Taxpayer-funded mental health screenings for Duval, Clay students never happened

Your tax dollars were supposed to pay for free mental health screenings for thousands of local students.

Most of those screenings never happened, but that Fernandina Beach company still got paid for them.

Action News Jax reported on Wednesday that Florida House of Representatives Speaker Richard Corcoran is demanding Florida Psychological Associates stop receiving tax dollars immediately.

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On Thursday, Action News Jax confirmed two school districts, Duval and Clay, never got the screenings taxpayers paid for.

Child Protection Team chief Dr. Randy Alexander said screening for mental health risks early on can prevent all kinds of issues down the road.

“That’s an age at which we can still potentially make a difference by various interventions before they might have decades of adult health that’s not good,” Alexander said. “It’s not only just the bad, acting-out behaviors that you might be preventing, but the inward behaviors. Perhaps depression, alcoholism, drug use.”

That’s the whole point of FPA’s mental health screening program, called CELPHIE.

CELPHIE got $1 million in appropriations, funded by taxpayers, in Florida State University’s budget this year.

The CEO of Florida Psychological Associates, Dr. Catherine Drew, is the wife of Nassau County Tax Collector John Drew.

John Drew is State Sen. Aaron Bean's former campaign manager.

An internal FSU email said the appropriation was “‘parked’ in our budget to avoid a veto” after Bean’s attempt to fund the program through the state legislature failed.

New financial documents show FSU paid FPA nearly $600,000 since July 2016.

Forty-eight hundred students and criminal defendants were supposed to be screened by the end of March.

But records show CELPHIE has only screened 358 students, all in Nassau County schools.

Duval and Clay County school district spokespeople confirmed no CELPHIE screenings have been administered to students in their districts.

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FPA’s public relations spokesman John Daigle said the contract requires FPA to “attempt” to screen 4,500 students in Duval, Clay and Nassau Counties.

Daigle said FPA met that obligation when it sent permissions slips home to 8,000 Nassau County students, even though only a fraction of them actually wound up getting screened.

He also said FPA didn’t get approval from FSU’s Institutional Review Board to begin screening students until Nov. 1.

He said FPA just got approval from the board this week to start screening local criminal defendants.

FSU has already agreed to give back the $200,000 of the appropriation the university had taken for “indirect costs.”

Cox Media Group