The Fiscal Year 2027 budget that the D.C. Council approved allocates dollars generated from a monthly telecommunications fee to sustain not only the operation of the District’s suicide hotline, but also pediatric crisis support and crisis support beds.
Another beneficiary of the telecommunications fee is the Child and Adolescent Mobile Psychiatric Service, also known as ChAMPS. For Mellie Harris, ChAMPS has been a beacon of light for her elementary school-aged son.
“He stayed on the phone with them…and the person was doing their best to make him laugh,” Harris, a Ward 8 mother of two, said about one of the instances when, within a matter of minutes, a ChAMPS representative prevented her son from jumping out of her car while she was driving.
“I was able to get home safely,” Harris told The Informer. “This was at a point where…I was very frustrated with him. I’m hungry and tired. He’s hungry and tired and was becoming a shouting match. I’m very grateful for ChAMPS to give me a moment and help him regulate.”
Earlier this year, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser presented her “Grow DC” budget proposal — a document that included the elimination of ChAMPS, a Catholic Charities program that provides on-site help to children facing mental crises at home, school or in the community.
This budget came amid D.C. Department of Behavioral Health (DBH)’s endeavor to sever ties with the community-based organizations staffing clinicians at District public and public charter schools. That would manifest in a proposal that included: a $5.26 million reallocation from community-based organizations to hire 45 school clinicians as District employees; $2.6 million in “assumed vacancy savings;” and the elimination of a $3.4 million pilot program that allowed public charter schools to directly employ clinicians.
During the budget season, Harris, a community health worker and advocate, played her part. That included raising awareness about how the proposed elimination of ChAMPS would affect young people liable to experience crises any and everywhere.
While speaking with The Informer, Harris recounted making at least three calls to ChAMPS during the recent school year. She’s since poured her energy into More Options Wellness, a network of practitioners working in and parallel to the clinical mental healthcare space.
“Clinical support is always really cool to have but… it’s not all-encompassing,” Harris told The Informer. “There are some gaps that are present even with these services being available. That’s one reason why… it’s definitely not a time to take any services away.”
During one of those incidents, a ChAMPS representative showed up to the scene alongside DBH, emergency medical personnel and members of the Metropolitan Police Department. Harris told The Informer that, if not for the persuasive powers of the ChAMPS representative, her son would’ve ended up in the back of a police cruiser.
“As a parent I should have been able to advocate for that alone, but it took some ‘professional’ dialogue for them to agree that my baby was safe enough to be transported in an ambulance,” Harris said. “It’s ridiculous if you ask me. If he was having a diabetic or physiological response, I would have been able to support him. It sucks [that] that’s how the processes are.”
Amid conversations about police-community relations, Harris said that ChAMPS is an invaluable resource for any young person trying to make it home safely. “They tried to treat my baby like a criminal in a health emergency,” Harris told The Informer. “If it was just D.C. Department of Behavioral Health alone, I don’t know what that advocacy would have looked like.”
Ongoing Conversations About School-Based Behavioral Health Offerings
When all was said and done this budget season, St. Coletta of Greater Washington, a Southeast-based public charter school for students with disabilities, received an additional $2.7 million.
Meanwhile, District public charter schools received nearly $16 million in additional dollars— though not what public charter officials deem sufficient in closing a gap between them and their public school counterparts. The council’s finalized FY 27 budget also allocated additional funding for 20 D.C. public schools, via Schools First in Budgeting Act, along with: educator wellness initiatives; course data collection, a literacy task force, adult literacy efforts, and another school year of community schools along with a task force centered on how to better fund the program.
Despite D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson’s additional $1.6 million, which makes $7.7 million total for community-based organizations, it remains to be seen how, or whether, DBH will address what’s anticipated to be at least five dozen school-based clinician vacancies. According to a June 4 letter D.C. Councilmember Christina Henderson (I-At large) wrote to DBH Director Dr. Barbara Bazron, the majority of those vacancies stem from the departure of community-based organizations for which DBH has decided not to use FY27 option years,
By the time Henderson sent the letter, the council’s Committee on Health recommended a reallocation of $6.1 million from within the School-Based Behavioral Health budget to restore funding for community-based organization grants. This move, which resulted in a net increase of $700,000 for the program, brought the total recommended FY27 budget of $19.2 million for school-based behavioral health — $5.2 million less what was approved during the previous fiscal year.
During the earlier part of June, Henderson said that, over the past few months, DBH has taken a course of action that doesn’t look like it will produce the best outcomes for young people. In response to what’s been described as a change in program funding structure, the Committee on Health introduced the FY 2027 Budget Support Act subtitle, School-Based Behavioral Health Program Stabilization and Oversight Act of 2026, which requires DBH to maintain a hybrid model for the 2026-2027 school, rather than bring the School-Based Behavioral Health Program entirely in-house.
“We asked DBH to do a comprehensive plan on how they’re gonna improve school-based behavioral health, and their response back was, ‘OK, well, we’ll just bring it in-house.’”Henderson told The Informer. “That’s not what we asked. How are we gonna improve service delivery? How are we gonna improve hiring and retention of clinicians?”
Earlier this year, DBH presented a comprehensive improvement plan that, in place of one clinician at each school, touted the presence of one clinician between two schools, clinicians and prevention specialists serving various schools simultaneously, and a telehealth program.
The plan also phased out community-based organizations, some of which agency leaders said didn’t meet the mark in service provision. In her letter, Henderson, chair of the council’s Committee on Health, alluded to three service providers’ engagement with DBH about concerns and the potential for corrective action, telling Bazron preserving relationships must take priority.
While speaking to The Informer, Henderson reiterated that point, questioning the degree to which DBH has always involved community-based organizations and other parties in conversation.
“They were making decisions in a vacuum,” Henderson said, “as opposed to actually having meaningful conversations with stakeholders about how to improve the program.”
The Bigger Picture, as Explained by an Advocate
A council staffer told The Informer that DBH is scheduled to respond to Henderson’s letter by July 1. DBH didn’t immediately respond to inquiries about the agency’s use of those option years, or how far along it is in replacing outgoing community-based organizations with in-house service providers.
Licensed professional counselor Chris Gamble told The Informer that District officials could benefit from a close examination of their budgetary decisions.
“There’s the issue of looking at numbers on the page and not talking to the people doing the work,” Gamble said. “Some of the really positive impacts of this work is not going to show up in whatever data is reported, [whether it’s] how much a child is able to connect and open up to the clinician at their school.”
Earlier this year, as it unveiled its plans to sever ties with community-based organizations and replace ChAMPS with in-house personnel inexperienced in youth affairs, DBH’s school-based behavioral health program reached 77% school coverage.
Throughout much of the budget season, Gamble and other members of the Children’s Law Center have rallied around efforts to ensure those service providers stay in place. With a client base that includes foster youth and families facing housing insecurity, Gamble said the worst is to come if DBH follows through with its plans.
“There are so many gaps across the behavioral health system and the continuum of care, like what kids can access, how easy it is to access it, whether there are wait lists,” Gamble told The Informer. “It would just unnecessarily add another, another gap in there.”
In addition to skepticism around DBH’s evaluation of the community-based organizations, Gamble raised questions about how the agency, amid a personnel shortage, would be able to make the pivot to in-house clinicians within a matter of two to three years.
“That’s one of our biggest concerns,” Gamble told The Informer. “It’s a tough job market. Licensed clinicians have a lot of options, whether it’s the school-based program, other programs in D.C. or just in the private sector. To say that ‘We can easily get these 60 clinicians, whether it’s over the next two years or whatever,’ is just hard to do.”
