For several months, the Ward 8 Education Council has embarked on a journey to fill executive board positions and strengthen collaboration between parents, principals, elected officials, and education councils in other wards.
Amid D.C. Department of Behavioral Health’s (DBH) proposed changes to school-based behavioral health programming, Ward 8 Education Council Chair Mike Grier said that he and his colleagues are also demanding investments that bolster students’ socioemotional well-being.
“Those are the areas that [are] priorities with the budget because those are things that the principals have shared that are their biggest concerns,” said Grier, a middle school teacher, “especially the social-emotional learning piece, where … the budget is not allowing them to have social workers, counselors, and technicians to service the amount of cases that are needed.”
The Fiscal Year 2026 budget that the D.C. Council approved last year included a provision tasking DBH with submitting a comprehensive improvement plan to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and the council.
That plan, which Bowser sent to the council by late October, sparked controversy with a “flexible” model that, instead of installing one clinician at each public and public charter school, provides either: one clinician serving two schools part time; clinicians and prevention specialists serving several schools; and a telehealth model for high schoolers and adult learners.
The comprehensive improvement plan also mentions a phasing out of a hybrid model through which DBH has long doled out grants to community-based organizations (CBOs) serving students at District public and public charter schools. Since October, the Ward 8 Education Council has conducted community outreach, which coalesced into a pre-winter break meeting where Ward 8 public and public charter school principals expressed their grievances about DBH’s proposal.
Grier alluded to ongoing collection of qualitative and quantitative data that will inform a soon-to-be-crafted letter addressed to the D.C. Council. That letter, he said, will not only delve into socioemotional learning concerns, but the burden placed on Ward 8 public schools when mid-year public charter school transfers don’t bring the public dollars needed to fulfill their IEPs and 504 plans.
“They had to restructure, regroup, and pull out things that they were not able to do in the school year,” Grier told The Informer about a Ward 8 public school currently facing this dilemma. “We’re almost in the middle of the year. Schools are saying that they want more collaboration in cases… when a charter school wants to put students out, especially after they have gotten the funding for that job.”
The Comprehensive Improvement Plan That’s Sparking Fury
DBH’s comprehensive improvement plan is subject to a Fiscal Year 2027 budget deliberation process scheduled to kick off in a few weeks during performance oversight hearings. In its letter, agency leaders said the plan, intended to provide services based on the specific needs of each public and public charter school, came together after consultation with its coordinating council, CBOs, agency partners, and school representatives.
Other factors that influenced the comprehensive improvement plan included a review of DBH and CBO clinicians’ ability to meet performance benchmarks. Last summer, DBH completed an environmental scan that assessed the behavioral health services in each school and identified service gaps. They also analyzed data collected from mid-year and end-of-year principals surveys.
Last fall, in her testimony before the D.C. Council’s Committee on Health, DBH Director Dr. Barbara J. Bazron spoke about the hurdles her agency has faced in actualizing a plan conceptualized during Vincent C. Gray’s mayoralty. She said pandemic-related workforce challenges and CBOs’ limited success in helping students necessitate a shift scheduled to take place until the end of the 2027-2028 school year.
“Achieving these milestones over the next 18 months, DBH will ensure a smooth implementation of the revised service delivery model while phasing-in services within DBH, and expanding access to behavioral health supports,” Bazron told the council’s Committee on Health during a Nov. 5 roundtable. “This structured, phased approach not only lays the groundwork for enhanced services, but also provides a new framework to support the behavioral health needs of our youth in public schools.”
As outlined in the comprehensive improvement plan, DBH determined that most CBO clinicians, in comparison to DBH personnel, fell short in meeting benchmarks and providing services mandated in grant agreements.
Agency leaders also said that CBO clinicians experienced difficulty in billing for treatment services.
Other findings centered on a mental health infrastructure overwhelmed by an influx of students with Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) and 504 Plans. Several CBOs, however, say there’s more to the picture, in terms of the services they provide District students, and the manner in which DBH measured programmatic effectiveness.
In her testimony before the council’s Committee on Health, Candace Besmen, director of Hillcrest Children and Family Center’s school-based mental health program, questioned the performance metrics that DBH used to justify the removal of CBOs.
“These metrics do not reflect the reality of the guidance CBOs have received for years,” Besmen told committee members. “We were explicitly told by DBH not to prioritize Tier 3 caseloads, but to focus on Tier 1 and Tier 2 support, despite CBOs needing a robust Tier 3 caseload to compensate for not being fully funded by the grant. When the directives shifted last summer, CBOs were critically questioned as to why their clinicians did not have full Tier 3 caseloads like DBH clinicians did.”
The shift to DBH clinicians, Besmen said, threatens years of progress made by CBOs.
“Most CBO clinicians have been in their respective schools a small fraction of the time that DBH clinicians have,” Besman told council committee members. “It takes years to build the trusting relationship required to support a robust referral system and I believe that we finally have the staffing to support this if our program can continue in its current capacity.”
