Few people have been untouched by the troubling and enduring youth mental health crisis. Already significant before the COVID-19 pandemic, it has only worsened since. This challenge crosses party lines, social strata, and culture. If you were to ask a representative group of parents to raise a hand if they had a kid suffering at home, nearly half the hands would go up. In 2023, four in ten high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, with two in ten seriously contemplating suicide. Add an LGBTQ+ identity and the latter number goes up to almost four in ten. With more kids coming out these days, we know that being LGBTQ+ is certainly not rare. We also know that when they receive love, acceptance, and support, these young people tend to thrive. Suicidal ideation for students of color is like that of white students, but the risk for girls (27 percent) is far greater than it is for boys (14 percent). As for the parents, remember that saying about how you can only be as happy as your least happy child? It’s not only the kids who are suffering.

While many are studying the contributors to this crisis, with potential culprits including climate change, growing socioeconomic inequality, and isolation due to increased screen time, the research on resilience points us to both risk factors and protective factors that can help us make headway in solving the crisis. Boosting young people’s protective factors is one way to improve their mental health, and one potent protective factor consists of attending a good school that will enhance the student’s connections with others. How does one define a “good school”? A good school feels safe and appropriately challenging, and it is filled with people whom the child looks forward to seeing, whether they’re peers or staff members. A good school engenders a sense of belonging and acceptance while insisting that the kids work hard and behave with respect and integrity. A good school helps kids learn to work well together and to form friendships. Academic and social success breed positive mental health.

How do we build these good schools? Thankfully, years of research on the topic has already provided the answer. We know the essential ingredients for creating and running schools that help students succeed academically and emotionally. Now we need a bold national investment to implement them across the country. Here is a cohesive blueprint that the next President can promote to improve our schools and help solve the youth mental health crisis.

Local Solutions

1. Ensure Equity, High Expectations, and Rigorous Learning for All

It starts with instruction. One of the most hopeful promises of our democracy is a well-educated populace, which means that all students need access to high-quality and comprehensive curricula. In the public schools, all means all. For the instruction to hit home for all our youth, the curriculum needs to be meaningful to them, to their situation, to their culture, to their needs. This is why culturally responsive instruction is important. This is when teachers seek to learn about and build relationships with students and families whose cultural backgrounds differ from their own. When the instruction effectively considers the circumstances and characteristics of the learner, kids dial in. Paired with high expectations and equitable policies that eliminate barriers to success, curricula that acknowledge the diversity of students as valuable to the learning process provide everyone with a true shot at becoming educated, pursuing a hopeful future, and living a healthy, productive life.

2. Integrate Academic, Mental Health, and Learning Supports

Truly meeting students where they are in their learning and mental health requires deftness, skills, and organization. The schools that get it right integrate their academic and mental/behavioral health supports, delivering evidence-based multi-tiered systems of support that make access to the right level of assistance possible through valid and timely screening and assessment. School leadership teams analyze data to determine the learning and social/emotional needs of each student, using a variety of classroom and standardized assessments. Students who are struggling get noticed. Their needs are evaluated, and tailored interventions are provided. Their progress is monitored efficiently and at regular intervals, with the results informing whether the intervention is working, whether it needs to be intensified or changed, or whether the student has improved and can be released from the targeted intervention process.

This multi-tiered approach is an especially powerful way of ensuring that all children’s mental health needs are met. We know that there are simply too many suffering kids to help every one of them on a one-to-one basis. And even if we had an endless supply of qualified mental health professionals in schools, not everyone needs individual counseling. Most kids will be happy enough if they have friends and are successful in school or some other performance-related endeavor, such as sports or the arts. Achieving these two feats will not be enough to cure every child’s mental health problems, but it will help a lot of them by arming them with kinship and self-esteem.

3. Foster Safe, Positive, and Inclusive School Climates

Inspired schools chase a positive school climate. The research on this is especially strong. Schools that invest time, energy, and resources in analyzing their environment find that when their school climate ratings increase, the changes are palpable. Kids end up wanting to go to school because they trust and like their teachers, their peers treat them decently, they have friends, and they enjoy being part of the community. Attendance rises, disciplinary actions and suspensions plummet, faculty morale improves, and caregivers start to rave about the school. Even test scores go up. Every parent knows that when your child wants to go to school, everything gets easier.

One important element of a positive school climate is a comprehensive discipline system that utilizes evidence-based and culturally responsive practices to reduce repeat offenses. Such a system incorporates restorative justice, reinforces positive behavior, and teaches kids important life lessons in the process. Effective school discipline is clear, consistent, and equitable.

Another paramount concern for parents, students, and staff alike is school safety. We have a rich knowledge base about which practices are most effective for preventing violence, preparing for crises, and intervening when an emergency occurs. The PREPaRE curriculum is a comprehensive, evidence-based program developed over the course of two decades by the National Association of School Psychologists that helps schools to strengthen threat assessments and crisis response teams. Employing reasonable physical security measures such as locked entries and close monitoring systems, together with robust school climate efforts that strengthen relationships, increases the likelihood that potential threats will be reported and addressed.

When personnel at schools treat all students with respect, those schools tend to produce successful learners. But in our pluralistic society, it can be a challenge to achieve this blanket of respect, especially against the backdrop of our culture wars. The rights of children are imperiled in many school communities due to oppressive and illegal local policies that promote specific religious practices in schools and deny children rights to their own authentic identities. When schools find a way to establish rules, values, and mores that just about everyone can agree on (it’s kind of hard to argue with respect or integrity, for example), and then go about incorporating those tenets into behavioral expectations, it elevates the dialogue and helps everyone focus on how to behave, children and adults alike.

