Sensing school community needs: a co-designed, personalized mental health app for high school students, parents, and staff

Abstract

The need to scale proven approaches towards the mental health care of students in under-resourced, urban public school districts grows increasingly urgent. To help address this challenge, we are developing Connectd for Schools, a mobile app aimed at providing personalized digital and local resources towards the mental health needs of high school students, parents, and teachers in large, urban school systems. The app builds on an established community partnered participatory approach to the design, development, and deployment of resilience-focused prevention interventions for school populations, co-designed by school and academic partners. This novel approach is designed to deploy a personalized and localized privacy-preserving, community sensing technology within a large, urban public school setting to three distinct audiences, with the potential for improving linkage to established behavioral health care pipelines. Along with the opportunities of this app come some challenges: scaling participatory design, the potential for mislabeled data, and community trust. The release of Connectd for Schools will occur in Fall of 2022; we share how we got to this point, and the next steps ahead.