Through its Master Plan for Kids’ Mental Health, California has invested $4.7 billion in youth mental and behavioral health since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Expanding behavioral health services on school campuses has been a powerful way to ensure equitable access to this support.

However, most of the state’s new behavioral health funding is short term, and local educational agencies (LEAs) cannot sustain or expand necessary services without making substantial reductions in other services. Collaborating with external partners—particularly from the health care sector—to create integrated, school-based systems of care offers a promising strategy for sustaining and expanding behavioral health support for students.

This research brief investigates how well the state’s recent short-term investments are aligned with LEAs’ highest priority needs for supporting mental and behavioral health and are aligned with the state’s goal of advancing integrated, school-based systems of care to support students in the long term.

The brief describes how LEAs’ investments of recent short-term funds seem well-aligned with students’ most pressing behavioral health needs. However, LEAs have largely used these funds to hire behavioral health staff rather than to invest in long-term, cross-sector partnerships to expand services on campus, which presents a funding sustainability concern. The brief offers recommendations for how state, county, and health plan leaders can maximize the effectiveness of future investments and strengthen partnerships between local education and health care systems to sustain school-based behavioral health supports.

A companion brief, Schools Can’t Do It Alone: Envisioning a Statewide System of Support to Advance School-Based Behavioral Health in California, explores the availability of technical assistance on this topic and how a statewide system to support school-based behavioral health might be structured.