News from the 21st Annual Advancing School Mental Health Conference

The Center for School Mental Health (CSMH), organizers of the conference, reported record attendance as school mental health continues to mature and gain acceptance as having an essential role in ensuring students’ health and as critical component of their academic success.
The theme of the conference was Shape the Future of School Mental Health: Advancing Quality and Sustainability. The conference emphasized a shared school-family-community agenda to bring high quality and evidence-based mental health promotion, prevention, and interventions to students and families. Clinicians, educators, administrators, youth and family members, researchers, primary care providers, advocates, and other youth-serving professionals attended the conference.

Several conference presenters talked about their use of Kognito simulations as part of their universal prevention and early intervention efforts in support of student mental health. Among these were:

• Scott Bloom and Marci Bouchard of the New York City Department of Education who discussed their work supporting the citywide NYC Thrive mental health initiative, championed by NYC first lady, Chirlaine McCray. As part of this groundbreaking mental health initiative, which seeks to remove barriers to treatment for mental health and substance use disorders, all NYC public schools have free access to Kognito simulations for elementary, middle and high school educators. We look forward to making great strides for NYC youth by reaching all 100,000 educators who support 1.1 million students,
• Janet Pozmantier of MHA of Greater Houston mentioned the use of Kognito simulations as part of system change efforts in large urban school districts.
• Mike Lombardo of Placer County (CA) Office of Education pointed to the value of Kognito simulations as part of PBIS programming.
• Carrie Freshour of the Baltimore County Public Schools discussed Kognito simulations in the context of implementing Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS)

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