By Scott Kearnan - Being a parent isn’t easy. Being a single parent is much less so. But when you have a support system in place to better understand your child’s mental health experiences, at least you’ve found an ally in the parenting process.

“We talk, and we’re close … but there are always going to be things they don’t show me,” says Henry Barboza, referring to his 8-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter. Besides working a full-time job, Barboza is raising both children on his own following a difficult separation from their mother. The loss of that maternal relationship has impacted his children’s behavior, but thanks to ongoing sessions with a mental health clinician at the John P. Holland Elementary School, his children are finding an outlet to express their experiences and Barboza is learning more about them.

Because he is learning and understanding the root of his children’s behavior, Barboza is better able to address it. And it’s especially helpful to parents like him that mental health clinicians are available in public school settings, a core accomplishment of the Alliance for Inclusion and Prevention (AIP) and its Connecting With Care (CWC) initiative, which was funded with a three-year grant from the Foundation’s Closing the Gap on Health Care Disparities program area. CWC has collaborated with several social service agencies as clinical partners—The Home for Little Wanderers, the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Family Service of Greater Boston, and Children’s Hospital Boston—to make mental health clinicians available to five schools in Boston’s Dorchester and Roxbury neighborhoods. In 2008, clinicians logged nearly 1,500 hours of direct service to children and families.

By placing full-time, licensed clinicians directly in a school setting, CWC hopes to alleviate some of the barriers, including transportation and unpaid time off work, that can make it difficult for parents to provide their children with mental health services— even when behavior warrants it. Placing clinicians in schools also alleviates stigma among students and parents, allowing them to perceive mental health care as a simple, natural extension of the educational environment. In time, students seem to learn how to articulate their experiences beyond acting out through negative behavior.

“Children are learning the language,” says Lisa Baron, CWC program director. “We’ve had children actually go up to [clinicians] and say, ‘You know that I have anger management issues. I think I need to see you!’”

Finally, care at schools—where a great deal of childhood experiential learning and development takes place— allows clinicians to understand the climate of the school and its students, observe behavior firsthand, and interpret mental health sessions in their full context.

The latter is particularly important when it comes to addressing issues of trauma, a major issue at the schools selected for the CWC program. In addition to training CWC staff, the initiative also trains school social workers and other agency staff in the Trauma Systems Therapy model.

“When you look at disparities and trauma, a piece of that is that you have a really high incidence of trauma in neighborhoods with low incidence of mental health services,” says Nechama Katz, CWC planning coordinator.

At the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Dorchester, a school identified by the state as a Trauma Sensitive School, CWC provides clinical support and runs an evening mental health clinic for families, including those who attend other partnership schools, to meet with mental health providers after traditional work hours. “The neighborhood is considered to be one of the most dangerous in Boston, and [many] of our children know someone who has been murdered,” says Debra Socia, the school's founding principal, on the troubles facing the local community.

“[Following an after-school program], there was a shooting, a murder that happened literally right next to the late bus,” recalls Susan Lovett, director of out-of-school time programs. “The victim ended up dying up against the bus. And then [the children] were afraid to have that information. Their parents were telling them, ‘Don’t talk about it, don’t tell anyone.’ They don’t want to be subpoenaed or have to testify.”

But talking about trauma is exactly what’s necessary. Otherwise, “sometimes you’ll see a numbing [reaction],” says Bob Kilkenny, AIP executive director. “It’s a concern when kids become blasé to this. It becomes normative, like kids who live in war zones and become numb to the emotions.”

“It’s not always the children who are loud that we worry about,” agrees Socia. Though she says that CWC has also helped the school staff understand the root cause of student behavior that might otherwise be labeled as simple discipline issues. “We have students who are self-injurious, quick to anger, lose control, and with the slightest provocation can go over the top,” says Socia. “We made assumptions that [negative] behavior had developed, as opposed to realizing it was them reliving a trauma because a trigger had occurred.”

Socia says that she has seen major changes in student behavior since the implementation of CWC. For example, by March 2009 the school had seen a 50 percent reduction in suspensions since the start of the school year as compared with the same period for the previous academic year.But beyond numbers, she believes that the tone of the student body has changed in ways that can’t be measured:

“Our halls are so calm … We don’t have different children now, but we have a different school environment.”