments supporting the SS/HS program. Our Federal workgroup is a model for collaboration at the state and community level. No single system can accomplish needed change on its own. Collaborative leadership among systems is essential.
You, as SS/HS partners, are the leaders and change agents within your communities. Through planning, collaboration, and careful implementation of your programs, you have the opportunity to transform how you serve children at the local level.
A critical facet of your leadership is to engage your community in thinking about the contextual things that are needed to promote transformation… and then planning the steps to bring them about. To quote Joel Barker, a consultant on the future of business enterprises, “Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.”
An example of a contextual change is shared information. Could a child be better served if teams of mental health, education, and justice professionals disclosed and discussed full information about the child and family? Such a change in policies and practices would enable the team to address a child’s best interests in a way previously not possible. An informed consent form, collaboratively developed, could make this happen. This is a critical aspect of transformation — creating the capacity to do now what we were unable to do before.
The SS/HS program represents both an opportunity and our responsibility as leaders of child-serving systems. Eighty-one million children younger than age 19 are now growing up in the United States. Normally, we refer to children as our future. In reality, we are their future. Children depend on us to promote and protect their mental health as the foundation for their success in learning and in life.
As you return home, do your utmost to apply the leadership lessons from this meeting to collaborative transformation in your communities and in your schools. Let us do what we can to ensure that all children can look forward to a life filled with promise.
Thank you, and I'd be happy to answer your questions.
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