Officials at Jonathan Alder showed the Angst documentary to students, teachers and the community. A community wide forum was also held to discuss and raise awareness around anxiety. (Photo submitted)
––––
Editor’s note: This is the second in a year-long series of articles by the Journal-Tribune titled Stella’s Cloud. The series is an effort to raise community awareness of the county’s rising suicide rate. The first of the stories was published on Jan. 12.
–––
During the first weeks of 2015, a pair of student suicides shocked the Jonathan Alder community.
In the wake of those tragedies, members of the Jonathan Alder School District came together to look at the issue of teen suicide.
What officials found was a lot of resources, but little continuity and many barriers to them.
The district formed the Jonathan Alder Community Support Coalition.
“We wanted to talk about roles, how do we respond, how do we educate families and youth about mental health,” said JoLynn Wheatley, the district’s social worker and student support specialist, who heads the coalition.
Wheatley explained that one result of those discussions was the creation of her position.
“They felt they needed someone like myself addressing mental health services,” Wheatley said.
Ken Chaffin, principal at Marysville’s Early College High School (ECHS), said historically, providing mental health support for students “has been the biggest gap, the biggest deficit” in education.
He said in recent years, educators have worked to change that.
In the past, Chaffin said, mental health “was the family’s job, was an outside counselor’s job” and the school’s job was to educate students.
“In the last five or six years, in particular, we have seen additional supports and additional intentionality to mental health,” Chaffin said. “We have seen more and more educators put mental health under the school’s umbrella.”
Educators acknowledge it can be difficult to convince a community that school dollars should be spent on mental health services rather than directly on education. Chaffin said the two are connected.
“Emotionally healthy learners are going to learn more, and that’s important,” he said. “Certainly we want them to feel whole and supported in our building.”
Officials at North Union schools said they need to be sensitive because of a recent suicide, but “we take all of the kids’ health and safety very seriously.”
“It is important to understand we are educating the whole child,” North Union Superintendent Rich Baird said. “To do that, we need to make sure they are healthy and safe — healthy in a physical way, healthy in a mental way.”
Baird said the district has added a counselor for the elementary school and a social worker for the high school. He said the district is holding professional development training for teachers to familiarize themselves with the district safety plan.
He said the district has also “integrated topics into the curriculum, dealing with physical and mental health.”
Even so, Baird says said he believes education is the best way to help students.
“More than anything, and this helps with physical and mental health the most, we give kids an education and a pathway to contribute to the workforce and give them an education where they can make a life-sustaining wage,” Baird said. “That gives them hope when they come to school.”
Other schools are taking a more active, direct approach.
In Marysville, every student gets evaluated for “tiers of support on an academic level and then also social, emotional mental health.”
Chaffin explained the three tiers:
– Tier one, meaning they need a little bit of help, could be as simple as a bi-weekly check in.
– Tier two support could be a weekly meeting with a school counselor and meetings with an outside counselor.
-Tier three level could mean daily meeting, multiple therapeutic counseling sessions and a modified academic schedule.
Chaffin said information is shared with counselors inside and outside the building as well as teachers and others involved with the student, “to the extent the family is comfortable.”
Chaffin said the district sees the value of peer referrals. He explained that many struggling students will hide that struggle, “from the whole entire world, except for one person, and that is another student.”
He said a new program at the ECHS allows students to anonymously refer other students for help.
“Often times the best information that we can get is from the people who know the student the most, and often times that is their peers,” Chaffin said.
He said another program pairs younger students with a mentor to help them transition into high school.
“We think that will really become part of our culture,” Chaffin said.
Additionally, Marysville and Jonathan Alder have each partnered with Dublin Springs, an outside counseling organization. Dublin Springs counselors go into the schools on a weekly basis.
“School counselors are trained to support students that have less intensive needs in the area of mental health,” Chaffin said. “What we have done is expanded with those partnerships to bring in experts that focus in areas of more intensive need for students and support them in collaboration with existing school counselors and resources.”
Officials said there is a fee for the Dublin Springs services. The group will bill Medicaid or private insurance. Other families are charged by the counseling agency on a sliding scale based on income.
