Reply to Illinois: Why You Don’t Want Your Children Screened for Mental Health in Schools

Attempting to usurp the parent role, this law could become the most destructive of all the leftist progressive projects. But that’s not the only reason it’s a stupid idea.

CATEGORY: SCHOOLS

Psychologist Dana Weiner, PhD

Source: Office of the Governor of Illinois news release
Read time: 2.3 minutes
 
This Happened
In July 2025, Illinois became the first state in the nation to mandate universal screening for mental health in schools.
 
Who Did This?
Psychologist Dana Weiner, PhD leads the initiative. She was appointed the Chief Officer for the Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation in March 2022. She is a Senior Policy Fellow at Chapin Hall, a progressive think tank focused on child welfare.
 
The Premise
The passage of Illinois Senate Bill 1560 sets the following timeline: By September 1, 2026, the State Board of Education, guided by the Governor’s Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation Team, must publish the materials and procedures for phased implementation. These must cover opt-out provisions, confidentiality and privacy, family communication, data safety, and follow-up care. Starting in the 2027–2028 school year, all public school districts must offer annual mental health screenings to all students in grades 3–12.
 
Analysis
Illinois SB1560 is being sold as a bold step toward solving the so-called “youth mental health crisis,” but in reality it is a misguided policy destined to create more harm than good. The project raises multiple serious concerns:
1. If you’re a parent and concerned about your child’s mental health, why don’t you get your own assessment? Why would you be waiting on an annual school screen?
Here’s how it likely will actually work. Competent parents will opt out. But parents who do not opt out and believe this project will magically get help for their children, are likely the same parents who have been unwilling to get help for their children on their own initiative. A school counselor cannot, and should not, unilaterally refer children to providers.
2. Research is clear that self-report surveys are riddled with flaws. These instruments routinely generate high false-positive rates [1]. Healthy children will be flagged for clinical referral because of normative unhappiness or fluctuations in mood or stress.
3. These children are a non-help seeking population. Many of them will see through the absurdity of the exercise, or rightfully resent it, and provide false answers on the surveys. The database will be riddled with invalid data.
4. Once thousands of new “cases” are generated, the already overstretched school counselors and psychologists will be buried under an impossible workload. An investigative report in 2023 documented that Illinois’ existing non-school screening program, which is much smaller than the planned school screenings, is already unable to link referrals to clinical care [2].
5. The collection and storage of highly sensitive personal information raises enormous privacy concerns. Who will see this data? How will it be shared? How are teachers—a profession not focused on health care—to guard children’s privacy? When this concern was raised in the planning stage last year, Weiner’s team brushed it off with an assurance that they will have policies in place. 

6. Worst of all, the practice of universal mental health screening is psychologically insidious. By training children from third grade onward to complete surveys every year, the state is implicitly telling them they are fragile, unstable, and should be vigilant for signs of illness.

Why Is This Happening?
Illinois SB1560 did not arise in a vacuum.
The push for mental health screening is part of the same agenda that brought CRT, DEI, and transgender ideology into schools. It is not organic—it is a cultural engineering project. Its roots lie in neo-Marxist thought, which seeks to dismantle family, religion, and national identity to replace them with state-driven collectivism. Instead of resilience, children are socialized into “awareness” of oppression.

These ideological projects put into practice the arrogant claim that institutions know better than families, rooted in progressivism’s eternal folly that enlightened self-interest—not the empirically-proven moral commitments of family, tribe, and tradition—is the path to collective happiness.
This project is possibly more destructive than the other progressive projects because it appears more moderate than the controversial CRT, DEI, and transgender projects in schools. Once implemented, however, universal screening will perpetuate the myth of a child mental health crisis, the notion that humans are highly fragile, and provide a launch point for a world of possibilities for state intervention, invasion of privacy, and an expanded welfare state.
 
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References
[1] Scheeringa MS (2025). False positives for Criterion A trauma events and PTSD symptoms with  questionnaires are common in children and adolescents and could not be eliminated with enhanced instructions. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology 35(6):347-352. DOI:
10.1089/cap.2024.0126.
[2] Karp S, Schorsch K (March 11, 2023). Illinois lifeline program for suicidal kids struggles amid a youth mental health crisis, staffing shortages. Chicago Sun Times.