HCPSSStaff Focus: La Tanya Robinson, School Social Worker
May 21st, 2025
La Tanya Robinson was working as an Adult Outpatient Therapist at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center when she decided she was ready for a change. Instead of working with adults, she wanted to work with children. And she wanted to work in a school.
In 2018, Robinson, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, was hired to work at Homewood Center’s Bridges Program where she provided therapy and counseling services to students with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), helping to ensure that the social-emotional goals outlined in their IEPs were being met.
Four years later, the opportunity emerged for Robinson to take part in helping to expand HCPSS’ School-Based Mental Health Services (SBMHS) program. The program, started in 2018, enables students to receive mental health treatment from approved community mental health agencies while they are in school.
“I was excited to have the chance to help build a program from scratch and remove barriers to students’ access to mental health services,” Robinson recalls.
Today, Robinson is responsible for the SBMHS program at three HCPSS schools: Lisbon Elementary, Glenwood Middle, and Glenelg High School. In practice, that means several things. First, she collaborates closely with school counselors, psychologists, and other school staff to identify students who may benefit from SBMHS. Second, Robinson reaches out to the student’s parents/guardians to discuss the SBMHS program. Third, if the parent/guardian would like their child to receive those services, she connects them with the mental health agency assigned to the school to discuss the child’s specific needs and treatment options.
Additionally, if a parent/guardian decides their child needs an alternative to SBMHS, Robinson researches other options and, when possible, helps to connect them with a local community mental health provider.
“I’ll pull together a curated list of providers based on what the parent/guardian is looking for in terms of things like location, modality (treatment method), and accepted insurance,” she explains.
Robinson also helps families in what she describes as “navigating systems.”
“There are times where a parent/guardian has identified a provider they want to work with, but can’t get through to that provider to actually arrange for services. Or maybe they have been on a waitlist for months, but haven’t heard anything from the provider. Whenever I can, I help them figure out who they need to call and what they need to say to help move things forward and get their child the help they need.”
In addition to her work in the SBMHS program assisting parents/guardians, Robinson provides therapeutic support to students. This can include play-based interventions for younger students or facilitating a group on stress management for high school students.
Robinson also sits on, and consults with several school teams and committees, including the Instructional Intervention Team, Student Support Team, and the Diversity Equity Inclusion Team. As a school social worker, she can be further called upon to participate in other teams (e.g. the Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) team and/or the districtwide crisis intervention team) and assist school teams in helping to implement schoolwide trauma-based professional learning for staff members.
“My primary role is always to make sure that when we’re looking at what is happening with a given student and brainstorming different ways we can help that we’re always considering the student’s mental health and the role it may be playing in the behaviors we are seeing,” she says.
Robinson also leads HCPSS’ Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE) Program. Initially established as an informal book club involving a few social workers wanting to deepen their knowledge of anxiety, the program has now grown into a formal training program for parents.
Facilitated by HCPSS’ Office of Social Work Services, SPACE brings together parents of anxious children and provides them with both a forum to connect and share their experiences, as well as an opportunity to learn strategies to better support their anxious children. As the program lead, Robinson works with HCPSS’ SPACE-trained school social workers, counselors and psychologists to develop and deliver program content.
“SPACE is about gathering real people to talk about and work through real challenges around parenting an anxious child,” Robinson says.
With its many and varied responsibilities, being a school social worker is both intense and challenging. But it’s exactly what Robinson wants to do.
“What we [as school social workers] do is truly important work. We are directly impacting students’ trajectory in life in a positive direction. We are trying to make a difference the very best way we can,” she says.
Additional information about HCPSS’ Social Work Services is available online.