Texas: Call for mental health screening to identify at risk students

May 31, 2018, Dallas Morning News: We can improve school safety by identifying kids with severe antisocial behavior and offering help https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2018/05/31/can-improve-school-safety-identifying-kids-severe-antisocial-behavior-offering-help Gov. Greg Abbott was at Dallas ISD headquarters this week to deliver 40 recommendations to improve school safety in the wake of the recent Santa Fe shooting. … Although several recommendations focused on making schools safer by strengthening security and increasing law enforcement presence, what is critical is that the proposal included a resounding call for improving mental health assessments and services. Steps in this direction would include providing mental health evaluations that identify students at risk of harming others or themselves, increasing mental health training, improving mental health crisis response, and most notably the expansion of Texas Tech University's Telemedicine Wellness, Intervention, Triage and Referral Project, which seeks to identify junior and high school students who show a risk of committing violence. … Efforts aimed at identifying individuals who exhibit severe antisocial tendencies and providing them the services they need should be a high priority, and this should not be limited solely to teenagers. In fact, it goes much further back. As my own research in the Journal of Criminal Justice has shown, conduct disorder, mental illness and antisocial behavior in early childhood left unaddressed can have long-term adverse impacts on children, their families and society at large. …