Ohio’s Care Team Collaborative is a multi-county initiative that provides individuals, schools, families, and communities with the tools they need to build Developmental Assets in kids. The organization approaches their goal of helping children achieve academic success from many different angles, including school-based mental health and prevention services.
The Care Team’s three-tiered system of care helps schools in four different Ohio counties integrate the asset framework into whole-school prevention, early intervention, and intensive intervention services. Members of the Collaborative assist guidance counselors, social workers, and other school-based providers by familiarizing them with the asset framework and giving them ideas, strategies, and resources they can use in their prevention programs.
Read about the Care Team Collaborative’s prevention model
“When mental health providers do early intervention groups, they often focus on asset-based skill building,” reports Michele Timmons, director of the Care Team Collaborative. Using asset-building resources such as Building Assets is Elementary, The Best of Building Assets Together, and Pass It On at School, the mental health programs help develop students’ social skills, teach good practices in building relationships, and help connect kids with adults that can support them in their school community.
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Intensive intervention programs are intended for youth that have multiple risk factors and need more comprehensive services, including mental health care and asset building. Each student has a “Care Map” with goals targeting specific asset categories, and each student speaks with a case manager about the asset checklist every year to make sure the student’s needs are being met.
In addition to in-school intervention programs, the Collaborative also encourages after-school programs co-facilitated by school personnel and mental health professionals. These programs target high-needs kids already working with the Care Team, but are open to all youth who may benefit from their services. Both homework time and asset-based skill building are included in these programs. In addition, kids are taught social skills, such as how to get along with others.
The impact these programs have had on the students has been visible. Many of the school districts that the Care Team has been working with have seen improved school attendance, decreased discipline referrals and out-of-school suspensions, and a decrease in recidivism for youth involved in the court system.
One of the most startling examples of positive change comes from Muskingum County, Ohio. This community has been participating in asset building with a strong mental health focus for around six years and, according to Timmons, “the biggest thing we’ve seen is a decrease in suicide attempts, and in 2009 there were no successful youth suicides in the county.”
See research data on Muskingum County schools’ improvements
Timmons and the Care Team Collaborative would like to see an expanded focus on mental health in the schools they work with in the future. “Our dream is to be able to enhance and expand mental health awareness professional development in schools so that it reaches more classroom teachers. I’m an educator and I was never trained in how I work with a child with mental health issues. That’s just not something that was ever available to me. Working with those youth, you need to approach them differently many times and most educators don’t know that they need to or know how to.”
Teach in Ohio? Learn more about the Collaborative’s professional development trainings
One of the ways in which the Care Team would like to help teachers is by developing a one-hour training that would give them some background knowledge on mental health issues and information on how to work with students suffering from mental health issues in a strengths-based manner. Timmons believes connecting schools with mental health services is critical because, “it has to be accessible, it has to be free, and it has to be where the kids are.”
Every day, Michele Timmons and the Care Team Collaborative make a difference in the lives of students by helping teachers and schools integrate the Developmental Assets into their prevention programs. Their efforts throughout the state of Ohio exemplify their four core values—Collaboration, Assets, Relationships, and Engaged Learning (C.A.R.E.)—and help create healthy, resilient Ohio youth.
Read success stories about Care Team programs
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