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School Mental and Behavioral Health: Expanding Access to Evidence-Based Interventions and Services
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Topic Description
Post Date: September 17, 2025
Expiration Date: September 11, 2026
Background
Schools represent the de facto points of service for health promotion and healthcare in many localities. They provide a range of health services, including, but not limited to, mental and behavioral health care. This topic encourages research-informed approaches that can be rapidly deployed and sustained in school and afterschool program settings using available resources and personnel (e.g., existing school personnel, contracted behavioral health providers, coordination and referral to outside providers).
Purpose
This topic encourages research focused on optimizing and testing school-based mental and behavioral health interventions and service delivery models.
Relevant research includes studies focused on:
- Validating sustainable strategies for operationalizing mental health risk, detecting students at risk, and matching students to appropriate interventions and services, including referring to specialty mental health care when needed.
- Developing and validating decision support tools to guide the selection of research-informed approaches provided within schools, based on need and available resources.
- Optimizing and testing research-informed preventive and treatment interventions that can be feasibly and sustainably delivered in school settings, including approaches that address the continuum of need encompassed by the multitiered system of supports framework, from universal prevention to indicated prevention and treatment.
- Evaluating strategies to promote the adoption and sustained fidelity of evidence-based interventions and services in school settings. This may include the judicious use of non-specialty providers to complement and extend the mental health workforce, with implementation models that incorporate scalable and sustainable approaches to training and supervision, safety monitoring, and credentialing.
Participating ICOs
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) supports research that incorporates:
- community-engaged approaches with systematic attention to challenges related to gaining access to schools, workforce shortages and competing workload demands, and privacy concerns;
- research-practice partnerships that leverage existing practice infrastructure (e.g., SAMHSA-supported mental and behavioral health services; Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics);
- plans to quantify the resources needed to support the sustained implementation of the intervention, tool, or strategy; and
- strategies that promote health for all.
NIMH also encourages research focused on optimizing and testing school-based mental and behavioral health interventions and service delivery models. An emphasis is placed on research-informed approaches that can be rapidly deployed and sustained in school and afterschool program settings using available resources and personnel.
ICO Scientific Contact:Mary Rooney, Ph.D
[email protected]
NIDA is interested in research examining schools as a setting for substance use risk screening and delivering programs/strategies to prevent substance use initiation, misuse and progression to disorder, particularly among high-risk youth. This includes intervention development and effectiveness research and preventive services research. Of interest are projects to enhance uptake and sustainability of evidence-based interventions, including adaptation and customization processes, implementation fidelity, economic analysis, and studies to improve engagement in and access to evidence-based interventions. Stakeholder engagement throughout the research process is strongly encouraged, particularly inclusion of decision-makers and end users. Analyses of underlying mechanisms of action are of interest when embedded in effectiveness trials and have clear implications for how findings can optimize tailoring and delivery within schools (secondary analyses would be lower priority).
ICO Scientific Contact:Amy Goldstein
[email protected]
NINR is interested in intervention or implementation research examining nurse-led preventive or health promotion school-based interventions that incorporate the conditions of daily life (e.g., where people live, work and play) into development, implementation and evaluation. Community engaged research approaches (including youth participatory action research) are of particular interest.
Dara Blachman-Demner, Ph.D.
[email protected]
ODP is interested in projects to develop, adapt, test, or implement school and afterschool mental and behavioral health interventions and service delivery models, including multi-site or cluster randomized clinical trials that employ rigorous study design, measurement, and analysis methods.
This office does not award grants. Applications must be relevant to the objectives of at least one of the participating NIH Institutes and Centers listed in this topic.
ICO Scientific Contact:Elizabeth Neilson, PhD
[email protected]
The areas of interest of the Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) include:
- Projects to validate and optimize sustainable strategies for detecting mental health risks and matching female students to appropriate interventions, with a focus on sex-specific influences and the continuum of need.
- Project to develop treatment, intervention, and strategies for detecting at-risk women and girls within educational systems.
This office does not award grants. Applications must be relevant to the objectives of at least one of the participating NIH Institutes and Centers listed in this topic.
ICO Scientific Contact:Elena Gorodetsky, M.D., Ph.D.
[email protected]
Dr. Catherine Pichardo
[email protected]
Larissa Avilés-Santa, MD, MPH, FACP. FACE
[email protected]
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