Washington Post: D.C.’s sole mental health crisis team for kids under threat in new budget
Lauren Lumpkin reports on a funding gap threatening to shutter the Child and Adolescent Mobile Psychiatric Service, DC’s only crisis response team dedicated to children and youth.
Youth advocates are sounding an alarm over the proposed cut — hoping to preserve a program they say fills critical gaps in D.C.’s spotty mental health workforce. Out of D.C’s roughly 250 traditional public and charter schools, about 100 are not staffed with a mental health clinician, according to June 2 testimony from Barbara J. Bazron, DBH director.
The reduction comes amid other cuts to youth mental health, locally and throughout the country. The Trump administration said it would shut down a suicide prevention hotline for LGBTQ youths. D.C.’s DBH also reduced its school-based behavioral health programming budget by $2.3 million, part of which was paid to community-based organizations to provide additional services to high-need schools but was never spent, according to Bazron.
“It’s acknowledged by the community, by the government itself that we have a lot of gaps. To essentially intentionally open another gap doesn’t make sense,” said Chris Gamble, behavioral health policy analyst at the Children’s Law Center.
Learn about Our Behavioral Health Work
Although tens of thousands of DC children have behavioral health needs, only a fraction of them actually receive timely supports and services. At Children’s Law Center, we know that many of the children we work with – including children in the foster care system or receiving special education services – only need our help because their needs have gone unaddressed.