DescriptionAcademic success can be considered a core metric by which to measure the relative success of a youth's childhood as the skills conveyed and measured in school are such as to foster positive long-term outcomes. Therefore, all efforts ought to be made towards encouraging this achievement. School success however, is a complex phenomenon shaped by a wide variety of factors and many Latino adolescents are missing opportunities to develop their full potential in the United States educational system. The goal of this project was to present a perspective on students' relationship to their academic outcomes that emphasizes the role of the mental health and self-efficacy of Latino youth towards their learning and academic success. The present study examined the relationship between students' broad mental health risk, general self-efficacy, and achievement outcomes. The district in which this study was conducted has one of the lowest graduation rates in the state of New Jersey (under 60%) and reading and math testing scores ranking below the 15th percentile. The high school was comprised of 1397 students, grades 9 through 12 of whom 485 met criteria for further analysis by virtue of being Latino, completing the Pediatric Symptom Checklist (PSC) and the General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSE) as well as meeting other demographic criteria. The results of this study indicated that mental health risk's impact on academic achievement outcomes are mediated by perceived general self-efficacy. This finding appears most significantly for the relationship between internalizing symptoms and final Language Arts grade as well as GPA. Specifically, the current study found that when an adolescent's self-reported internalizing symptoms go up by 1, the indirect, mediated effect by self-efficacy is that final Language Arts grade goes down by .16 and GPA goes down by .01. Broadly, the effect sizes reflecting these findings are small, but add to the field suggesting that academic self-efficacy is a predictor of school success for Latino students. The findings here offer an important potential area for intervention that can and ought to be explored in furtherance of the goal of encouraging school achievement in at-risk populations.