The Department of Psychology received a $3.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education. ACU is the only Texas university to receive the Mental Health Service Professionals Demonstration Grant and one of 30 in the country.

The grant will be used to help decrease the national shortage of school psychologists; support mental health services in local public schools, specifically for younger students; and help recruit and retain graduate students. 

Mental health services will increase for Abilene and Wylie ISD through Project SMILE (School Psychologists Molded into Interdisciplinary Leaders in Education). 

“The way that we’ll do that is our graduate students and our school psych program will go out into both Abilene and Wiley ISD,” said Dr. Rachel Team, director of the program. “They’re providing specifically social skills training to the pre-k programs.”

Team said that starting as early as pre-k and supporting kids in their social-emotional development at that stage, they can prevent further issues down the road.

Dr. Brit’ny Stien, associate professor of psychology, said the goal of Project SMILE is to establish a network of highly trained school psychologists. It also aims to expand the pipeline of diverse trainees entering school-based mental health programs.

“It’s about going ahead and providing access and support to students and it’s also about increasing the number of diverse school psychologists,” Stein said.

The grant will allow the department to provide an additional $20,000-a-year stipend to graduate students to help with tuition and living expenses. The goal is to help students pursue graduate school. 

“To be a type of psychologist; a licensed professional counselor; a school psychologist. Any of those, you have to go on and get at least a master’s degree to do that,” Team said. 

The nation has experienced a shortage of mental health professionals, especially in rural and low-income areas.

“We have been at a shortage of specifically school psychologists but also all mental health professionals in our region for years,” Team said.

To help further prepare students to work in the field of psychology, the department will be paying for students to attend an out-of-state conference at the National Association of School Psychologists conference.

The grant will help provide funding for travel. Over 6,000 psychologists from across the country attend so students can learn how different states and districts handle school psychology.

“We’re also able to send our school psychology supervisors to the big conference as well,” Team said. “So they get training on being better supervisors and exposure to more things in the field.”