Beth Pausic: Kooth's mission is solely to provide care for kids

I would like to offer several corrections to former representative Lou Barletta’s op-ed “Say no to Kooth in Pa. schools” (Dec. 4, TribLive).

First and foremost, I’d like to reintroduce readers to Kooth. We are a mental health support and pre-clinical care provider with a web-based application available to public school and home-schooled students in Pennsylvania — my home state and current residence. The resources we offer (including chats with counselors, articles about sleep trouble, bullying and anxiety, and community message boards) are provided to students at no cost to them, their parents or their school district, thanks to the state grant that Barletta mentioned. We were happy to have received broad bipartisan support in the creation of the grant program in 2022.

Barletta is wrong in saying that there is no school board or administration oversight in the program. School boards, principals and superintendents have to approve our program before it is offered to their students, and they make this decision after review of our application and its success in Pennsylvania, other states and other countries. Once they move ahead with the program, it is entirely optional for students to participate or not.

Young people are in a mental health crisis. A multi-year, global pandemic robbed them of a traditional school experience, and many other generation-specific stressors exist in their daily lives have led to increases in anxiety and depression. According to the CDC:

• Almost one in three high school girls have seriously considered taking their own lives, which is up almost 60% in a decade.

• 40% of all high school students said that they’d felt so sad or hopeless within the past year and that they were unable to do their regular activities.

• 10% of high school students attempted suicide one or more times during the past year.

• 41% of young people with anxiety go untreated.

• 15% of young people suffer a major depressive episode.

We all know this is a problem, but the solution is not so simple in states like Pennsylvania, where rural and ex-urban families don’t have accessible mental health care options. We seek to provide 24/7 access to care from a young person’s mobile device — no worries about insurance coverage, provider availability or waitlists.

With more than two decades of research and success in improving pre-clinical mental health and wellness challenges, Kooth designed an evidence-based, behavioral platform that pairs private, confidential chat-based counseling to give young people the tools they need to build better lives for themselves — the full, rich lives that they so deserve.

To answer Barletta’s direct allegations about our safety and privacy, we have many policies in place to protect our users.

Upon registration, service users are required to identify who they are, including their date of birth, and create a username and password unique to them. Children under the age of 13 are entitled to certain privacy protections under federal law. The Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act, more commonly known as COPPA, is a law detailing how websites and applications collect data and personal information of children under 13; it requires Kooth to provide notice and get parental consent before collecting personal information from children, have a clear privacy policy, and keep information collected from children confidential and secure. Kooth is also a member of the PRIVO Kids Privacy Assured COPPA safe harbor certification program, an independent, third-party organization committed to supporting online services to safeguard children’s personal information collected online.

Kooth’s terms of use outline how children may share information with other children. Service users are reminded to keep their accounts private and not to give out any personal information. Everything that is submitted to the Kooth platform is checked before it is published, and individuals cannot freely communicate with each other outside of this process. This activity is conducted by our team of highly skilled moderators, who have completed our custom moderation training and with oversight from licensed clinicians as part of our formal clinical governance and safeguarding processes. Our moderators review all submissions to ensure that they meet our community boundaries and age ratings guidance and some submissions may be edited or not published, if they do not meet our boundaries and guidelines.

If any submission contains information that suggests a young person is in any danger, we reach out to them with a message and escalate our processes appropriately, including making contact with the relevant services/adults outside the platform if required.

Access to evidence-based intelligence, support and insights must be available to virtually every teen — but too many of them are struggling to find the tools and resources they need to build better lives. And what should be even more distressing is that many young people don’t even realize there is a better way to cope and live.

Kooth’s sole mission is to provide care to every young person who needs it, without geographic or economic barriers. We’re proud to have done that in Pennsylvania for the past year, and we hope to do it for many more years to come.

Beth Pausic is vice president of clinical excellence and safety for Kooth US.