CASE STUDIES
Empowering Mental Health Professionals in Schools
How one social worker identified a solution to improve efficacy, reliability, and data for student support teams
As a veteran school social worker, now working at Austin Achieve Public Schools, Andrea Hale spent years wrestling with the familiar pain points plaguing students’ support service teams nationwide - how to manage her large case load with consistency and efficiency while effectively providing services to students and families.
With the increasing administrative workload and growing responsibilities on the job, student support teams often find themselves tracking interventions in a fragmented manner across multiple systems. Fellow social worker Taryn James explained how the school’s previous documentation system was essentially an embedded Word document created by a colleague. She and Hale felt strongly that a more unified approach to documentation would promote consistency and enable them to spend less time on paperwork and more time supporting students.
Hale and James also noticed that inconsistent documentation systems left room for potential liability risks. For years, their team envisioned finding “a system that aligned across our team, to make sure we were all doing the same documentation.” Systems in place in medical environments were not suited for the “unique combination of thorough detail and brevity to meet the needs of the school setting,” James reflected.
SocialNote provides a safe, detailed, and consistent way to communicate, codify, and document mental health support.
— Andrea Hale, Director of School-Based Mental Health, Austin Achieve Public Schools
A Problem-Solving Platform
In 2018, Hale heard about a new platform designed to do just that. SocialNote, a platform built by a social worker for social workers, offered an intriguing new way to document, manage, and share caseload information across an entire district.
She made a compelling case to their school leadership to invest in this program: it would bring much-needed consistency to crisis and support documentation for the social workers district-wide, saving valuable time and simultaneously adding a level of protection for the district. Most importantly, it had the potential to dramatically enhance student services by improving communication and coordination across all teams and grade levels.
Streamlining Student Support Workflows
As the Director of School-Based Mental Health for Austin Achieve Public Schools, Andrea Hale and her colleagues needed a streamlined, secure documentation system for their school social workers. Existing record-keeping was not cohesive – each social worker and mental health professional used their own system, leading to a lack of consistency and efficiency.
Specifically, the team had concerns about potential liability issues if and when the district was asked to share its records. Hale needed a tool in place that aligned her team’s documentation across their interactions with students to ensure accuracy and consistency.
In her previous work as a school social worker, Hale experienced firsthand the myriad benefits of SocialNote’s documentation system. She knew implementing SocialNote at Austin Achieve Public Schools would not only help her as an administrator in holding her team accountable, but more importantly, would make it easier for her to offer the school’s social workers intervention and support when necessary.
From Challenges to Cohesive Documentation
A beautifully done, intuitive to use, and highly efficient and effective documentation system.
— Taryn James, LCSW, KIPP Austin
From Social Workers to Systems
Hale and her fellow administrators at Austin Achieve Public Schools saw the value of SocialNote not only for themselves, but also for their broader student support team. Because of her familiarity with the platform, Hale knew an investment in SocialNote would add consistency to crisis and support documentation, while saving valuable time and vastly improving student support services, not to mention the streamlining of communication across teams and grade levels.
Saving Time, Creating Efficiencies
In addition to time-saving features, SocialNote fostered increased collaboration between district team members. The platform's capability to track student information in one consolidated place allowed social workers across grade levels and schools the ability to quickly and efficiently access student records, leading to better long-term support for students.
Mental health providers were no longer starting from scratch every school year and wasting precious time on locating and retrieving previous records on current students. These records were also quickly on hand any time new personnel joined the school, leading to a more efficient onboarding process for new hires and staffing changes.
Social Note reduces liability with a concrete and HIPAA/FERPA secure documentation system and allows leaders to get data around what their mental health team does to continue advocating for them to be in our schools.
— Janice Lopez, School Leader, KIPP Austin Collegiate
Analysis for Administrators
From her vantage point as a director, Hale was able to access a high-level view of student documentation across her team, providing ease and efficiency in her ability to hold them accountable. The reporting data provided by SocialNote allowed Hale quick access to a detailed snapshot of what was happening on a student level; now, administrators were able to obtain concrete data for accountability, planning, and intervention, allowing her to intervene and advocate for more support as needed for her providers and their students.
Another important value-add of the SocialNote system was the layer of liability protection provided by the consistent and confidential reporting system within the platform. The district was able to provide student services in a timely manner and keep accurate, timestamped records. The safety and security against miscommunications that this provides is invaluable while navigating the complicated web of student needs, parental oversight, and legal requirements of the student services environment.
Ultimately…
School leaders at Austin Achieve Public Schools gained a greater perspective on how impactful SocialNote has been for its social workers and the students they care for. The platform bolstered consistency among providers, increased efficiency, and fostered collaboration among district leaders and their social workers. The district as a whole was better able to meet the needs of more students over time.
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SocialNote provides a clear, connected workflow for school-based mental health work — from referrals and daily services to crisis documentation, outcomes, and defensible reporting.
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