Schools can screen students for behavioral health issues – but many are reluctant to do so

What’s in a screening?

Bardos is now CEO of EduMetrisis, the company that publishes the BIMAS-2, which calls on respondents to fill out a 34-question form. The respondent can either be a teacher, a parent, the student themself or a combination of the three.

Bardos said schools can begin screening students as early as pre-K. The earlier a school implements screenings and follows up with the appropriate interventions, the better the outcome is going to be, he said.

The respondent fills out the form online and the responses are immediately collected in a database for school officials to examine. It takes about five minutes to fill out the form, Bardos said.

The form asks the respondent to rate whether the student has performed a specific behavior in the past week on a five-point scale from never to very often. The questions range from how often the student followed directions to how often they threatened or bullied others.

Another question asks students how often they have thought of hurting themselves. Bardos said that question gives the first initial indication that a student needs help.

“It’s just a little opening to a box that says to you, ‘Please take a look at me,’” he said.

Another common behavioral health screening is the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment, or DESSA.

That screener evaluates students on six different competencies: optimistic thinking, relationship skills, self-management, responsible decision-making, social awareness and self-awareness.

Like the BIMAS-2, respondents complete the DESSA online. Respondents can be students, teachers or parents. The respondent, like in the BIMAS-2, is asked how often the student performs a certain behavior on a five-point scale from never to almost always.

Some of the questions include: “During the past four weeks, how often did the student keep trying when unsuccessful?” and “During the past four weeks, how often did the student believe they can achieve their goals?”

The DESSA groups students into three different categories based on how they respond to its questions: strength, typical and need for instruction — equivalent to above average, average and below average.

There are two versions of the DESSA. DESSA-mini is a shorter, eight-question form meant to serve as a benchmark for districts and help them gather information about the entire student body, said Evelyn Johnson, vice president for research at Riverside Insights, the company that publishes the screening tool.

The full DESSA assessment, which can evaluate individual students, has 72 questions.

Just like Bardos’ test, the DESSA can be used with students in grades K-12.

Equipped with information from the DESSA, “schools can start thinking about: How can I help this student build on the strengths they already are demonstrating to then develop skills in other areas that are going to serve them well?” Johnson said.

Screenings in schools

In its screening guide, the National Center for School Mental Health recommends schools start small when they begin screening students — and that’s what the Green Bay area schools did.

The district is in its second year of implementing the BIMAS-2. Gingle, the district’s associate director of pupil services, said district officials favored a slow rollout to make sure they could address students’ concerns, especially if they mentioned self-harm.

The district chose to only screen students in the fifth and eighth grades because those are critical times in their lives — just before they transition from elementary school to middle school and from middle school to high school.

Gingle said the district created an intervention guide and conducted trainings for teachers, administrators and parents before implementing the screening tool.

“I think it has been really well-received and [is] hopefully preventing any types of crises and keeping students in really that least restrictive setting to receive the level of needed care,” she said.

In Northern Virginia, Alexandria City Public Schools took a more comprehensive approach by screening all students from kindergarten to grade 12.

“What we’re trying to do is identify those life skills students have already learned and things, but also try to enhance ones that might need to be developed as it relates to social emotional competencies,” said Victor Martin, the district’s executive director of student support teams.

Martin’s district has been using the DESSA for three years. He said the district chose to use that screening tool because it measures social and emotional learning, or the process in which people develop their identities, manage their emotions and create relationships.

The district screens students twice a year. Teachers fill out a shorter assessment for students in kindergarten through eighth grade. It takes about two minutes to fill out the form for each student, Martin said.

In high school, students complete a longer assessment on their own. It takes them about 20 minutes to complete, according to Martin.

The district then compiles the data and uses it to help its student support teams and teachers provide small group instruction, while other students may be referred for individual or online counseling.

“Perhaps you might see that an entire grade level is maybe struggling with relationship skills, and maybe that’s an opportunity for us, in collaboration with the classroom teacher, to work on providing lessons that might help with building relationship skills,” Martin said.

Using that approach, some schools in the district have seen entire grade levels improve from the fall assessment to the spring assessment.

“We’ve seen students improve to a strengths-based level because of strategies and interventions that have been put in place by those schools,” Martin said.

A reluctance to screen

Students in Green Bay and Alexandria can opt out of the screenings if their parents prefer — but elsewhere, many school districts are entirely opting out of behavioral health screenings, or limiting their use, for a number of reasons.

A 2023 poll published in Phi Delta Kappan found the public has mixed views on mental health assessments in schools. Of those that responded to the survey, 45% said schools should assess students only when their parents or guardians request it, 39% said schools should assess all students and 14% said schools should not assess students.

 Sometimes school officials worry parents are going to be upset if their children are screened, said Elizabeth Connors, an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine.

She said that worry is often unfounded. “I don’t think there’s often that much resistance, but it certainly does happen,” she said. “So that’s why we encourage schools to be reaching out to their parents.”

Yet the screenings have caused a stir in some places. When Wake County schools in North Carolina implemented the BIMAS-2, some parents objected to the idea that teachers would be evaluating the behavioral health of their students.

“I don’t think it’s fair to put the teachers in the position to have to analyze the students in this way,” Rachael Ayscue, the parent of a high schooler, told ABC11 in Raleigh-Durham in 2019. “They’re educated in the curriculum that they’re teaching, not in behavioral science.”

Students sometimes object to the screenings, too. In 2022, Isaiah Steinberg, at the time a student at Jamesville-Dewitt High School in upstate New York, wrote an essay criticizing the BIMAS-2 in the school newspaper, the RamPage. He said students were reluctant to complete the screening, and for a good reason.

“The truth is that J-D students are nervous that they will be singled out by their counselors and administrators, people who they often do not know or trust very well,” Steinberg wrote.

Another potential limitation of mental health screenings is the cost. For example, it would cost a school district the size of Green Bay over $70,000 each year to use the BIMAS-2.

Signs of success

There’s evidence, though, that the screenings do some good.

A March 2025 study by University of Nebraska researchers found the BIMAS-2 “effectively identifies at-risk students, offering an effective approach to addressing adolescent mental health needs in rural communities.”

And a 2017 study of low-income kindergarteners evaluated with the DESSA found the screening accurately evaluated their self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making.

Both Gingle and Martin mentioned screenings are just one data point they look at when they consider a child’s mental well-being.

Martin said Alexandria schools wouldn’t automatically put a child into therapy based on the results of the screening. “We would take that in consideration with attendance and grades and disciplinary reasons and concerns from the teacher,” he said.

Connors said that’s the right approach. She likens mental health screenings to vision screenings in schools.

“Just because you, you know, fail that vision screening, it doesn’t mean that you need glasses. You actually need to go to the optometrist, and they’re going to have sharper tools there,” she said.

A lower score on the screening just means that school officials should follow up with those students and understand whether the student would benefit from some kind of service, she added.

Despite the occasional concerns of parents and students elsewhere, Gingle and Martin said the response from parents to the screenings in their schools has been positive. Both said their districts have made sure to do outreach to parents to make sure they understand the screenings and how they are conducted.

Connors said when school districts start doing mental health screenings, they begin to understand their students have a lot of mental health needs that, without screenings, may have gone unnoticed.

“Once you identify one student who otherwise might have fallen through the cracks, you realize how essential this is to supporting student mental health and well-being and success,” Connors said.