Sample (N = 1408) · Schools with an official BTAM team (82 percent of sample)
Only 6 percent of schools noted that they had a psychologist on their BTAM teams but not on staff at their schools
this indicates that these schools made the extra effort to ensure that these disciplines were represented on the team, even though it required them to draw personnel from outside their current staffing.
We saw this same pattern with all the health professional positions we asked about, suggesting that schools’ access to school-based mental and physical health staff usually shapes whether their BTAM team includes such personnel.
This is noteworthy because schools have differential access to various types of school-based personnel, and accessing those disciplines from outside the school can be challenging, especially when it comes to individuals with specialized expertise.
Which specific personnel were included on schools’ BTAM teams was also highly related to the school context (although this is intertwined with which types of schools tend to have which staff, as discussed in the “Differential Access to School Personnel Likely Shapes the Composition of BTAM Teams” box).
For example, secondary (middle and high) schools were more likely to have a greater variety of personnel on their teams—including other school administrators beyond the principal, school-based law enforcement, counselors, and social workers—than their elementary counterparts.
Schools in small districts (those serving fewer than 10,000 students) were especially likely to directly include school principals and district administrators on their BTAM teams.
Conversely, in large districts, other school administrators, such as assistant principals, were more likely to be involved.
We infer from these patterns that larger districts might have greater capacity for specialized roles or delegation of specific individuals to be involved in BTAM, given they tend to employ more school- and district-level administrators.
We also observed some differences in school BTAM team composition by school poverty level.
For example, schools in higher-income neighborhoods were more likely to have school psychologists than schools serving lower-income neighborhoods.
We also used principals’ responses to our question about which personnel were represented on their school’s BTAM team to infer how many people were on the team overall, assuming one person per role.
We acknowledge that some schools may involve multiple people in the same role: For example, a BTAM team might include several instructional staff.
we found that nearly all principals selected between three and eight personnel from the list provided (see Figure 5.2).
The typical (median) principal selected five distinct roles.
To understand how BTAM team membership changes as these teams increase in size (i.e., which types of personnel are added as teams grow), we investigated the likelihood of various types of personnel being on a BTAM teams given team size.
We focus on schools with between three and eight team members because there are very few schools with BTAM teams that fall outside this range.
Principals’ reports suggest that they and their school counselors are the most commonly represented roles on school BTAM teams.
Federal government data from the 2021–2022 school year paint a somewhat different picture, showing that high-poverty schools were actually more likely than low-poverty schools to have both diagnostic mental health assessment services and mental health treatment services (NCES, 2024).
Find the Perfect Training Class For You
