• Visibly prioritize mental health and well-being in school plans and your actions.
• Lead, model, communicate, and support decisions and activities that foster an identity-affirming, mentally healthy school environment.
• Ensure equitable access to mental health professionals for every student. This will require analyzing data, policies, and practices for disparities and disproportionalities.
• Actively seek and listen to feedback from students, parents/caregivers, and community partners to evaluate your work in this area.
• Provide learning and training opportunities for staff members. This will enable them to effectively support students’ mental health needs in their respective roles.

• Start engagement and collaboration efforts with the understanding that they will require effort, time, humility, and authenticity to create respectful and trusting relationships.
• Be open to different approaches, timelines, and paces.
• Focus on diverse, representative, and widespread collaboration with staff, students, parents/caregivers, and community members. Work alongside to create supportive environments that disrupt and remove barriers to participation for marginalized individuals (e.g., offering transportation or childcare, meeting at different times or locations, providing meals).
• Make engagement efforts routine (not a one-time offering) and ensure that co-created guidelines and norms are in place to facilitate collaborative conversations and shared decision-making.
• Evaluate engagement and collaboration efforts and always ask, “Who is not represented or included?”
• When planning consultation or collaboration, remember that involvement should be meaningful – there should be real opportunities for influence. Be sure to report back following any consultations so participants know what actions have resulted from what was shared – or if nothing is happening, why not.
• Follow a listen-and-believe commitment. Actively listen to participants’ stories and experiences and believe them. Stories are valuable and powerful evidence.
• Provide workshops and tip sheets for families that connect to your school’s health planning. Consider offering events at locations other than the school (e.g., a faith centre in the community), in various languages, and at various times during the day.
• Cultivate opportunities for school staff to enhance their capacity to support student engagement initiatives, including allowing staff time, space, and permission to engage in professional development, planning, and initiatives related to student engagement.

• Know and understand the goals specific to mental health and well-being in the Student Achievement Plan and mental health and addictions strategy and action plan to ensure alignment. Incorporate mental health planning in your regular iterative process of school improvement planning.
• Seek to understand the strengths and needs related to mental health and well-being within your school community. Use the Leading Mentally Healthy Schools Reflection Tool to support your reflection and planning. If you’ve organized a team to promote mental health at your school, consider completing the reflection tool collaboratively.
• As part of planning, invite staff to reflect on the elements of a mentally healthy classroom using the Mentally Healthy Classroom Reflection Tool. Dialogue as a staff to identify opportunities to think in a school-wide manner.
• Review available data to understand where to focus your efforts. A powerful source of information may be the disaggregated data from the student census, if you have results from the school and depending on the questions included, as it may help you identify any opportunity gaps related to student identity. Other data may include course selection and achievement, enrolment, climate survey, and student voice initiatives. You can also talk with students, staff, parents/caregivers, and community partners to understand some of the opportunity gaps related to student mental health.
• Consider actions you can take at the school level that support the goals outlined in the board strategy and that align with the opportunities and needs you’ve identified through reflection and data review. In many cases, the Student Achievement Plan will include actions that affect all schools; for example, for educators to complete School Mental Health Ontario’s MH LIT: Mental Health in Action online course. The sections in this resource provide guidance aligned to the provincial three-year strategy to support your action planning.
• Identify opportunities to collaborate with staff, students, parents/caregivers, and community partners throughout the action-planning and implementation phases.
• Ensure you are addressing the needs of every student. Indigenous, Black, and marginalized student perspectives may be missing in mental health conversations, and school administrators have the power to make sure that doesn’t continue. For example, you can start by working with staff, students, parents/caregivers, and the community to identify and address oppressive policies and practices at the school level that disproportionately and negatively affect the mental health of racialized and marginalized students.
• Recognize that efforts to support student mental health don’t stand alone from other initiatives in your school – everything is connected. For example, your school’s approach to supporting daily physical activity can also support student and staff mental health. Any programs operating at your school to address food insecurity are connected to mental health. Your efforts to ensure culturally responsive learning and teaching also support student mental health.

• Support and collaborate with the board mental health leadership team to ensure alignment of student mental health initiatives and action planning.
• Consider how you might build and utilize a mental health leadership team at the school level. This team can include staff members reflecting the different roles within the school, parents/caregivers, students, and community partners. The mental health leadership team supports achieving, monitoring, and measuring the student mental health and well-being goal(s) embedded within your School Improvement Plan.
• You might also recognize that mental health fits well into an existing committee or team within your school community. Student mental health can be supported by the work you are already doing related to equity and inclusion, school climate and belonging, safe and healthy schools, and more. It’s not essential to create a new committee or team, but embedding student mental health into the leadership infrastructure within your school is an important part of demonstrating leadership commitment – the first foundation.

