In our February 15 newsletter, we shared with you that, along with other organizations, Families as Allies sent a letter to legislative leadership with recommendations about SB 2865, which is a bill that allocates $104 million in COVID relief funds to the Department of Mental Health (DMH).
The letter our organizations sent made these recommendations to the legislature:
- Use the funds to strengthen the infrastructure to sustain the system over time rather than adding new services for a few short years.
- Create a stakeholder committee to advise and monitor the DMH on using these funds.
- Ensure that any recommendations related to the children’s system are coordinated through the Interagency Coordinating Council for Children and Youth.
- Require that the DMH regularly report to the legislature and the stakeholder group about the use of the funds.
- Support the stakeholder group to coordinate its plans with the Office of the Coordinator of Mental Health Accessibility and Dr. Michael Hogan, the monitor in the US. v. Mississippi mental healthcare lawsuit.
Families as Allies believes these recommendations are consistent with our core value of accountability, the Mississippi state law about the system of care for children’s mental health and the nationally accepted definition of family-driven practice.
Family-driven means (emphasis added): “Families have the primary role in decisions regarding their children as well as the policies and procedures governing the well-being of all children in their community, state, tribe, territory and nation. This includes, but is not limited to … Partnering in decision-making at all levels … Families and youth, providers, administrators, and policymakers accept and support willingly and enthusiastically shared decision-making and responsibility for outcomes, as evidenced by: Families and family-run organizations provide direction for policy decisions that impact funding, supports, and services, including the right of families and youth to have a meaningful voice at the individual and policy level.”
After we sent the letter, the Department of Mental Health published its plans for the ARPA funds on its website. These are its recommendations related to children’s mental health:
- Intensive Community Support Specialists for Children and Youth: The Intensive Community Support Specialist is the primary contact for inpatient facilities discharging children and youth back into the community and works closely with the facilities to develop and coordinate aftercare plans to promote successful transitions from the facilities to the services and resources in the communities. DMH would like to expand this further to the remaining seven CMHCs that do not have an ICSS to have this service available in all CMHCs.
- Adolescent Offender Program: Traditionally, the mental health component of Adolescent Offender Programs (AOPs) has been implemented utilizing a day-treatment model. With AOPs in operation, youth court judges and referees have an alternative to court-ordering youth who have mental health needs to lengthened stays in juvenile detention centers or other consequences that may lack a mental health component. DMH recommends adding one program in each of the 13 Community Mental Health Centers.
As our letter explained, we believe the DMH should use the funds to strengthen the infrastructure to sustain services offered by the system over time rather than add services for a few short years.
The Department’s two recommendations for children affect the population of children and youth defined in Mississippi’s system-of-care law. However, the recommendations do not appear to coordinate with structures and mechanisms outlined in that law: wraparound, Making a Plan (MAP) teams, and so on. Instead, they offer services solely through the mental health system without seeming to connect children and families to the system-of-care supports that existing law says they should receive.
The first of the proposed services, the Intensive Community Support Specialists, appears to replicate what MAP teams are already required to do in state law—to serve as the single point of entry and re-entry for children placed in out-of-home care.
The second recommendation, a new Adolescent Offender Program, focuses on day treatment, a service that federal site visitors and consultants have encouraged Mississippi to rely on less. This proposal also seems to address a population for whom wraparound care coordination would be appropriate, but it doesn’t mention wraparound. Wraparound is the care-coordination model designated in state law.
The disconnect in these proposals reflects why we believe more input and discussion would be beneficial. We have reached out directly to the Department of Mental Health about its ARPA proposal and look forward to hearing back from them.
We also urge legislators and policymakers to implement the recommendations in the letter from us and our partners. The House amended SB 2865 with a reverse repealer. A reverse repealer typically means the bill will go to a conference committee session, where legislators will craft a version acceptable to both the House and Senate. So there will likely be more opportunities for input into this bill. Conference committee members will be listed on SB 2865’s bill status page when they are appointed.
