Center Welcomes

New Executive Director

The Center for Children, Families and Workforce Development is pleased to announce the selection of Kate Chapin as its new Executive Director. Chapin will begin her new duties on May 16th, 2022, and follows the Center’s founder and previous Executive Director, Ryan Tolleson Knee, who is retiring after nearly thirty years of service at the University of Montana.  

“I am honored to serve as the next Director, and to lead this amazing group of people,” says Chapin. “Our team is well poised to continue to serve Montana, and I am excited to bring the work of this organization to more people across our beautiful and vast state.” 

Chapin received her MSW from the University of Montana in 2007. She has worked in a variety of roles at UM including serving as the Director of the Student Advocacy Resource Center (2006-10), and Clinical Professor/Director of Field Education for the School of Social Work (2013-19). In 2019, Chapin began working for the Center as a Program Evaluator and took the lead on various projects and grants. Her work included program evaluation for the Zero Suicide in Health Systems Implementation Grant, a statewide multi-year evaluation that serves Tribal health systems across Montana. In addition, she has been the lead evaluator for a statewide school-based substance abuse and suicide prevention program, and the co-principal investigator for the Interprofessional Student Hotspotting Program, a team-based approach to serving patients with complex medical and social needs.

“The Center has earned a reputation of carefully listening and actively responding to the diverse health and welfare needs across our state. We will continue to leverage the expertise of our team to build the capacity of public health, education and human services in rural, Tribal, urban and frontier communities. Our goal is to help Montana serve Montanans better,” says Chapin.  



Please help us welcome Kate.

We're excited for the future of the Center under her direction.

The Struggle to Support Mental Health in Rural Schools

Nearly twenty percent of school age children experience serious mental health problems, yet few actually receive services. This is particularly true in rural states, where limited access to resources and mental health care creates additional barriers to receiving treatment. In Montana, we feel the pain of this statistic all too well, thereby experiencing higher rates of suicide and trauma than almost all other states. 

Four years ago, the Center began working to help rural schools develop the capacity to prevent mental illness and support wellness through a multi-state research grant. The grant helps rural schools in Montana, Missouri and Virginia identify students at-risk of developing mental illness and provide evidence-based interventions to address risk factors. 

A large body of research demonstrates that students who have not mastered social emotional learning (SEL) — such as the ability to self-regulate and manage emotions — are at-risk of developing mental illness. Current teachers report that their students’ ability to self-regulate, resolve conflict, and manage emotions have markedly declined from student abilities ten to 15 years ago. There are many reasons for this decline — increased access to internet and electronic devices, and increased stress and isolation due to the pandemic — to name a few. The bottom line is schools need to rethink how they address student behavior and begin teaching social emotional learning just like they do academics. 

The research project is in its fourth year and has completed the development of the Early Identification System, an SEL screener that identifies students at-risk of developing mental illness, and an intervention hub that matches student needs to evidenced-based interventions to be carried out in rural schools. The project has developed materials and tools vetted by rural schools. The hope is for rural schools to employ culturally relevant, effective prevention and intervention support that meets the needs of their students. 

In April, the Center’s research team traveled to Missouri to present materials and tools they helped develop to national experts and scholars who provided feedback and ideas for improvement. Experts from eight states converged and spent two days reviewing materials, responding to surveys, and offering suggestions to improve the quality of the project. The Center will incorporate this feedback in the final phase of the project which assesses the efficacy of the EIS and intervention hub when used in rural schools across Montana, Virginia and Missouri.



This fall the project will accept a small number of schools to begin the research. If you are interested in learning more about the research or are interested in having your school participate, contact Carol Ewen at [email protected].