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| FOND DU LAC SCHOOL DISTRICT USES TEEN MENTAL HEALTH SCREENING |
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WPR News - Fond du Lac School District uses teen mental health screening
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Monday September 05, 2011
by Shamane Mills
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(FOND DU LAC) More schools around the country are doing voluntary mental health screening of students. A Wisconsin district has been doing it for nearly a decade and will again this year.
Physical checkups are routine for student athletes. Mental checkups for students are not as common, although Fond du Lac School District has been using a computerized questionaire called Teen Screen for nine years. Marian Sheridan is health and safety coordinator for the district. She says 60 percent of eligible students are screened for a variety of mental health issues--if both the student and parents give permission, "Social phobias, anxieties, panic attacks, obsession compulsion, depression, alcohol abuse, marijuana abuse and other substance abuse, suicide ideation and suicide attempts."
Fond du Lac offers the mental health assessment to 9th graders. However, Teen Screen can be used as early as 6th grade. Leslie McGuire is deputy director of Teen Screen Center at Columbia University in New York. She says they started the program in 2003 with 30 sites, "Now we've got over 600 school and community sites across the country implementing Teen Screen so it's definitely grown a lot over time. And Teen Screen's also offered in primary care offices and we've got 1,700 primary care providers who are implementing Teen Screen also."
In the Fond du Lac district, more than 6,000 kids have been screened in the last nine years; Sheridan says about a thousand were connected to support services.
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