Conclusion: Middle and high school students were capable of identifying significant differences in
their own BER across schools, suggesting that universal mental health risk screening via
student self-report is potentially useful for identifying aggregated community risk in a given school
that may warrant differential deployment of mental health prevention and intervention strategies.
BESS results reliably identified individual mental health risk associated with special education
placement, which is documented to lead to poor school outcomes such as school dropout and lack
of enrollment in post-secondary education. [West J Emerg Med. 2013;14(4):384–390.]