Outcomes of a Training Program for School Counseling Students to Provide Behavioral Health Services in Underserved Rural Schools in the United States

There is an urgent need to grow the behavioral health workforce so that Kindergarten (K)-12 students from all backgrounds can access affordable, interdisciplinary, and personalized treatments. This project addressed the state of Georgia’s behavioral health professional shortages in K-12 schools by offering integrated behavioral health training to students in a master’s-level school counseling program. The project provided didactic and experiential training over two semesters (30 weeks) to 62 school counseling students to prepare them to provide behavioral health services to K-12 students in rural and underserved areas of Georgia. Trainees completed online surveys pre- and post-training that assessed general counseling self-efficacy, behavioral health counseling self-efficacy, inter-professional collaboration competencies, and multicultural knowledge, awareness, and terminology. In completer-only analyses, as well as analyses involving multiple imputation methods to address missing data, trainees reported significant increases in general and behavioral health counseling self-efficacy, inter-professional collaboration competencies, and multicultural knowledge and terminology. Programs of this genus can increase the number of school counselors and other behavioral health providers prepared to work in educational settings across the globe.