4. Strengthen Collaboration and Family-Community Partnerships

It’s particularly challenging for schools to find a way across the divide these days, with parents and staff sometimes identifying with vastly different philosophies. In many locales, the diversity of thought exists both within and between these two groups. When a majority culture or perspective exists in a school community, it can be especially tricky to be inclusive of those who think, identify, or gather differently. School leaders who make this effort in a good-faith way—putting in the work to be accessible, to listen to the concerns of parents, and to promote practices that honor and protect the rights of children—have a good chance of helping all parents to feel heard and respected, and thus to be more likely to support their school. When parents are connected to their school, they also have access to school mental health personnel who can provide guidance about topics that affect children’s wellness, such as monitoring social media access, recognizing signs of adolescent depression and anxiety, and improving communication within the family.

Forging school-community partnerships is one way to maximize resources to provide a full range of services for students. There are examples across the country that can be studied and replicated, such as the Comprehensive Behavioral Health Model developed by UMass Boston in partnership with Boston Public Schools and Boston Children’s Hospital. In this model, professionals in each of these organizations coordinate funding, resources, and services to provide tiered mental and behavioral health services for schoolchildren.

National Solutions

1. Demand Presidential Leadership

The next President has the opportunity to launch an initiative that will speak to the millions of parents and other family members who are agonizing over how to help their suffering children. A national investment in policies and resources that strengthen schools’ ability to meet the mental health needs of their students will turn the tide on this problem. The youth mental health crisis affects all of us. A community-based solution is necessary. With 87 percent of our nation’s students attending public schools, that is where learning, growing, and healing can take place. The next President should elevate this conversation and make supporting students’ mental health a national priority.

2. Invest in a Skilled, Diverse, and Well-Supported Workforce

Schools cannot meet the learning and emotional needs of children and youth without high-quality teachers, principals, and support personnel. But it remains challenging to recruit our brightest and most inspiring individuals into the field and then keep them there, particularly those from diverse backgrounds like those of the children they serve. The next administration should pursue boosting federal funding streams to tackle this problem.

Although most people can agree that schools need to meet the learning needs of students, not everyone believes in the need to fund public schools appropriately, especially if they think the system is broken and can’t be fixed. Thus, accountability measures that assess social elements (e.g., absenteeism) as well as academic ones must be valid and reliable to strengthen the case for funding, especially among those who do not care to open their pocketbooks for public schools their children do not attend, not to mention those conservatives who deem public schools a place for leftist brainwashing.

And the question exists: Why must schools meet the emotional needs of children and teens? Some would say, That’s up to the parents to manage. But it was easier to argue this point when smaller percentages of children were struggling with their mental health and loneliness, when fewer children were demonstrating behavioral problems that parents could not for the life of them solve, when there were fewer kids being diagnosed with ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, anxiety, and depression. Back then, many parents might say that schools should stay out of the mental health realm.

These days, we know that parents need help, and well-staffed schools can make a real difference. The schoolhouse is where approximately 70 percent of children access the mental health support they need. When school mental health personnel are staffed at the recommended ratios, children have a better chance of overcoming their emotional, behavioral, and social problems, and parents get the guidance and support they need. Schools that support multidisciplinary collaboration among highly trained professionals to address student needs produce greater percentages of healthy and successful students.

It is important to ensure that school-employed mental health professionals are appropriately trained to provide both prevention and intervention services. School psychologists have such training: They are experts in learning, behavior, mental health, and school systems. The National Association of School Psychologists recommends a staffing ratio of one school psychologist to 500 children. The recommended ratio for both school counselors and school social workers is 1:250. Current data show the national average ratios coming up alarmingly short: 1:1,071 for school psychologists, 1:372 for school counselors, and a sobering 1:2,106 for school social workers.

Efforts to improve staffing ratios of mental health personnel made headway before the current Administration called for a halt last year. Two federal programs, the Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration Grant Program and the School-Based Mental Health Services Grant Program, were passed into law in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Supplemental funding to both programs was authorized in 2022, resulting in significant progress in addressing workforce shortages and increasing services to students. The current Administration abruptly discontinued the grants in the spring of 2025. While the Department of Education allocated a new batch of funding later that year, the new grants only amounted to about 20 percent of the canceled funding. The will to address shortages of school mental health personnel exists, even in our divided legislature; funding must be safeguarded and expanded. But grants such as these do not offer a lasting solution. The next President needs to champion legislation that will provide sustained, long-term funding to prevent future shortages.

3. Reinstate the Federal Department of Education

Achieving these goals requires a strong federal Department of Education that promotes evidence-based instruction and practices while holding states, districts, and schools accountable for improving student outcomes. A new presidential administration in 2029 must reinstate, fully fund, and adequately staff the department so that it can provide guidance, offer technical assistance, and ensure consistent implementation of federal education laws by states and local education agencies. Strong federal leadership can once again make education a national priority, sending a clear message to the nation’s youth: We see you. You matter. And you deserve to go to a good school.

By continuing to fund school mental health grant programs through bipartisan action, Congress has signaled a willingness to address the youth mental health crisis. But these investments fall short of what is needed. While reducing staffing ratios is vital, it is equally important to improve access to student loans and provide loan forgiveness incentives for mental health professionals who serve underserved communities.

Bold action is necessary to renew the hopes and health of this young generation, many of whom have withdrawn and succumbed to despair about a future they see as hopeless. The next President must embrace a national strategy that prioritizes healthy students and thriving schools for a strong America. This would be a national investment in our future. Nothing is more important.