School Mental Health Program Quality Dashboard: What to Measure

Access and referral

• Referral volume and source.
• Referral completeness on first review.
• Referral-to-disposition time.
• Disposition mix across the available continuum.
• Percentage successfully connected to the recommended support.
• Re-referral rate and original disposition.

Delivery and clinical usefulness

• Time from acceptance to first substantive service.
• Expected versus delivered intervention dose when meaningful.
• Progress-monitoring completion at defined review points.
• Continue/adapt/step-up/step-down/close decisions and their timing.
• Student/family experience or acceptability feedback when feasible.

Safety, supervision, and workforce reliability

• Risk/safety consultations and emergency activations reviewed for process learning, not as a productivity target.
• Prompt-consultation access and unresolved consultation requests.
• Protected supervision completion and backup coverage.
• Documentation timeliness and recurring quality themes.
• Caseload/workload indicators that include meetings, travel, documentation, crisis work, and coordination rather than student count alone.

Equity and system improvement

• Referral, acceptance, redirection, connection, step-up, step-down, and closure patterns across relevant student groups when lawful and appropriate.
• Reasons for pathway differences rather than relying only on raw percentages.
• One named system improvement from each review cycle with an owner and review date.
• Track whether the improvement changed the metric or merely created a new procedure.

Use SHAPE as a system-level reference point

The National Center for School Mental Health's SHAPE system is designed for schools, districts, and partners to assess comprehensive school mental-health systems, document services across tiers, prioritize quality-improvement needs, and monitor progress over time. Local dashboards can complement that work by making the program's own operational pathway visible between formal assessment cycles.