Planning for the Needs of Children with Serious Emotional Disturbance: The National Special Education and Mental Health Coalition

It has long been evident that both special educators and mental health professionals working with children with behavioral or emotional disorders are seriously concerned not only with underidentif ication of such children in the public schools but also with coordination of treatmentforsuch children, whose problems often require extensive family and other support services outside the school setting. A very recent reflection of this concern is the development of an unusual national coalit ion of representatives from professional associations and agencies concerned with education or mental health of children and adolescents. Sponsored jointly by the Council for Exceptional Children and the National Mental Health Associat ion, a ser ies of both planning and working meet ings of the Coal i t ion were held in 1987 at NMHA headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, with subsequent meetings planned on an ongoing basis. This article and the responses that follow represent both a progress report of this Coalit ion's efforts and its particular implications for special educators. While cooperative ventures between educators and mental health workers are certainly not unusual, such efforts have been somewhat less visible in recent years, perhaps for a variety of reasons. Such reasons include a somewhat unidimensional emphasis on behavioral technology in special education, unti l recently, as well as frustration of both mental health and education professionals in coordinating effective or mutually satisfying interventions (Huntze, 1987). The fact, however, that still fewer than one percent of schoolage youngsters are being served in public school programs for the seriously emotionally disturbed has been acurrent impetus to cooperation for both special education and mental health personnel (U.S. Department of Education, 1987). That such a coalit ion seemed timelywas also due, at least in some part, to a spate of recent reports (Knitzer, '1982; National Mental Health Association, 1986; Stroul & Friedman, 1986), position statements (Huntze, 1986; Council for Children with Behavioral Disorders, 1987), and papers (Bower, 1982; Forness, Sinclair, & Russell, 1984; Grosenick, George, & George, 1987; Kauffman, 1986; Paul, 1985; Smith, Wood, & Grimes, 1988; Wood, 1987) questioning both the underlying assumptions and the current effectiveness of programs for emotionally or behaviorally disordered youngsters. lt is significant hat some 16 quite diverse organizations have become involved in the Coalit ion, as depicted in Table 1.