Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral To (SBIRT) - What You Should Know.
In the coming weeks, every 8th and 10th grader in the Tahoma School District (TSD) will be given the SBIRT (Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral To) questionnaire. But what exactly is SBIRT and is it something you should consider opting out of? Let’s dive in!
Screening will be done through the Check Yourself tool, which was developed by Seattle Children’s Hospital and the University of Washington with Tickit Health, a for-profit software technology company that uses what they call “Digital Empathy” to obtain critical information required to efficiently deliver care and support to individuals across broad populations. The screening asks students’ age, grade, school, race, language, gender identity, sexual orientation, mental health, substance use, safety, and other details they include in open-ended responses.
Students who indicate higher levels of risk or request additional support will be referred to their school’s Student Wellness Advocate for a brief intervention of several sessions.
Students deemed to have elevated levels of risk may be referred to providers in the community for additional support.
The screening is done in partnership with King County Department of Community and Human Services (DCHS). This year in the Tahoma School District, SBIRT will only be given to 8th & 10th graders.
Some pros of the SBIRT are that it can potentially and proactively support students in building skills to prevent youth mental health and substance use issues.
Graphic courtesy of Tahoma Matters email dated 5/6/22 and the TSD website.
According to the SBIRT brochure, some expected benefits are as follows:
Increase in positive strategies used to reduce stress, anxiety, and depression
Increased connections to school
Increased attendance
Decreased drop-out rates
Delayed onset of substance use
Decreased symptoms of anxiety, depression, self-harm/ suicidality
Unfortunately, there are several unpublicized cons as well.
According to an article published by The Seattle Times, “…no one tells kids or their parents that they have helped fine-tune a commercial screening tool whose accuracy hasn’t been rigorously tested. No one tells them that contractors evaluating the program have a broader research agenda for the screening tool. And no one tells them that the information schools gather, without student names but with potentially identifying information, could become public, an investigation by The Seattle Times has found.”
A copy of a recently used SBIRT Questionnaire can be found here
The data from the survey then goes to Tickit Health without the student’s name attached, then gives access to Seattle Children’s Research Institute (both contracted by King County). Schools can then re-link student’s names to their answers and follow up with them to offer support.
So much for protecting students’ identities.
The U.S. Department of Education’s privacy guidelines require schools to remove “direct identifiers,” such as names, from data being released, but that is not enough. Their identity is NOT protected when all other identifiers remain, since students can answer the open-ended questions with whatever information they want. The U.S. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) considers student data to be identifiable if “a reasonable person in the school community” without personal knowledge of the circumstances could “identify the student with reasonable certainty.”
This chart from The Seattle Times helps explain the flow of student data when the SBIRT is taken:
According to The Seattle Times article, each of the 12 King County School Districts participating in the SBIRT screening have to individually decide if the information provided in the kids’ screening results is part of their education record or not. If so, parents would have a right under federal law to see things that their children might not want them to know. If not, the information isn’t protected by a federal privacy law and it could be released publicly, compromising student privacy.
How did Tahoma respond when asked if student screening responses are covered by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and if parents have access to their kids’ responses?
Click here to view the district’s agreement on sharing student data.
Many also question if the screening crosses into the arena of research (which would require informed consent from students and/or parents) and if schools are attempting to become healthcare facilities.
Parents who have concerns over SBIRT are encouraged to attend the parent information night (hosted on zoom) and/or opt out their child. We the commend Tahoma School District for offering these parent information nights for families.
To register for the Middle School parent information night on Sep 21, 2022 at 6:00 PM, go here Webinar Registration - Zoom
To register for the High School parent information night on Sep 20, 2022 at 6:00 PM, go here Webinar Registration - Zoom
To opt your middle schooler out of SBIRT, go here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfFhCgp3OibIkG2rXObJqnE0WWc5jLrJSkzlAHQxj_jcBps7g/viewform
To opt your high schooler out of SBIRT, go here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScvBkSvbOly-sUS3bZxqcA47OaR4HcI0cL1zRYplWxreLsV2A/viewform
If you have further questions, contact a Student Wellness Advocate at your child’s school:
Pam McKinney
Maple View Middle School
425-413-5500
pmckinne@tahomasd.us
Bryan Lloyd
Summit Trail Middle School
blloyd@tahomasd.us
Mina Bryant
Tahoma High School
425-413-3290 x 9981
mbryant@tahomasd.us
Gwendolyn Huete
Tahoma High School
425-413-5614
ghuete@tahomasd.us
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