3 Reasons Why Illinois's Universal Student Mental Health Screenings Need More

Are we implementing another checkbox initiative without the intent or funds to ensure successful follow-through?

Recently, Illinois Governor Pritzker signed legislation requiring annual mental health screenings for students in grades 3-12. The process and model will be developed and overseen by the Illinois State Board of Education. Schools will be required to connect families with the BEACON Portal to find psychiatric care. According to NBC Chicago, the "screenings are designed to be confidential, and parents who don't want their kids to participate can opt out." However, the article also claims that "mental health advocates praised the measure as a way to eliminate the stigma associated with seeking help," and this is where I struggle, being a mental health advocate myself, because at the end of the day, they still need to seek help, which is not easy nor is it free.

I first want to say that I'm always relieved, especially in this political day and age, when an entity steps up and goes against the grain of what is easy versus what is right. So, from that standpoint, I am glad to see an attempt at supporting students, even if I don't agree with how it's being done. I do believe it's being implemented with good intentions.

But, as with many implementations coming top-down, it is not well thought through from the get-go. Below are just three of the reasons why it's already missing the mark.

There is no provided follow-up.

The already underfunded initiative relies fully on families following up with mental health support on their own and coming out of their own pockets, according to their insurance deductibles. I deal with this a lot when I work with school districts in understanding the barriers to getting mental health services, which are 1) understanding what they have access to, 2) finding available providers, and 3) cost. I'm often told that "mental health services are covered by insurance," but that doesn't mean that they are free, and with many families having high-deductible insurance, there's a good possibility that they might be responsible up-front for every penny of care. While philosophically it's great to claim that parents should be willing to do anything for their child's mental health, if they are choosing between paying rent that month or buying groceries, they may need to put aside that need for others. Saying "mental health is more important than anything else" comes from a very privileged lens when you don't have to choose to pay for other human needs. There is no plan (and, to my understanding, additional funding) to provide support for parents not able to pay for mental health services or districts to implement programs to service students right at the school with additional therapists or mental health professionals.

This also makes the assumption that there are mental health providers available. It is common for people to tell me they've tried to get help but can't get in - sometimes for six months or more. Mental health programs are overfilled and turning people away, even with serious mental health challenges that risk their lives.

Finally, this initiative also assumes that parents will want to get the students the help and are healthy and healed enough to do so, which brings me to my next point.

Home lives can be the catalyst for mental health issues.

What happens when the caregivers are notified of the mental health issues that are the cause of the mental health issues? Alerting caregivers without additional, neutral support can unintentionally escalate harm instead of offering help.

I was a junior in high school when one of my friends talked to the school counselor about the fact that I mentioned being suicidal. She did what was required - brought me into the office and asked me what was going on. For the first time in my life, I opened up about my abusive home life, just praying for some help in any way. Instead, she told me I had a "nice family" and called my mother to tell her that I was "clearly trying to start trouble" and that they should come pick me up from school. At home, I paid for that lapse in judgment, the belief that the particular professional would help me. Like Fight Club, the understanding is that when stuff goes on at home, you don't talk about it ever to anyone.

If I had been a student to take any kind of mental health assessment, it would have found me to be severely depressed, with high anxiety, and with passive suicidal ideation. However, I would have lied on that assessment the second that I found out my parents were going to be notified, nullifying the very reason for the assessment to begin with. Is that the right way to handle it? Of course not. Students should be able to feel safe at all times and shouldn't have to lie to survive. The right way would have been for my school to have known their student well enough and employed confidentiality to help me when I spoke up, and maybe my parents would have been arrested for abuse years before they finally were. The right way for it to have been handled would have been to provide me a psychologically safe place to have been honest about my experiences, well before my junior year, and all of this could have been done without an assessment. One step further, we are going to be destroying the potential of those psychologically safe places by reporting these findings to home without the promise of follow-through support.

If our plan is to take this information and hand it off to caregivers, what protections are we providing for our students who are dealing with mental health issues BECAUSE of those caregivers? What follow-through are we providing to students to be certain that unhealed, hurtful parents are not ignoring these issues, or worse, making them worse because of this reported data? My school wasn't required to notify my parents back then; they just made the choice to. However, this legislation risks creating the same scenario that could potentially make matters worse for the student.

Can we trust the mental health data to truly be confidential?

Perhaps most concerning: the initiative gathers sensitive data, and what protections are in place when government systems have demonstrated overreach and misuse? Consider the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tapping into massive federal databases - Social Security, IRS, Education, you name it. It’s faced lawsuits, audits, and judicial blocks over breaches and overreach. While Illinois’s goal is health care and not surveillance, we are willingly gathering intimate mental health insights and providing them to systems that may someday be accessed, or commandeered, by entities beyond our intent. We must demand airtight data privacy, clear limits, and transparent governance, and I'm unsure if that's something that anyone can guarantee right now.

To be clear, I’m not blind to the value of this legislation. Illinois is bravely stepping into uncharted territory: schools offering universal screenings could normalize emotional check‑ins, potentially reduce stigma, and shift us from reaction to prevention (NBC Chicago). That being said, the critical work of implementation is going to have to be extremely careful and intentional, and by people who can both see the bigger picture in education as well as still have a practical understanding of classrooms and community relationships. We need innovative thinkers who can see the potential for programs that bridge the massive gap that will help between data collection and actual healing help for students. The way it is currently feels like a typical top-down initiative - the directive to do something without the funds to do it well.

Illinois still has time to get this right. That means pairing screenings with funded in-school mental health teams, creating safe pathways for students whose home is not safe, and enacting the strictest possible privacy protections. Anything less will fail the very kids this law was meant to help, and be another checkbox initiative to put on schools' plates.