COLUMBIA, Mo. – Gov. Jay Nixon visited Kansas City and Columbia on Wednesday to announce additional funding increases for education. This time, his focus was mental health education.

Here in Columbia, Nixon visited the Moberly Area Community College’s Columbia Higher Education Center, where he announced a $20 million proposal aiming to train an additional 1,200 students for careers in mental health fields under his Caring for Missourians initiative, which began in 2009.

“As we’ve intensified our focus,” Nixon said, noting increased gun violence in recent years” he said, “ it’s increasingly clear we need more qualified professionals to provide that care. At all education levels… we are facing a critical shortage of mental health professionals.”

Nixon said 104 of the state’s 114 counties have been designated as mental health professional shortage areas. His Wednesday announcement would add a mental health initiative to the already existing Caring for Missourians plan.

The announcement came after Nixon had announced another nearly $53 million in proposed education funding increases for his Fiscal Year 2015 budget, on top of what education officials estimate to be as high as a $200 million increase in the K-12 foundation formula, as Nixon works to fulfill his pledge to fill the nearly $594 million shortfall in the formula by Fiscal Year 2017.

“We certainly feel good about they way the economic trends are going,” Nixon said of how he plans to pay for all the potential funding increases. “There certainly will be places in government where we’ll want to continue to find efficiencies.”