Hillcrest Children and Family Center is the only DBH grant recipient that provides trauma-systems therapy and trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy. Besmen, the first clinician hired by the CBO under the agency’s school-based behavioral health expansion grant, facilitates psychiatric evaluations, medication management and an adolescent substance use disorder program.
“Our work extends beyond individual students,” Besman said. “It is common for us to enroll parents or caregivers once a student enters services—allowing us to address trauma at the family level and improve long-term outcomes for entire households. This whole-family model is something only a CBO—with deep ties to the community and a broad service array—can provide.”
Grace Birth, a licensed graduate social worker at Catholic Charities, told the council’s Committee on Health about the leaps and bounds she’s made with elementary school students, including those suffering from ADHD and PTSD exacerbated by community violence.
Her strategies include: individual sessions, family sessions, consulting teachers on students’ well-being, and promoting mental wellness among staff members.
“In joining my school, I was able to transition multiple students without IEPs or 504s onto my caseload,” Birth said on Nov. 5. “Doing so allowed the mental health professionals in my school to more effectively provide services for students with disabilities, as they were no longer supporting the students in the same capacity.”
That’s why for Birth, DBH’s removal of CBOs could cause a domino effect unlike that which students and families won’t be able to handle.
“School-based therapists are needed everywhere, as our presence allows for streamlined service delivery and targeted interventions both for kids on and off of our caseload,” Birth said. “Without this program and its current scope, the children in our community will be negatively impacted.”
CBOs Deserve a Fair Shake, Say an Advocate and Councilmember
Data compiled by DC Action’s Youth Economic Justice Coalition showed that, in the District’s behavioral health pipeline, 32% of 225 District public and public charter schools lacked access to a licensed mental health provider, while nearly half needed a full-time clinician.
That’s why for Kawanza Billy, a youth advocate and Ward 8 Education Council member, the removal of CBOs from schools could prove catastrophic. In the aftermath of DBH’s proposal, Billy counts among those searching for answers.
“Providers are trying to figure out what this means for community-based organizations,” Billy said. “They’re left with more questions than anything about what this means for the ecosystem of young people and mental health. There’s an understanding that there’s an issue with career pathways but while mitigating that, I don’t think the best answer is taking away school-based mental health.”
At the height of the pandemic, students affiliated with Black Swan Academy and other organizations pressed District leaders to dedicate funds toward school-based behavioral health services. This happened amid an uptick in on-campus melees and youth criminal activity. In response to a clinician shortage, the D.C. Council explored several strategies, including a DBH-funded peer mentoring program that allows CBOs to recruit, train and supervise peer educators in Ward 5,7 and 8 schools.
Billy said that CBOs fulfill needs that DBH won’t be able to handle on its own. Without these organizations, school leaders will be left to their own devices, she told The Informer.
“Principals will have to go to their budgets to see how they can support and fill in the gaps,” Billy said. “Teachers may experience in real time what it means to have multiple young people having health challenges. It’s gonna be chaotic not having that support on site or having to share a [full-time employee] at multiple sites.”
These problems, Billy said, will most likely spill over into other aspects of the academic experience.
“I can see attendance being affected by lack of mental health support,” she explained.
For D.C. Councilmember Christina Henderson (I-At large), such circumstances demand that DBH thoroughly examines the school-based behavioral health landscape before making such a consequential overhaul of the system.
She said DBH has fallen short in doing so.
“There had been an environmental scan that we had been asking them to do for months, which is to say, the clinicians that came from DBH are not the only behavioral health clinicians in D.C. public schools or charter schools,” Henderson said about the shared responsibility between DBH and CBOs.
“Both DCPS and charter schools [are] hiring school psychologists, social workers, therapists, a whole amalgamation of people,” she continued. “If you…asked DBH to give…a list of how many social workers are working at Henley Elementary, or how many school psychologists are working at Henley Elementary, you wouldn’t have…information on that. We kind of felt…that’s kind of important before you start deploying additional resources.”
In her Nov. 25 letter to Bazron, Henderson expressed concerns about the lack of a clear plan to hire 113 DBH staff members needed for the transition outlined in DBH’s comprehensive improvement plan. She went on to criticize what she called a disregard for the role that CBOs play in strengthening the behavioral health workforce pipeline.
Henderson’s recommendations include: the re-establishment of a transparent and inclusive stakeholder engagement process; the release of data, including the environmental scan dataset that DBH said informed its comprehensive improvement plan; and and a detailed multi-year hiring and budgeting plan that breaks down staffing projections by role and comparisons between the in-house model and the current CBO model.
While speaking to The Informer, Henderson, reflecting on her exchange with Bazron during a health committee hearing last year, emphasized that CBOs need a fair shake. She said that data collected by DBH doesn’t guarantee that.
“They were dinging CBOs on whether or not they were following this particular curriculum,” Henderson said. “What they didn’t share in the report, but later shared at the hearing was the curriculum actually wasn’t required for CBOs to be able to do the thing. So lots of CBOs had either created their own programming that they felt was more culturally responsive to the student population that they worked with.”