Students at in the Minnesota State University, Mankato, Professional School Counseling Program of the Department of Counseling and Student Personnel are trained to keep track of certain types of critical incidents they encounter with K-12 students on-site during their year-long supervised internship experience. These critical incidents are logged via an accountability mechanism known as a mental health profile (MHP).
The mental health profile serves to provide a "snapshot" of the kind of personal and social problems K-12 students experience today. With MHP data, a school can better understand the disruptive forces negatively impacting student learning.
Graph 1 (17KB PDF) summarizes the experiences of MSU Mankato Professional School Counseling interns during a 4 1/2 year period in 35 different categories of student problems. It is important to remember that the experiences of interns is much more limited than the experiences of practitioners. Actual numbers of K-12 students at-risk seen by the typical school counselor are much higher. As can be seen, however, MSU Mankato interns are involved in a wide variety of interventions on behalf of students in the problem categories listed.
School counselors are trained human service professionals capable of responding to students at-risk inside the school setting. Responding to critical incidents, however, requires quality time, time which school counselors must be willing to provide those in need during times of crisis.
It is important that policy makers understand that professional school counselors provide educational, career, and personal services to all students in the school setting. As such, school counselors must adjust their duty time to respond to the needs of the moment. One method of providing evidence of the type services provided by today's professional school counselor is via the utilization of a mental health profile.
The template graph displayed here is provided as a catalyst to practitioners to determine how they might best provide an accountability mechanism relevant for their particular school setting. School counselors can adopt a mental health profile template for any variety of roles within their school. The MHP template provided here can be modified to show evidence of the school counselor's role in each domain of student development: career, academic, and additional personal/social areas.
Accountability is not simply for the K-12 realm. The MSU Mankato Professional School Counseling Program has used the data provided by its interns to modify course offerings to better prepare its graduates to respond to the mental health needs of K-12 students.
Additional information on the MHP and its application in school settings can be found in the following articles: Roberts (1993), Creating a Mental Health Profile of Your School, The School Counselor, 41, 134-136, and Roberts & Morotti (2001). What is Your School's Mental Health Profile? NASSP Bulletin, 85, pp. 59-68.
Thirty-five categories of mental health issues among K-12 students have been monitored by MSU Mankato PSCP interns since 1999. (Prior to that date, 22 categories were monitored from 1994-1998. Additional MHP categories were added when the university switched from quarters to semesters and the opportunity presented itself to increase the type of mental health issues surveyed.) Those categories are listed below.
The operational definitions of behaviors constituting the documentation of an incident are specific to the MSU Mankato PSCP and are explained to interns at the beginning of each academic year. It is important to consider that only one incident category for a K-12 student is logged by an intern throughout the totality of the intern placement. If an intern sees a student multiple times about the same issue, that issue was only logged once. (The format for recording is similar to an internet server that records a first time "hit" on a webpage and does not duplicate additional entries onto the same page from the same e-mail address.) The percentages displayed on the graph represent a tiny, tiny portion of the total involvement between MSU Mankato interns and K-12 students. MSU Mankato interns have logged over 20,000 individual K-12 student contacts at least once during the 1999-Fall 2004 period shown here.
Please note: The graph of the 4 1/2 year summary of the MSU Mankato PSCP MHP does not display all 35 categories on the X axis due to a transfer problem in getting the graph onto the website. To see which categories are not listed, refer to the key below.
1. Known / Suspected physical / emotional abuse
2. Known / Suspected sexual abuse
3. Known / Suspected nonalcohol drug abuse (Excludes nicotine: oral & smoked)
4. Known / Suspected chronic alcohol use/abuse
5. Truancy
6. Court involvement / jurisdiction
7. Known / Suspected pregnancy / miscarriage (Inclusive of both males & females)
8. Death / Loss / Severe illness in family / extended family / significant other (Includes loss of significant function or object of importance)
9. High risk behaviors / potential for harm-to-self / harm-to-others
10. Known / suspected suicidal indicators / attempts / Behaviors indicative of potential for harm-to-self
11. Direct suicidal intervention (Defined as direct conversation with student @ behaviors or cognitions)
12. Direct alcohol / drug intervention / referral
13. Victim of violence (domestic or other)
14. Child of chemically addicted / chronically chemically impaired parent
15. Victimized by peers / others (verbal or physical)
16. High stress life experiences [Misc. / Combined factors / Atypical responses to situations] (Includes 2+ other stressors; Difficult or chaotic home/family situations impacting school experience)
17. School failure / danger of not graduating as scheduled (Failure in 2+ courses; Retention of grade level beyond 4th grade)
18. Referral for drug treatment--Mandated or Requested
19. Recipient / Recent recipient of in- or out-patient therapeutic / psychiatric intervention or treatment
20. Divorce /Separation / Remarriage issues in family/ Family relationship issues
21. Peer relationship issues / Friendships / Significant Other relationships
22. Depression
23. Eating Disorders
24. Other potential clinically diagnosable mental health issue (Please list)
25. Medical issue
26. Gang involvement / behaviors
27. In-school behavioral disruptions
28. Assaultive behaviors / Weapons violations
29. Racial / Ethnic confrontation
30. Social skills deficits
31. Self-esteem issues
32. Fear of failure (academic or personal) / Fear of postsecondary future
33. Anger (atypical or inordinate to situation
34. Teacher/Administrator-Student conflict
35. Violence intervention
Additional codes may be added by Intern as necessary.
