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On Monday, ETHS began offering a connection service for students and parents seeking mental health professionals through a pilot program with Referral GPS. The program partners with mental health organizations and schools to help reduce barriers in access to mental health care care.
Amit Thaker, founder of the program, spoke to the District 202 Board of Education at its Nov. 12 meeting to explain how the program works.
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Employees at Referral GPS communicate with students and families about their needs, and then call partner practitioners directly to find appointments that fit a student’s schedule.
The family will then get a curated list of available appointments close to them. Use of the program is completely free for students and families, as Referral GPS is funded through a variety of sources including grants and payment from District 202 for use of the platform.
“What we’re doing is providing an opportunity for every student who’s at Evanston Township High School to have access to a mental health practitioner,” Superintendent Marcus Campbell said. “Every student can have access to therapy, which is a game changer for our community.”
Simplifying a process
“Referral GPS — the concept was simple — is really to work with families to help find those appointments, understand first what they need, and do a triage and then help them find an appointment,” Thaker said.
Thaker conceived the idea for the program years ago, when he considered how difficult it is to find in-network or affordable mental health care while simultaneously going through a mental health crisis or watching a loved one do so.
He wanted to help people find available appointments and practitioners without spending hours making calls or submitting requests.
“I’m not going to send you a list of 35 different PDF pages and ask you to start calling,” Thaker said. “I’m going to do that for you.”
The program works with K-12 students and families and has 90 partner organizations and 8,000 to 9,000 providers participating.
How it works
When a student or family at ETHS expresses a need for mental health services, they have two ways to go about accessing them through Referral GPS, Thaker explained.
They can go straight to student services at ETHS, and there, the student can meet with a social worker to help them discuss their needs and next steps.
School social workers, counselors and psychologists can then access a database and send information about nearby practitioners directly to parents. For parents who might need more help finding and making appointments, school staff can send their information with permission to Referral GPS.
Thaker said the “care navigation team” would then help find an appointment, “keeping the school district in the loop because they sent us that referral, as long as the parent provides us that permission.”
“I just want to say that, school counselors, school social workers, they have the absolute will to be able to do this, but they just literally don’t have the time,” said board member and previous ETHS counselor Leah Piekarz.
For those who feel less comfortable involving the school district in that conversation, families can also directly contact the care navigation team through an anonymous portal.
“We still know that there’s going to be those that, regardless of how much you offer, because it is a school district and the stigma around mental health that has historically plagued us, they would rather suffer in silence than to have that conversation,” Thaker said.
This anonymous option still lets families involve the school district in the future, if they’d like.
Addressing barriers
Thaker explained how the program addresses a number of barriers that students and families face in getting care.
The care navigation team finding appointments for families helps address the difficulty of just making appointments in the first place, but also helps reduce the wait times that so many organizations have.
They also remove the step of finding evening or weeknight appointments, as the care team finds which practitioners offer this for families.
Transportation can also be limiting, so the team locates practitioners close to home.
Thaker also finds that regardless of the economic situations clients are in, affordability is a problem.
“This is what we hear as a consistent barrier,” Thaker said. “It’s insurance or the ability to pay.”
For those who are uninsured or underinsured, Referral GPS also has some funding available to make sure all students receive care. They will also work with practitioners directly to help negotiate sliding scale pricing, if necessary.
Some communities might also have a limited supply of health care practitioners for families to access. Thaker, however, believes Evanston is rich in mental health resources, but lacks coordination between those who need them and those who offer them.
The problem is simply connecting families to the many providers.
ETHS launches pilot program for connecting students to mental health services is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.