The Sarasota County school district is ending a longstanding contract that placed full-time mental health therapists in elementary schools at a time when demand for such services remains high and political attacks have targeted mental health funding in schools.
The annual contract with The Florida Center for Early Childhood, which has been in place for seven years and served more than 475 children last year alone, will expire at the end of June and will not be renewed, according to the center’s CEO Kristie Skoglund.
Instead, the district is weighing a new approach that shifts away from the in-school therapy model that once made Sarasota a national leader in student mental health care and raises questions about whether it will be enough to meet the needs.
Skoglund said she was informed of the change on March 12 by two top student services officials – Chief of Student Services Kirk Hutchinson and Executive Director of Student Services Debra Giacolone. She said she was given little explanation for the decision.
District administrators declined to be interviewed for this story. However, a draft document obtained by Suncoast Searchlight through a public records request shed light on the district’s new direction.
Instead of renewing the $975,000 contract, the school board will consider an interagency agreement with The Florida Center, a district spokeswoman told Suncoast Searchlight in an email. Interagency agreements are a common practice enabling schools to refer students to outside providers for services, which are not paid for by the district.
Of the district’s current interagency agreements, nine are related to mental health and 11 are for mentoring services.
The draft interagency agreement for The Florida Center says the district would provide school space for its staff, but Skoglund said she cannot guarantee their ability to travel to schools without funding. She also said the change could add insurance and copay barriers for families.
Currently, students receive The Florida Center’s services on campus with parental consent, she said, and families don’t have to navigate insurance or copays unless they qualify for Medicaid.
“If these kids were struggling throughout the day, they had access to the mental health therapist who was there that could help give this kid a brain break, or bring them in and talk (to) them,” Skoglund said.
The district’s proposed plan would use an estimated $862,000 from the district’s mental health budget to retain seven home school liaisons – a social worker role – slated to be cut due to a drop in Title I funding. It also would hire five new school psychologists or social workers.
The cost of the new positions was not listed in the document obtained by Suncoast Searchlight. Those mental health professionals would rotate among 33 schools, providing a mix of individual and group therapy, crisis response, and training for school staff.
District spokesperson Kelsey Whealy confirmed that the school board will consider the interagency agreement at its April 15 meeting. She also said state funding for school mental health has not yet been finalized, which could affect the district’s budget decisions.
Skoglund said she would partner with the district in any way necessary to help kids, but she warned the change could make it harder for children to access help when they need it most – especially without dedicated funding to cover travel and staff time.
“I’m like, we’re going back to the dark ages here,” she said. “You're going to just make referrals for kids and hope they get seen, and hope families can drive here and be seen at our center.”
For parents like Christine Scott, having a therapist on campus made a profound difference. After her father died and one of her children was diagnosed with a serious illness, she reached out to the school for help. Her son began seeing a counselor regularly at school.
“It was kind of just back-to-back blows for the family,” Scott said. “If that had not been available for [my son], I don't quite know how well he would have done through both of those experiences.”
Both she and her husband work full-time. Taking her son to appointments outside of school might not have been an option, she said.
Why the change?
A district document suggested that service gaps at The Florida Center may have factored into the decision to reevaluate the contract. As of January, the document said, three elementary schools were without a therapist due to a staffing shortage at The Florida Center. It said the center was supporting 272 students, or 74% of the contracted capacity.
Skoglund said her agency had only one vacancy in January, which was filled by February. Another vacancy opened in February, she said, but when the district alerted her of possible contract changes, the organization opted not to fill it. She also said her team sent staff from other schools for coverage when possible.
This comes after The Florida Center already reduced its Sarasota County Schools-based staff by almost half over the last three years upon raising salaries to retain talent – a change that Skoglund said was “jointly agreed upon” with the district, though the contract amount remained flat. This year’s contract is for 14 clinicians.
The Florida Center’s therapists at SCS currently are paid $69,643, the contract shows. In addition to using Medicaid and district funds, the center has always paid from its own budget for supervisory services for its clinicians, Skoglund said.
“We still struggled to stay afloat with the contract,” she said. “But nonetheless, we wanted these kids to have access to services. So we figured it out. We raised money, we did what we needed to do to make sure that these kids had access to services.”
School board member Robyn Marinelli said moving to in-house staff should allow the district to create more consistency, though she said she would “wait and see” how the new plan works.
