Using a System Dynamics Approach to Improve Student Mental Health

By Kayla Tawa and Isha Weerasinghe

From June 2023 to April 2024, CLASP and the National Collaborative for Transformative Youth Policy provided technical assistance to community advocates in three localities: Charleston, SC, Gulfport, MS, and Tulsa, OK. Our goal was to increase access to equitable school-based mental health services.

We used Community-Based System Dynamics to understand what upstream factors impacted student mental health outcomes and what was needed to make policy changes. System dynamics is a set of tools that elicit and represent mental models that members of a system hold about different dynamic problems, and allow us a way to test those models. In this case, the system was the school district. The goal of system dynamics is to understand how different parts of a system interact to see what the levers of change are and what’s holding the system in place.

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