CT passed ‘historic’ kids mental health legislation. Three years later, not much has changed

CT Insider – Monday, June 16, 2025
By Alex Putterman

For a brief time in spring 2022, nothing seemed to matter more in Connecticut politics than addressing the rising mental health needs of the state’s children.

As the COVID-19 pandemic drove a kids mental health crisis, lawmakers passed three sweeping bills containing dozens of provisions meant to address the issue. Ambitious new programs, additional resources for schools, an array of studies and task forces.

“We had to do more, especially coming after two years of COVID,” Gov. Ned Lamont said upon signing the legislation. “We’re going to make a difference in these kids’ lives.”

Three years later, though, advocates question whether the bills have truly fulfilled their promise. Funding has tapered off. Grant programs have ended. Task forces have stalled. Meanwhile, children continue to visit the emergency room for suicidal ideation and self-harm in large numbers, and key kids mental health services still have long wait lists.

Even the legislation’s biggest successes come with asterisks. A new committee on children’s behavioral health has drawn rave reviews… but lawmakers failed to adopt its recommendations during the recent legislative session. New urgent crisis centers have shown promising results… but are perennially in danger of closing amid long-term funding concerns.

Overall, advocates and providers say they’ve been underwhelmed by the legislation’s impact — and, even more so, frustrated by lawmakers’ level of attention to children’s mental health in the years since. Some have pushed for the legislature to address children’s mental health in a special session this year, something one top lawmaker says it a real possibility.

“There were some good new initiatives that were lifted up,” Sarah Eagan, executive director of the Center for Children’s Advocacy, said of the 2022 bills. “But we have not really come close yet to resolving our systemic statewide problems in how we deliver care to children.”

When it comes to kids mental health needs in Connecticut, Eagan said, “We’re pretty much where we were.”

Sprawling legislation

The 2022 package of kids mental health legislation included three bills: the House of Representatives’ top priority bill of the session, and the Senate’s top two priority bills of the session.

All three drew broad bipartisan support, passing both chambers overwhelmingly — in some cases unanimously. Lawmakers repeatedly touted the package of legislation as “historic.”

The bills included so many sections and provisions, it’s difficult to concisely summarize them. They established new forms of care, such as urgent crisis centers and crisis stabilization beds. They broadened existed programs, such as a mobile crisis response service, which expanded to 24 hours. They increased resources for school-based mental health and established initiatives to help boost staffing there. They created numerous committees and task forces and called for copious reports and studies.

In many cases, these programs have helped kids, exactly as they were intended to, whether on a temporary basis or on a lasting one. Rep. Tammy Exum, a West Hartford Democrat who helped draft some of the legislation, touts urgent crisis centers a as particular success.

“We really put as a priority, front and center, children’s behavioral health,” Exum said. “We elevated the urgency around it.”

Looking through the provisions, though, it’s notable how many appear to have made less impact than lawmakers may have intended. Some of the task forces have met only sporadically, while others don’t seem to have been created at all. For example, it’s unclear whether a “task force to combat ableism,” established in one of the bills, ever convened, let alone generated a report that was due by Jan. 1, 2023.

Multiple advocates say they’re unaware of that task force, and Rep. Jennifer Leeper, co-chair of the legislature’s Education Committee, said as far as she can tell, it “doesn’t seem to have ever been formed.”

Some advocates were excited about a new “social determinants of mental health” fund designed to help poor families pay for mental health services. That fund, though, has received only $2 million total since it was established, all of which has been expended, a state spokesperson said.

Another problem, advocates say, is that key programs were established using federal money from the American Rescue Plan Act, which always came with an expiration date. From urgent crisis centers to grants for school-based services, many of the most ambitious initiatives lacked a permanent funding stream.

In some cases, lawmakers intended these programs to be temporary, to help school districts or non-profits deal with the immediate effects of the pandemic. In other cases, including some that required significant new infrastructure, they imagined the programs enduring long into the future but never gamed out how long-term funding would work.

“A lot of the things we were trying were funded with one-time ARPA money,” Eagan said. “So like, What was the plan to maintain that once the federal money was gone?”

Programs in limbo

By most accounts, the urgent crisis centers that have opened in Hartford, Waterbury, New Haven and New London represent a shining example of a new program helping the state’s children.

These centers, created with ARPA money, offer a softer alternative to the emergency room for children in mental health crisis. Instead of spending hours in a stressful hospital setting, they receive treatment in calming, quiet environment, from staff trained in how best to meet their needs.

Providers say the UCCs have helped hundreds of kids and will benefit even more as word spreads and volume increases. Advocates are thrilled to have a new level of care they can refer families to. Top state officials have repeatedly praised the program.

Yet year after year, the officials who operate the UCCs find themselves stressing whether the state will fund the centers, now that the federal funding that initially sustained them has expired.

