Northwest Health Services is a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) serving 15 counties—13 rural and 2 urban—in northwest Missouri. This provider is an RCORP behavioral health grant awardee and is currently in the final year of the award period. Northwest Health Services’ consortium members selected “youth” as the focus population for grant activities.
Northwest Health Services’ grant project involves partnering with public school districts to provide treatment, support, and prevention services to as many youth as possible. After collecting school survey data, the project team developed interventions to address the needs identified in the survey and invited every school district in the 13-county rural area to participate. The project expanded from a single pilot school in Year 1 to serving 25 schools by Year 4, reaching 47 percent of school districts across the rural counties.
The project provides direct funding to 14 of the school districts, and those school districts deliver services using their own contracted therapist. The other 11 school districts, which don’t have access to a therapist, partner with the project team to provide services using the project’s telehealth program. Two organizations deliver the services—a counseling agency and a university training program for masters- and doctorate-level students (under supervision) who are training to be therapists. The majority of youth at schools participating in the telehealth program receive services at school during the school day, unless a parent has requested that they receive their sessions at home outside of school hours. School counselors make and track student referrals in a secure electronic platform called “Unite Us.” The project also offers an adult clinic where parents and school teachers and staff can request telehealth therapy services. These services are self-referred, with no involvement from the schools.
During the 2024–2025 school year, the project team provided 2,325 therapy sessions for 227 students—elementary through high school—and 39 adults. Eighty-five percent of the sessions were provided to youth. The majority of adults served were teachers or staff. The program served an additional 20 students with 30 hours of group therapy and 210 youth with 1,029 peer support sessions.
In addition, the project provided or contracted out the following prevention services for school districts:
- Naloxone and naloxone training offered to every school district, six naloxone distribution boxes placed in three rural counties, and a naloxone text line that anyone in the covered counties can use to request naloxone be mailed to them
- Prevention assemblies—more than 75 prevention assemblies delivered by 5 different assembly providers
- Curriculum on sexual abuse prevention and safe dating
- Peer mentoring program—high school students mentor middle school students
- Partnership with two prevention coalitions to sponsor annual student symposiums on the topic of prevention
- Substance use disorder prevention curriculum through the substance use prevention platform Vive18
- Emergency funding for students who are unhoused
- Mental health first aid for teachers and staff
- Screenagers movies for parents
- Vaping prevention books for elementary students
- Access to community health worker services
- Cards with a QR code, printed and distributed to schools for use at back-to-school or parent-teacher conference events, that provide a variety of community resources, including behavioral health services and naloxone box locations
- Small Quick Series booklets for educating parents
- Prevention challenges and campaigns for students
Sub-awards for schools and community organizations to host substance-free activities for youth or to provide prevention activities at school, many of which were student-led
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