A fundamental principle of the Consultation and Education approach is to offer immediate, direct and individualized assistance to families to help them address the challenges they face. The goal is to support the family in creating and maintaining for their children an affirmative, supportive environment for physical and emotional growth. Early intervention is essential to this approach to prevent development of more severe problems. Child and Family Support Services include:
Case Management: The C&E provides informal, short-term “case management” for individual families to assure that their mental health and social service needs are met. By combining personalized assistance in addressing socio-economic crises through direct assistance or referrals with specialized behavioral health expertise and knowledge of available resources, the C&E helps to alleviate immediate challenges to the family and assists the child and his or her family in realizing their goals.
Coordination of Behavioral Health Services: The C&E works with the school to assure that services available through the children’s behavioral health system of care are made available to the child and his/her family. This may involve participating in Comprehensive Student Assistance Process (CSAP) and other multi-disciplinary school meetings, arranging for psychological evaluations, linking the child to mental health treatment services, etc. The C&E participates in the development of educational and treatment plans and strategies and takes responsibility for facilitating access to mental health and other services which may be required under such plans. If the child is not appropriate for formal mental health treatment services, the C&E works with the child, family, teacher, counselor or others to identify alternate service options, which may help to meet the needs of the child and family.
Crisis Management: The C&E also provides crisis management services to school staff to assist them in dealing with individual crisis that may occur and in linking to appropriate outside services when necessary.
