Therapy that comes to the child.
THRIVE places a licensed clinician, a care coordinator, and supervised graduate clinicians inside a Title I elementary school and keeps them there for the full academic year. Children from age three through fifth grade receive clinical therapy during the school day, in their own building, at no cost to their family.
No parent has to arrange transportation, take time off work, or navigate a referral system to get a child seen.
1:567
students to school-based mental health counselors in South Carolina
1 in 5
youth will develop mental health difficulties that warrant a diagnosis
SC Department of Health and Human Services, January 2026.
77%
of South Carolina youth with a major depressive episode receive no treatment at all
South Carolina meets only 30.7 percent of the mental health workforce need in its designated shortage areas. When a school counselor identifies a child who needs therapy, the usual next step is a referral to a community provider, and a majority of those children never finish care.
We do not refer children out. We build the care into the school.
HOW IT WORKS
Every embedded school receives the same team. A licensed therapist carrying the individual caseload. A care coordinator who owns the referral pipeline, the scheduling, the family contact, and the relationship with the school. At least one graduate clinical intern, trained in play therapy before ever seeing a child and supervised in house.
The care coordinator is the seat that makes the model work, and it is the one most often missing from school-based mental health. A therapist placed in a building without that infrastructure is isolated and quickly overwhelmed. With it, therapy becomes part of a system the school community trusts.
THREE TIERS OF SUPPORT
Assessment places a student at the level of care they need. Our tiers align with the school district's own Multi-Tiered System of Supports, so we add to what a school already does rather than working around it.
Tier 1 - Universal Services
School-wide mental health resources and trauma-informed training for every adult who sees students each day.
Tier 2 - Targeted Support Services
Small group and individual support delivered by graduate clinical interns under licensed supervision, focused on grief, anxiety, emotional regulation, and social skills.
Tier 3 - Intensive Support Services
Individual therapy delivered by a licensed clinician for students carrying significant trauma or distress, using trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy and other evidence-based modalities.
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Documentation lives in Salesforce and nowhere else. Session notes are entered within 24 hours, and assessment results within 24 hours of administration. A treatment plan is written early in care, with a fidelity check every four sessions once the plan exists. Guardians hear from us every two weeks and teachers monthly. The MTSS tracker is shared with school staff and updated daily, so a principal can follow our progress in real time rather than waiting for a report at the end of the year.
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Every THRIVE student is assessed with a validated instrument before care begins and again before it ends. ClearMark Group, our external analytics partner, produces quarterly dashboards and board-level reporting from that data.
We are candid about where we stand. Our pre and post data shows real movement, strongest on student self-report, and at these sample sizes it is directional rather than conclusive. We do not yet have a comparison group, which means we can show improvement without attributing it.
Our goal this year is 70 percent or more of THRIVE students shifting from elevated into normative range, and building the infrastructure to say that with confidence is the explicit work of this fiscal year.
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Memminger, Pepperhill, and Hunley Park Elementary, across Charleston, Berkeley, and Dorchester counties.
Last school year we delivered 907 hours of individual therapy to 60 students, an average of just over fifteen hours of care per child. This year we are serving 100 students.
FOR SCHOOLS
We are expanding to ten schools across the tri-county by 2029. If your school is interested in an embedded THRIVE team, we will walk you through what the partnership requires on both sides.