“They would have to pay for that outside counseling, we are just providing that in the district,” Wheatley said.
Chaffin said Dublin Springs has the same arrangement at Marysville. He said having the services provided at the school or during the school day eliminates barriers for some families. For some families, however, payment can be a barrier.
For the ECHS student Stella Abel and her family, the barrier was all too real. In November, the 15-year-old girl took her own life. Her mother, Vanessa Prentice, said Stella was in outside counseling, a service provided through a scholarship. Prentice said Stella was doing well for a while, but began to struggle earlier in the school year. Prentice said she got a call from the school. A counselor offered to enroll Stella in a group session that met after school. Prentice said she was all in favor of the additional support. The counselor said insurance would often pay for it.
“At that point we had to say ‘no,’” Prentice said. “We don’t have insurance.”
Prentice said she doesn’t blame the school for Stella’s suicide, but wishes things could have been different.
“It would be nice if they had been able to offer that without having to ask those questions (about insurance) first,” Prentice said. “If a student needs fed, we are going to find a way to feed them. If they need help or counseling, we should be able to find a way to get it for them.”
She added, “There are probably a lot of people who are not able to see someone. The thought of a kid out there struggling, not being able to get help, that really gets to me.”
Officials said there are free services available through the district, but Chaffin acknowledged that if students and families don’t know about them, or if the message is not clear, the resources don’t matter.
“I am going to work with our counseling team on new ideas to make sure that this message is as close to being universally understood as possible,” Chaffin wrote in an email.
Prentice said mental health help, especially programs aimed at students, need to be “available and easy to get started, especially for kids because they don’t know how to navigate anything like that.”
Wheatley said it is not just a Marysville problem.
“I definitely think there is some of that, a lot of that — parents and students who are not sure where to go for help,” Wheatley said.
Like each of the other districts, the Triad School District is also dealing with the aftermath of a suicide. In October, the parents of Bethany Thompson filed a federal lawsuit against Triad school officials, administrators, staff members, employees and students. Thompson, then 11 years old, committed suicide in 2016.
Initially, district officials said they wanted to be part of the article. Superintendent Vickie Hoffman eventually decided not to comment on the role that schools can, should and do play in assisting students with mental health support.
“I truly appreciate your interest and would very much like to assist in responding,” Hoffman wrote in an email to the Journal-Tribune. “However, the pendency of the lawsuit which you reference constrains me and the district from offering any particular or detailed comments at this time. The district has always, and continues to, properly identify and appropriately address the needs of all its students.”
Chaffin said that while school districts do it differently, “I think philosophically, your best educators are going to say and believe and practice that every student that walks through the doors needs’ are supported by the school in any way possible, period. If the tools, if the supports that are needed are not within that school’s toolbox, they are going to figure out a way for them to get those supports.”
The principal said he has “seen some really positive things in this area on the school side, and in general the level of support.”
“We didn’t have the partnerships that we have now when I started teaching … not like this,” Chaffin said. “I think our school district has prioritized it. I think as a result, we are able to do more things for more kids and more targeted supports for kids. My hope is we will continue to improve on that each year.”
Officials agree that peers, parents, teachers and the community need to work together to make that happen.
“The biggest thing is for parents to be talking to the students, if they see concerns at home, to reach out to us at the school, to see us as a resource,” Wheatley said.
She added that other students “see things we might not be able to see.”
“We tell our students that if they see someone in need, if they see something, to say something. We want parents to do the same thing,” she said.
Chaffin echoed those thoughts.
“I would just go back to ‘See something, hear something? Say something.’ Really important, that when young people have concern about a peer, about a loved one, that they come forward to a trusted adult and share that,” Chaffin said. “Generally speaking, that is proving to be one of the most effective ways that we can support and target needs.”
In the end, everyone also agreed as electronic communication increases, personal contact between teachers, administrators, parents and counselors becomes more important.
“One of the constants that has increased in importance every year is relationships and in 2019, every student needs and deserves a champion and we work hard to foster that,” Chaffin said.