Both Marinelli and fellow board member Tom Edwards said the decision was not about the quality of The Florida Center’s services.
“I’m a big fan,” Edwards said, but the district needs to “try to maximize [mental health] dollars for as many students as possible.”
Edwards called student mental health a “crisis” and said the state should allocate more funds. “We need more mental health dollars, period. End of discussion.”
This year the state allocated $2.8 million to SCS through its Annual Mental Health Assistance Allocations, according to the Florida Department of Education website. That’s a 63% increase since 2018-19; the same year SCS entered into its district-level contract with The Florida Center.
But with conservative groups pushing back on mental health and social-emotional learning programs in schools, such funding has faced political scrutiny.
In 2023, the activist group Moms for Liberty urged its Sarasota members to oppose the district’s Mental Health Assistance Allocation Plan – a state-required plan for using state funds dedicated to school-based mental health services. The email described the plan as a vehicle for indoctrination.
That same year, the school district suspended its “Character Strong” program after similar opposition.
Skoglund said she’s not aware of any direct political opposition to The Florida Center’s work in schools. Still, she’s heard from elementary principals who are frustrated by the contract’s end. Some are even exploring whether they could pay for therapists using their individual school budgets or Title I funds, which provide supplemental funding to schools with a high concentration of low-income students.
But Skoglund said that would only be enough to support a few clinicians, at most.
A leader in mental health
The Florida Center’s school-based program began in 2016–17 at Alta Vista Elementary through the initiative of then-principal Barbara Shirley, according to Skoglund. The Community Foundation of Sarasota County helped expand the program to a second elementary school the next year.
In 2018-19, the district adopted the model more broadly using state funds committed to mental health programs and school security improvements after the Parkland High School shooting.
The Community Foundation continued to support additional schools.
At its peak, the center had clinicians in all 23 elementary schools.
The district’s contract with The Florida Center put it ahead of many schools across the nation in mental health resources. In 2019-20, less than half of U.S. public schools offered mental health treatment, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.
Demand has only grown. National surveys show a steep rise in students seeking mental health support since the COVID-19 pandemic, and fewer than half of public schools say they are not equipped to meet the demand, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Even before the pandemic, feelings of persistent sadness and suicidal thoughts among young people already were on the rise.
Child psychologists are among the most in-demand in their field and report the largest waiting lists, according to the American Psychological Association.
In Sarasota County alone, untreated mental illness in children costs taxpayers an estimated $86 million per year, according to a 2019 report conducted by the University of South Florida.
School board member Liz Barker, who is a former school psychologist, said that she supports the idea of moving services in-house because it can give the schools greater access and ability to meet students' needs.
However, she said she’s worried the district may have difficulty recruiting and hiring qualified school psychologists. And she wondered if community partners will have the capacity to serve students who previously accessed therapy at school. “What I would hate to see happen is … those students put on a waiting list and a disruption of service.”
According to Barker, the role of a school psychologist centers on academic goals. Their role can include short-term counseling, but when it does, “the end goal is whatever [the students] need to be helpful in school” She said licensed mental health therapists like those from The Florida Center, however, “can dive deeper into other issues.”
Scott said having mental health services at her son’s school made a difference for her family. Both she and her husband work full-time.
“I don't know that being able to take him somewhere would have even been in the cards of something we'd be able to do,” she said.
The district’s contract, according to Skoglund, has never fully covered the cost-per-clinician of The Florida Center’s services. Billing Medicaid offset some of the unfunded costs of the contract and helped “spread the (district’s) dollars further.”
She said the center did not bill private insurance companies because it would have become too logistically complicated for families and deductibles and copays could have been barriers to service.
As her son processed his grief, Scott said, he also noticed his siblings’ feelings and encouraged them to share happy memories of their grandfather. He learned to use breathing and counting techniques when coping with other difficulties, such as peer conflicts.
“He has really taken the information that the two of them have done together,” she said, “and really ran with it.”
Scott and the therapist recently decided her son would not need to attend sessions after this year. Nevertheless, Scott was “shocked” that it wouldn’t be an option for other children.
“It hurts my heart,” she said, “for all the people that really need this service and could have benefited from it.”
This story was produced by Suncoast Searchlight, a nonprofit newsroom of the Community News Collaborative serving Sarasota, Manatee, and DeSoto counties. Learn more at suncoastsearchlight.org.