Coastal Horizons Wins $7.5M SAMHSA Grant for School Mental Health

New Hanover County Schools and the Wilmington nonprofit Coastal Horizons will place 15 behavioral health staff inside the district's K-12 schools under a five-year, $7.5 million federal grant awarded to the provider by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

The grant, announced Tuesday, delivers $1.5 million a year through Project AWARE, the federal program whose name stands for Advancing Wellness and Resilience in Education. It is designed to help schools identify students' needs and connect them with behavioral health services, including support related to substance use.

What the money buys

Coastal Horizons, a behavioral health and human services provider based in Wilmington, will lead the initiative alongside the district. The organization's president and chief executive, Margaret Weller-Stargell, said the staff will work across prevention, early intervention and crisis response, and coordinate with families and community providers.

The district told Port City Daily that the grant will cover a team of 15 staff hired through Coastal Horizons, charged with building what the district described as a sustainable framework of expanded school-based mental health for students based on identified needs.

Coastal Horizons will construct a three-tier system of care spanning prevention, early intervention and referral to intensive treatment, so that schools, families and providers can recognize and respond to mental health concerns, substance use and co-occurring conditions in school-aged youth. That structure mirrors the tiered model most state and federal school mental health programs now use, and it treats a school referral as the entry point to clinical care rather than the end of the district's involvement.

"Supporting the mental health and well-being of our students is essential to helping them succeed in the classroom and in life," said Julie Varnam, deputy superintendent of New Hanover County Schools.

Fifteen staff, one district, five years

The award is unusual in scale for a single district, where behavioral health staffing is typically funded through state grants or local levy dollars rather than a dedicated federal clinical team. The 15 positions funded through the grant represent a standing clinical and support presence in the buildings rather than a one-time training contract.

Weller-Stargell framed the five-year term as the point. "No student should have to face a mental health challenge alone, and no family should have to navigate the search for help without support," she said. "This five-year investment gives us the opportunity to work alongside New Hanover County Schools to recognize concerns earlier, connect students with care, and build a lasting network of support."

The initiative sits at the intersection of two service systems that often fail to connect. Schools are the most common place where adolescent mental health and substance use problems surface, but they are rarely staffed to treat them, which is why referrals to outside providers such as mental health treatment and integrated care for co-occurring conditions determine whether an identified student actually receives care. Placing the staff inside the buildings is intended to shorten that gap.

A separate award to three other districts

North Carolina's Department of Public Instruction announced a separate five-year, $7.5 million Project AWARE award that will support three school districts across the state from 2026 through 2031. District officials said the two awards are distinct and that the New Hanover grant is not drawn from the state's allocation.

Both awards come from the same federal program, and both are structured around the same premise: that the federal government will pay to build behavioral health infrastructure in schools and expect the systems to outlive the funding. Whether the 15 Coastal Horizons positions continue when the grant ends in 2031 is not addressed in the announcement, and no measure of student outcomes has been published yet.