Mental Health Awareness Month began in 1949 by Mental Health America, an organization started by a psychiatric patient-turned-advocate who was harmed by the institutions that were supposed to care for him.

Thankfully, mental health has come a very long way since 1949, but the modern-day challenges our students navigate are much different.

And schools play a primary role in offering front line support for those challenges.

It’s clear from both the data and the reality on the ground: adolescent mental health crisis is certainly worthy of attention

For this reason, Mental Health Awareness Month this May is an important one for schools.

In this article, we’ll explore how to move beyond awareness to help you build an approach to create seamless pathways to access for more students, like:

• Embedded mental health access
• Reflecting on five important questions
• An integrated approach to support

Awareness isn’t enough.

Bringing awareness to the fact of this growing problem is important, and May is a great opportunity to do so. Awareness builds knowledge that can inform policies and secure resources.

Creating a culture that’s open to talking about mental health challenges candidly, and supporting each other in them, starts with leadership.

But it’s just one small part of moving towards effective solutions that help our students. And there’s a growing gap between student need and school capacity.

As students’ mental health needs grow, the data shows schools are feeling less equipped to meet them.

Creating a culture that’s open to talking about mental health challenges candidly, and supporting each other in them, starts with leadership.

• In 2024, only 48% of public schools felt they could meet the mental health needs of their students
• The average student to school-counselor-ratio was 372-to-1 for the 2025-2025 school year
• The percentage of adolescents reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness reached 40% in 2023

What effective school-based mental health support actually requires

1. Embed access in order to meet students where they’re at, seamlessly. The most effective mental health supports are proactive, easily accessible, and integrated into a student’s existing school day. This means mental health supports, including clinicians, conversations, and terminology, are part of the intrinsic culture and every day environment: visible, normalized, and de-stigmatized
2. Coordinate your system of care to create an integrated, connected system that isn’t silo’d in the counselor’s office. Effective coordination requires clear handoffs and defined referral processes for students who require more acute care.
3. Staff sustainably with multidisciplinary teams who are resourced with mental health training appropriate to their school demographics, and trusted and empowered to build a strong culture of mental health, both for themselves and students. Professional learning and coaching, peer groups, and more can help to build this capacity
4. Align your leadership. When mental health is seen as a single initiative owned by one department, it can be vulnerable to budget cuts, leadership transitions, and competing priorities. Durable change means superintendents, principals, board members, and curriculum leaders sharing a common framework from which to make decisions about priorities, scheduling, grading and learning environment through a mental health lens.

Five questions district leaders should ask this spring
Mental Health Awareness Month is a great time for leaders to bring the following questions to their teams for discussion. School board meetings, planning meetings, and yearly reflections are all excellent opportunities to ask:

1. Do our staff have the appropriate trauma-and-culturally informed training to identify and respond to anxiety, depression, and crises?
2. How are we building relationships with student families, and bringing them into partnership?
3. Which student populations are least likely to receive mental health support, and what barriers are standing in the way?
4. How are we investing in, building a culture around, and creating opportunities for student and staff mental health and wellness?
5. Are we integrating social-emotional learning (SEL) as a universal, proactive skillset in every classroom?

Use May as a checkpoint for year-round planning, not a standalone campaign.

Mental Health Awareness Month is one worth celebrating. It creates space for important conversations, and shows students, staff and families that their wellbeing is a priority.

While May is a great time to reflect on Mental Health, the questions above can serve to guide teams in year-round planning and implementation to address the growing needs that impact our students, families, and staff every day of the year.