The Renton Student Health Hub connects students to mental health and behavioral services thanks to funding by the city of Renton.

At the 2025 Renton State of the City address, Mayor Armondo Pavone highlighted the health hub and said it helps enhance youth access to critical health services.

“By funding the Renton Student Health Hub, a partnership with the Renton School District and the Health Commons Project, we can ensure students receive the support they need to thrive, both in and out of the classroom,” Pavone said.

The city of Renton approved a contract with Health Commons Project to fund the Renton Student Health Hub on Nov. 25, 2024, for a total not to exceed $3,129,000 through 2026 using HB 1590 funds.

After being screened by school district staff, students and families needing behavioral health assistance are connected to health providers while maintaining confidential information. The hub also keeps school district staff informed when students are served.

Pavone said the hub offers easy and quick access to behavioral health and mental health services by utilizing technology to connect students to the appropriate resources when they need them most by linking schools, healthcare providers, and human service agencies

“This is a smart long-term investment,” Pavone said. “By addressing the health needs of our young people early on, we can reduce the need for expensive emergency intervention in the future.”

The funding goes toward Health Commons Project’s development and operation of the hub, the salaries and benefits for 2.5 FTE social worker/ case manager positions to support students and assist them in using the hub and grants to local service providers to participate in the hub.

In a video presentation, Renton School District superintendent Damien Pattenaude said the student health hub is a strategy to remove barriers students and families encounter when seeking out behavior and mental health support.

“The big thing for us is that we don’t believe anyone’s access to these resources and support should be dependent on who they know, whether that’s who the student knows, who the family knows or who the school counselor knows,” Pattenaude said.

Pattenaude said the Student Health Hub is supposed to serve as a “one-stop shop” for students and counselors can work together to get the services and supports students need. He said one of the unique aspects of the hubs is the ability to tailor the support to what they learn from the students in the survey.

“That could be anything from a specific area of behavioral and/or mental health, it could be cultural needs, it could be language needs,” Pattenaude said. “Wherever the student and their family are at, we want to meet them there and help them get the supports that they deserve.”

Also in the video, Seattle Children’s Hospital research professor Cari McCarty said the work is focused on doing school-based screening, providing brief interventions to students in school settings and helping them get referrals if more care is needed.

“Student mental health issues is actually the number one predictor of school dropout and so students who have mental health issues really face increased odds of a lot of negative outcomes later in life,” Cari McCarty said.

McCarty said the more they can impact and address these problems early on, the more they can help youth stay in school and build toward the future.

Parks and Recreation Administrator Maryjane Van Cleave said last year they worked on expanding their approach to social services.

“What we wanted to do, and at the direction of the mayor, was we wanted to invest upstream,” Van Cleave said. “We wanted to invest in our youth. To ensure that we needed some sort of connection with those students and that was through the Renton Health Hub and working with Health Commons.”

Van Cleave said they are looking at what they can adapt in terms of parks and recreational programming to provide holistic and well-rounded support for students in the future.