Boerne students now have year-round access to free mental health care through a state program that offers telehealth counseling to Texas school districts, and the program is filling a need for the district, according to the head of BISD student support services.
Krista Pomeroy is the executive director of the district’s support services and said the schools are always looking for resources to help students when there’s a crisis or a need for therapeutic care, but it can be a challenge.
“Most of our local providers operate on cash only, they don’t accept insurance or there’s a backlog,” Pome- roy said. “In some cases, there’s not a lot of child or adolescent providers.”
Through the state program, students can receive one-onone counseling, medication management and treatment for some of the most common issues, such as anxiety, depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Boerne ISD students have participated in nearly 400 one-on-one virtual therapy sessions through the program in the last year, according to data from Texas Child Health Access Through Telemedicine, known as TCHATT.
Although Kendall County has more mental health care providers compared to the state average, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services, the numbers do not indicate how many of those provide pediatric services.
The majority of Boerne’s counseling sessions have been with elementary and middle school students, Pomeroy said.
“One of our focuses is being very attentive to early intervention, and so noticing and working with our kids early on so that we see if there’s intervention we can provide, if there’s therapy we can refer them out to, if there’s family support we can provide to stabilize the situation,” Pomeroy said. “Early is always better.”
Students access the program after being referred by a teacher. The school must receive parental consent to enroll the child in TCHATT services. Though services are primarily provided during the school year, the program operates in the summer with students doing the telehealth visits at home, according to Program Manager Rachel Jew.
“We encourage parents to reach out to their school to submit that referral,” Jew said of families who would like to begin counseling sessions in the summer.
Pomeroy said she became aware of several children over the summer who needed help, so she contacted the family and made the referral to TCHATT so they could begin counseling.
“That’s really the philosophy here in Boerne ISD. Kids go away for the summer, but we know life continues, and we are that point of access for them if they are needing something,” Pomeroy said.
Texas is ranked last in access to mental health care by the advocacy group Mental Health America, and rural areas suffer from the greatest deficits, according to Texas Community Health News data.
That is one of the reasons TCHATT staff focus on enrolling rural school districts in the program, said Jew.
“We are often the only source of school-based mental health services,” Jew said.
The program has provided more than 174,000 counseling sessions to over 33,000 students across Texas, according to Jew. It is available to more than 44,000 students in Kendall County, according to THCATT data.
“I think we’ve seen a lot of success in the program,” Jew said. “We’re just about four years old now and we are already in around 68% of all Texas schools.”
The program’s staff provides training for teachers and administrators.
“When schools join a partnership with us, we do an initial ‘what is a good referral,’ what our services are and answering any questions about how to talk with consenting families, to give them a good awareness of the different kinds of things they might see,” said Dr. Puja Patel, a pediatric psychologist that works for TCHATT.
The average referral leads to around five counseling sessions depending on the case. Sessions typically begin with both the parent and student, so the team can create a diagnostic picture throughout the process. Following this, a support plan is created based on the family’s circumstances and the availability of the parents and child.
TCHATT serves students from age 4 to 18 and they adapt their services as needed, Patel said.
“We do kind of think about how we structure our services based on age,” Patel said. “We’re also just thinking about where they are developmentally and making sure that we’re targeting out interventions to be focused on that.”
The program is funded by the Texas Legislature and there is no cost to the schools nor to the students. Counseling sessions are free and medical insurance is not required.
Although Pomeroy was initially skeptical that online access to a counselor would be as beneficial as an in-person session, she said she knows today’s students are accustomed to working online. The online platform also can make accessing care feel more comfortable.
“Part of what I think it is, too, is that we all know that there’s still a stigma associated with mental health,” she said. “And so, in some cases, online access is more private, it feels more private, so our families are accessing it a little bit easier.”
Colton Gibson is a journalism major at Texas State University and a contributor to Texas Community Health News, a collaboration between the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the university’s Translational Health Research Center He hopes to work as a sports writer and broadcaster.
“We see if there’s intervention we can provide, if there’s therapy we can refer them out to ... Early is always better.”
— Krista Pomeroy BISD support services director
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