We Were Cutting Positions and Building Our Strongest Mental Health System at the Same Time
When students in Harford County named mental health as their priority in 2018, it set off a years-long chain of community partnerships, peer training programs, and district initiatives that cost almost nothing from the operating budget.
In the fall of 2018, my first year as superintendent in Harford County, the Superintendent's Student Advisory Council held its opening meeting. The council was not a symbolic body. About thirty-five middle and high school students had applied for membership and been selected by the district's supervisor of Equity and Cultural Proficiency. The student member of the Board of Education was always among them, serving as an informal spokesperson for the group. At the start of each year, the students identified the topics they wanted to work on, and it was common for them to break into subgroups organized around different areas of interest.
That fall, they did not divide. Every student coalesced around the same topic. They wanted to address mental health, and they quickly refined it to something more specific. They wanted to normalize conversations about it.
In 2018, mental health was no longer the taboo subject it had been not many years earlier. But school systems were not yet openly discussing it, and it was far less common than it is today for students to drive that conversation. These students understood something that many adults in educational leadership were still working through. The barrier keeping students from seeking help was stigma as much as access. Stigma yields to culture, and culture is something peers can change in ways that programs cannot.
What the Students Built
By the end of that school year, hundreds of Harford County students had been trained in Youth Mental Health First Aid and in QPR, which stands for Question, Persuade, Refer, a protocol that equips people to recognize warning signs of a mental health crisis and connect someone to support. These were not awareness campaigns. They were skill-building programs that gave students something concrete to do when a friend was struggling.
The work spread through peer networks in ways that adult-designed programming rarely manages. When the message comes from another student, it carries a different authority. The council members became advocates, and the students they trained became advocates after them.
The reason this first year of work mattered so much is that it was not a service expansion. It was a cultural shift. Those students changed what was acceptable to talk about in Harford County schools, who was willing to ask for help, and what the district could realistically build next. Every initiative that followed depended on the ground they had prepared.
What Followed
In the years after 2018, Harford County developed what I regard as one of the more complete community-based mental health systems in Maryland, and we built it almost entirely outside the operating budget. During this same period, we were cutting positions in other areas. We were increasing mental health capacity.
School-based mental health partnerships with external agencies had begun before the student initiative, with three providers working across six schools in 2017. By the end of 2018, every school had a provider. By the 2022-23 school year, 10 outside agencies were providing services across all comprehensive schools, with 6 schools carrying two providers each. In any given year, approximately 1,000 students access those services during the school day, and none of it affects the operating budget.
The Harford County Health Department became one of the most consequential partners in this work. Through their funding, we brought Care Solace to the district, a service that connects students, families, and staff to mental health providers matched to their specific needs, including insurance coverage, location, and personal preferences, and that assists with actually scheduling the appointment. In a five-month window, 373 community members used the service, generating more than 14,000 individual communications with providers and saving families roughly 354 hours in a process that routinely defeats people before they ever reach care. Care Solace also offers an anonymous online search tool for those who want to find support without identifying themselves to anyone. The Health Department funded it all.
The Health Department also used grant funding to create a Director of Health and Wellness position for HCPS beginning in 2022, with responsibility for overseeing all mental and physical wellness initiatives, programs, and staff. The position would not have existed without that grant.
In fall 2022, we conducted a comprehensive Wellness Needs Assessment across grades one through twelve in partnership with the Health Department and other community health organizations. More than 26,800 people responded, a 78 percent response rate, including over 2,700 open-ended comments from students in grades six through twelve. That data now drives a real-time dashboard that schools use to identify systemic mental health needs and shape their support initiatives. We also built a Handle with Care program with local law enforcement, ensuring that students who experience traumatic events receive coordinated school support in the immediate aftermath.
Why the Students Made the Difference
The question I have been asked most often when I describe this work is some version of, “How did you bring a board and a community along on this level of investment, particularly while cutting elsewhere?” My response was simple, “The students made it very difficult to say no.”
When thirty-five teenagers who applied to serve on an advisory council tell a superintendent and a board that mental health is the issue they care most about, the conversation changes. Board members who might have hedged on prioritizing mental health in a tight budget year found it genuinely hard to face those students and explain why their concern did not warrant a serious response. Community partners who might otherwise have kept a polite distance from school district work found a compelling reason to engage.
Student-organized advocacy around a genuine need moves differently than adult-designed initiatives. I do not believe we would have built what we built in Harford County if the adults had put mental health on the strategic plan. The students named it as a priority, organized around it, and did real work on it. Then the adults organized around them. That sequence matters. It is also replicable and significantly underused.
When superintendents ask me about building community support for mental health infrastructure, I tell them to start by asking their students what they think the problem is, and then to build a structure that gives students a real reason to share what they know.
A Final Thought
The student member of the Board of Education who sat in that first advisory council meeting in fall 2018 was participating in a process whose full consequences neither of us could have anticipated. What began as a group of students deciding they wanted to talk more openly about mental health became, over the following years, a system that reached roughly 1,000 students annually in school-based counseling, connected hundreds more to outside providers through Care Solace, generated nearly 27,000 wellness responses, and added a district-level director of health and wellness funded entirely through community partnership. None of it started with a budget line or a strategic plan. It started with students who had something urgent to say and a structure that treated what they said as worth acting on.
Dr. Sean Bulson is a practitioner-scholar, professor of educational leadership, and the 2024 Maryland Superintendent of the Year. He served as superintendent of Harford County Public Schools from 2018 to 2026 and Wilson County Schools from 2011 to 2016. Subscribe for weekly posts on educational leadership, equity, and district transformation.