What families need to know about the free mental health services provided by Santa Cruz County public schools

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A free mental health program relied on by thousands of Santa Cruz County students hinges on something surprisingly simple: how many families are willing to hand over their insurance information.

Santa Cruz County public schools provide a broad range of free substance-use and mental health services to students, from individual counseling to classroom talks about coping with anxiety. 

The staffing that provides those services, while essential to student well-being, isn’t funded through the state like teacher salaries, leaving school districts to find other sources of funding, such as grants, to sustain those positions.  

To alleviate the financial pressures and help ensure school districts continue providing students mental health support, in 2024 the State of California started requiring that insurers reimburse schools for the mental health services they offer. As a result, students can keep accessing these services at school for free. 

To be reimbursed and receive that funding, however, school districts need to submit a claim for reimbursement to students’ health plans or insurers. The more families who provide their insurance information to school districts, the better the districts will be able to sustain these services in the long run. 

Santa Cruz County Superintendent of Schools Faris Sabbah and local school officials want to assure families that providing insurance information to their school districts will not bring them any costs for services and will not change their child’s coverage under their health plan or insurer. 

“Please share your insurance information with your school. It’s safe,” said Sabbah. “There’s no additional cost to families.”

He added that through the initiative, school districts are reimbursed about 40% of their costs. Districts then use money from their general fund or grants to cover the remaining 60%.

Sabbah said if a staff member providing these services costs about $100,000, the district will receive about $40,000 in reimbursement. He said it often takes time for districts to receive the money because the California Department of Health Care Services, which runs the program, is experiencing a backlog.

Currently, all 10 school districts in the county are offering students mental health services that are being billed to insurers or health plans. 

School staff whose services may be reimbursed include school counselors, social workers, mental health specialists, nurses and anyone certified as a wellness coach, according to Santa Cruz City Schools Safety & Wellness Coordinator Heather Maurin. She said families might not realize what schools can be reimbursed for. 

“If you came in to talk to me about your class schedule, but then you say, ‘My parents are getting a divorce, and I’m really bummed about it,’” she said. “And you end up having … an eight-minute-or-more conversation about that … that is billable.”

Maurin said because the services school are reimbursed for include classroom presentations on topics like suicide presentation, which all students receive, every single student in Santa Cruz City Schools is affected. The district isn’t billing just for common services like group and individual counseling, but those educational presentations as well. 

“We don’t want mental health support to be a stigmatized place that only some kids get,” she said. “We want it to be normalized, we want it to be integrated.” 

Maurin said that it’s essential that school districts be able to provide these services at their schools because it ensures that students who face barriers to accessing them outside of school hours have the same opportunities. She said not all students have guardians or parents who can drive them to mental health or substance-use support in the evenings: “It levels the playing field.”

“If we want to continue to be able to provide that, we have to have a high level of participation in the program to get the compensation we need for that,” she said. 

Maurin said that about 65% of Santa Cruz City Schools students have so far provided the district consent and insurance information. 

She added that for the previous school year, staff engaged in about 4,500 student interactions at the high school level for either group or individual counseling or support for a social emotional check-in or crisis. These numbers don’t include the wide range of other wellness services the school district provides such as screenings for mental health or substance-use disorder or educational presentations. 

She said at the elementary and middle school levels, the district estimates that about 10 to 12% of students, or about 350 students, receive supports like small-group counseling or short-term counseling, and about 2 to 3% (about 55 to 60 students) receive more intensive services. 

What families need to know

• Families will not be charged anything and participating doesn’t affect insurance coverage. 
• Schools are already providing these mental health services, regardless of insurance status or whether information has been provided to the district. 
• School districts need high participation of families providing their insurance information, so that services provided by school staff are reimbursed to an affordable level for the districts. 
• All health insurance information is confidential. 
• All students, regardless of whether they have insurance, have access to all mental health services provided at their schools. 
• The state reimbursement program is called the Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative (CYBHI) and is run by the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS). Details on the initiative are available on the DHCS website. 

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