Well yes, there are a number of brief questionnaires and inventories for use with children to spot issues such as depressed mood and potential for drug abuse ("The Children's Depression Inventory" and the "Personal Experience Inventory", as examples), but most are used as part of an individualized assessment battery - to try to apply them for screening en masse to the "entire" population of US children, no matter what validity and reliability they boast in a facility setting, would most probably result in literally millions of misclassified "emotionally disturbed", especially if evaluation and follow-up are provided by "technicians" trained to whatever minimal standards the government wants - to do the technical part at a level I would want for my kid is impossible, but public opinion will put a stop to the program once the populace finds out what a farce it is......
i hope it gets stopped before it gets very far. it is very hard for anyone to DISPROVE that he/she or his/her child is mentally ill.
and why should the federal government be pushing this? it seems that this should fall within a state's jurisdiction.
i am against the idea, for all sorts of reasons. the problem is, it could be done very easily, but not necessarily very accurately.