This year, the state budget includes significant funding for the program through Medicaid, which advocates say is better than nothing — but which won’t help the roughly 40% of patients who have private insurance. An additional $2 million in grant funding will further help sustain the UCCs in the short-term, a spokesperson for the state Office of Policy and Management said.

Gary Steck, CEO of Wellmore Behavioral Health, which operates a UCC in Waterbury, said state support for UCCs remains insufficient. Without a further solution, he said, Wellmore may have to shutter its program this summer.

“I feel like we are at a crisis point with our urgent crisis center,” Steck said. “We’re at the point of having to begin planning to wind it down because there isn’t a committed plan for resources.”

At The Village for Families and Children in Hartford, which operates one of the UCCs, Dr. Laine Taylor said officials are scrambling to make sure they can access the funding the state has allocated for the program.

“I’m still hopeful,” said Taylor, The Village’s chief medical officer. “Because there’s still a lot of desire for the UCCs to work.”

The story is similar when it comes to other programs funded with federal money through the 2022 kids mental health legislation.

For example, one of the 2022 bills expanded Connecticut’s mobile crisis intervention service from 16 hours a day to 24, in line with what’s considered best-practice nationally. As of this week, advocates were unclear whether the budget included enough funding to maintain that expansion.

“That means that the mobile crisis system might be looking at reverting back to pre-ARPA grant funding levels, which will be enough to operate the core of the system, but not enough to maintain recent expansions of 24/7 access,” Jeff Vanderploeg, president of the Child Health and Development Institute of Connecticut, said in an email.

Exum said lawmakers are working on a solution to make sure the program is fully funded for both of the next two fiscal years.

As Steck sees it, uncertainty around the UCCs and the 24-hour mobile crisis service indicate a lack of commitment to the programs at the heart of the landmark legislation.

“The two things that were the core of the 2022 children’s mental health reforms that were really meant to radically change and improve the children’s behavioral health system and address the crisis we’re in are potentially falling apart because the funding isn’t there,” he said.

Success and failure of TCB committee

Nearly everyone interviewed for this story pointed to the Transforming Children’s Behavioral Health Policy and Planning committee, known as TCB, as another soaring success of the 2022 legislation.

“I belong to a lot of committees and legislative groups, and this one feels the most optimistic,” said Alice Forrester, CEO of the Hamden-based behavioral health non-profit Clifford Beers.

“It has pulled together providers and agencies and people with a commitment to children’s mental health to work on those issues and try to figure out, how do we tackle the reality that our children are not okay,” said Christina Ghio, the state’s acting child advocate. “That’s important.”

But even here, the story isn’t all positive: Advocates were surprised last week when the legislature failed to pass a bill containing several of the committee’s policy recommendations, including several reports on how to sustain key services and provisions around reporting child abuse.

The bill passed the House of Representatives on the final night of the legislative session but didn’t come up for a vote in the Senate.

“It’s very disappointing,” Ghio said. “That bill represents a tremendous amount of work and some really important steps towards addressing children’s mental health, and I hope that there is a commitment from the legislature to move that legislation forward.”

Exum, who pushed hard for the bill, said watching it fail on the final night of the session was “kind of a gut-punch” after the work she’d put into it.

The good news for advocates is that the bill could be back very soon. Speaker of the House Matt Ritter, a Hartford Democrat, said Thursday lawmakers could take up the proposal again at a special session sometime in the coming months.

“To the extent that bills pass the House overwhelmingly, those become, in my opinion, prime targets to look at in a special session,” he said.

Show me the money

One after one, advocates proposed the same solution to these issues: more money for Medicaid reimbursement rates so providers can maintain and expand their offerings around kids mental health.

“Medicaid rates are not everything. There are lots of children who are not on Medicaid who need access to services,” Ghio said. “But I do think the Medicaid rates are a really important driver of what’s available to families.”

Added Eagan: “I think providers are beside themselves over the lack of investment in Medicaid and non-profits.”

Ultimately, advocates and providers say, any new initiative is only as valuable as the willingness to fund it.

“You can have really great ideas, but if we’re going to make these things happen, there’s going to have to be serious financing conversations,” Forrester said.

This year, the legislature devoted several hundred million dollars to boosting Connecticut’s Medicaid rates, which had significantly lagged peer states. While that money should help behavioral health providers maintain their services, the total was not as large as advocates — and some lawmakers — said was necessary.

Meanwhile, it’s not as though the crisis that precipitated the 2022 legislation has meaningfully improved. One well-regarded in-home children’s behavioral health program, known as IICAPS, still has a waiting list of more 500 kids, and state data shows youth behavioral health emergency room volume has not meaningfully decreased in recent years, nor has the number of kids “stuck” in the emergency room awaiting mental health care.

Three years ago, Connecticut lawmakers came together to pass sweeping legislation, designed to tackle a difficult problem from near-countless different angles.

What does it say that, today, the problem remains essentially unchanged?

“I don’t think legislation alone can solve this problem,” Exum said. “The sad reality is, it takes a lot of time and a lot of collective effort to move systems, to move things forward.”

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