In a tight budget year, D.C. school leaders, parents and advocates fear a double whammy of cuts is on the way for mental health services for students.
Mayor Muriel Bowser is proposing a major shift for school-based behavioral health services: she wants to phase out the city’s contracts with a network of community-based organizations providing clinicians to schools and bring those functions under a city agency.
At the same time, she hopes to end a long-running contract with Catholic Charities DC to provide a mental health crisis response team, which primarily serves schools, a year after working to slash its budget. Similarly, Bowser plans to rely on the city’s Department of Behavioral Health to offer those services instead.
Taken together, some fear these changes will disrupt a fragile ecosystem of care for the city’s most vulnerable students at a time when there’s growing concern about truancy, “teen takeovers,” and all manner of other issues involving the District’s kids.
“We’re just staring down the barrel of major disruption by trying to move these programs in-house to an agency that I think is not staffed up yet to even take these programs on and doesn’t have the budget to either,” said Leah Castelaz, a senior policy attorney studying these issues at the Children’s Law Center.
Department of Behavioral Health Director Barbara Bazron has defended these changes as ones that will simultaneously save money — about $7 million in all — and better utilize her agency’s existing strengths. DBH already operates its own crisis response team, which it plans to augment with new staffers going forward. And she expects the changes to the school-based system will better centralize operations by helping the city end its reliance on a constellation of private providers.
“The school-based program will support all public schools with the more effective use of DBH or community-based clinicians and better collaborate with each school-hired behavioral health team,” Bazron said during a council hearing last month.
But lawmakers have doubts about these plans. Some are particularly concerned that DBH plans to wind down contracts with organizations serving more than 50 schools starting in the upcoming school year, even though it has yet to hire all of the clinicians it needs to backfill that work. (Contracts impacting the remaining 130 schools served by community-based organizations, or CBOs, would be eliminated over the next few years.)
Many of the organizations involved say they have yet to even be informed whether their contracts will be impacted or not, perhaps leaving schools without dedicated mental health providers in the interim.
“I’m not gonna lie to y’all, this feels real squishy to me,” At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson, the chair of the council’s health committee, said during the same hearing with Bazron. “We are building the plane as we are flying it.”
Bazron notes that the city plans to spend $18 million to stand up the new school-based program over the next few years, and insisted that the city made this decision in consultation with school leaders and the community-based organizations themselves as a way to improve care for students. But many have denied this.
Miriam Hauser, vice president of behavioral health for the CBO Mary’s Center, told the council that the plan has moved forward so haphazardly that she’s not sure if her “clinicians will be provided with enough notice to engage in an ethical closure process with their clients.” Similarly, teachers have built relationships with these clinicians and many are not eager to see them replaced with city workers, if they’re replaced at all.
“Teachers are the ones who will be tasked with implementing any new initiative, adding to their already overwhelming workload,” Gracy Obuchowicz, director of educator wellness with the teacher advocacy group EmpowerEd, told the council. “By failing to understand their reality, this plan creates more work for schools instead of solving their problems.”
Chris Gamble, a behavioral health policy analyst for the Children’s Law Center, said he’s concerned the crisis response changes will only compound these disruptions.
The Catholic Charities team — known as the Child and Adolescent Mobile Psychiatric Service, or ChAMPS—has focused specifically on this work for the last 15 years, serving as a resource for schools to call in emergency situations or a way to fill the gap if a school doesn’t have a dedicated clinician. By contrast, DBH primarily serves adults since its crisis response unit operates overnight, and Gamble questions whether the agency is ready to pick up the slack in ChAMPS’ absence.
“Teenagers, they’re not just small adults,” Gamble said. “The way you talk to a child is different from an adult. And from just the clinical perspective, something like suicidal ideation may present differently in a 10-year-old versus a 40-year-old. It’s about being able to know those nuances and ChAMPS is doing this day in and day out.”
Bazron assured the council that her agency is ready for the change, and plans to hire between six and eight additional staffers to supplement its crisis response work. Yet lawmakers expressed skepticism that would be enough to meet the need, perhaps forcing police officers to respond to yet more calls instead.
“Our need for crisis services are expanding while we are slashing the budget in such a significant way,” said Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker.
That’s why Gamble is hopeful lawmakers will be able to move money around in the budget to keep the city’s contract with ChAMPS. He notes lawmakers have previously considered adding a small fee on phone bills to fund the city’s 988 crisis response call center, and some of that money could be directed toward this purpose.
And Castelaz, the Children’s Law Center attorney, hopes the council will also press pause on the school-based behavioral health plan: particularly because so much of it is set to be implemented in the next few years, when a new mayor will be running DBH. (Notably, both Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George and former councilmember Vincent Orange criticized the proposal to cut contracts with CBOs during a forum for mayoral contenders hosted last month by the D.C. Democrats.)
“We have been making some really great progress, and so how do we sustain that progress and keep growing it, even in a tight budget, I think is a really important conversation to keep having with the council,” Castelaz said.
At-Large Councilmember Doni Crawford says she expects the council will ultimately make some changes to the plan in the near term, arguing “we know it’s really important for youth to have access to resources in schools.” The council will make adjustments to Bowser’s budget proposal in the coming weeks, with a final vote set for June 23.
The post Mayor Bowser’s budget proposes sweeping changes to mental health services in D.C. schools, raising concerns appeared first on WAMU.
Published Date : 2026-05-13 20:02:00
Source : wamu.org