• Be familiar with board-level protocols and processes related to student mental health to ensure alignment with school-level protocols and processes.
• Make sure school-level protocols and processes ensure safe, culturally responsive, and evidence-informed decision-making regarding supports and services related to mental health and well-being.
• Ensure that any relevant protocols and processes are communicated to and understood by staff.
• Follow processes for decision support related to mental health programs, initiatives, and awareness activities in school, such as speakers, mental health surveys, and peer-support strategies.

• As you set actions in your School Improvement Plan, include indicators that you will use to measure progress toward your goals. Refer back to the data available for your school. Consider which indicators you’re focusing on changing and ensure that you have benchmarks so you can measure the progress.
• Monitoring and evaluating are ongoing practices. With the school-based mental health leadership team, check in on your plan at various points to review the indicators for your goals and consider whether you’re making progress or need to adjust/change.
• If you used the Leading Mentally Healthy Schools Reflection Tool and Mentally Health Classroom Reflection Tool as part of your vision and action planning, consider completing them again throughout the year to assess progress.

• Internal staff communication is the first priority. It helps to build an understanding of why certain initiatives are happening and how they fit with the overall school strategy. It can also help staff respond to questions they may receive. Staff need to know about:
  • the board’s strategy and school plan
  • the importance of mental health promotion and how it relates to learning
  • what to do if they’re concerned about a student’s mental health
  • how they can support students with mental health concerns
  • the board’s suicide-prevention, intervention, and postvention protocols – all school administrators and educators must have working knowledge of these protocols and know how to reach out for help immediately on behalf of students
  • how they can access employer support for their own mental health
  • changes, new programs, or tragic/challenging situations that are affecting the school community and what their role is
• When planning communication, start with your established communication channels –incorporate messaging across channels. The goal isn’t to create new work but to use what you have in place and build from there.
• Remember that face-to-face communication remains a powerful form of communication – it’s easy to do with the staff and students in your school. For parents/caregivers, opportunities include:
  • providing a few speaking points that educators can use during parent/caregiver–teacher interviews
  • adding messaging to speaking notes for in-person events (e.g., back-to-school, curriculum nights, concerts, school council events)
  • informal chats at pick-up/drop-off
  • hosting activities specific to mental health at the school or at locations in the community
  • setting up a booth at events that highlights activities that promote mental health at your school (e.g., orientation day, curriculum night)
• Before you communicate, ask yourself: who needs to know this, what do they need/want to know, and how do they want to hear about it? Remember that communication hasn’t happened unless the message is received, so ensure you’re repeating messaging and using multiple methods and channels to reach people.
• Examine and address communication barriers between school and home and community – for example, if you’ve changed to primarily digital communication, are you reaching all families? Consider communicating using the languages spoken within your student population.
• Ask the board mental health leadership team if there is templated content you can adapt for your school. This might include tips for parents/caregivers or guidance on how to access support through the school. Check the parent/caregiver section of the School Mental Health Ontario website for content to adapt. Many of the resources also include communication materials for home.
• Invite and welcome two-way communication. Let students, staff, and parents/caregivers know they can ask questions. If you receive comments on social media or questions through any other channel, respond promptly. If you don’t have the answer and it’ll take some time to find, you can reply to let the person know that.
• Some messages are better as one-on-one conversations – while making a personal phone call may take more time, it can go a long way to building trust and relationships.
• Communicate the aspirational goals for student mental health in positive and strengths-based terms. The goal is to foster a safe and supportive learning environment where every student feels valued and cared for and to provide resources and education to promote positive mental health.
• Communicate and celebrate successes and achievements, building confidence and hope in the collective efforts needed to realize improved well-being and mental health across the school.

Gómez, J. M., Gobin, R. L., Barnes, M. L. (2021) Discrimination, violence, & healing within marginalized communities. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 22(2), 135-140,

Hochhauser, S., Rao, S., England-Kennedy, E & Roy, S. (2020). Why social justice matters: a context for suicide prevention efforts. International Journal for Equity in Health, 19 (76).

Wisdom2Action & School Mental Health Ontario. (2021). #HearNowON: Ontario student perspectives on school mental health. Summary report.