Leading the way

In 2018 and continuing into 2019, four pilot school districts, including Homewood City Schools, launched a new kind of prevention and support initiative to aid students dealing with mental health issues. 

Through the Building Comprehensive School Mental Health Systems Partnership, a collaborative effort with the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham (CFGB), Homewood City Schools is part of pioneering a new approach to mental health that would be physically and financially sustainable over time, after the initial grant funding. 

Director of Guidance for Homewood City Schools Leigh Cohen Long said the feedback from teachers has been very positive since they first started training them in May 2018.

“We have some veteran teachers say this has been some of the best trainings they’ve ever been through, and we’ve had other teachers say this is so necessary. A lot of other teachers are saying thank you because they needed this information and knowledge in order to help students,” Long said.

CFGB Vice President of Programs Gus Heard-Hughes said the goal for their collaborative plan is to build stronger school mental health systems through their Youth Mental Health Training, which is an 8-hour-long session that informs teachers how to prevent, identify and assist children struggling with mental health issues in the classroom.

“We kept hearing again and again from superintendents and others from within school districts that mental health issues with their students are growing, and that was one issue they weren’t fully equipped to get their hands around,” Heard-Hughes said.

The 2017 Mental Health in America report ranks Alabama 46th for its youth mental health gap, which means there’s a higher prevalence of youth with mental illness while there is a lower access to youth mental health care. 

From 2015-17, the CFGB spent time on an intensive research and planning process, Heard-Hughes said, through which they determined where the needs are. They looked at the local landscape, he said, as well as the best processes and models for children’s mental health nationwide. 

In 2018, they launched the partnership with the help of Gateway, United Way and several other partners and donors. As the initiative continues, Heard-Hughes said, CFGB will be spending time compiling and recording the impact of the results over the course of years, both collectively and individually, to share the results with other districts.

“The goal was not to do some kind of minor intervention or little program here or little program there, but to take a more comprehensive approach, and do it in a cross-district way so that four different districts were doing essentially the same thing at the same time, and we could evaluate what impact that had and see if it made a meaningful different,” Heard-Hughes said, adding they will include survey data and feedback from counselors, teachers, administration and students.

Homewood City Schools has been one of the districts on the forefront of embracing the Youth Mental Health First Aid, Homewood City Schools Prevention and Development Coordinator Carissa Anthony said.

“I think it gives teachers confidence because before they would not have noticed things and gotten assistance, but now it gives them a lot of confidence on how they are going to do that,” Anthony said.

The “three legs” of the initiative, Heard-Hughes said, are training, screening and services. This foundational training includes learning to recognize signs of distress and mental health issues, dealing with it in the classroom and supporting students through services and referrals. The screening part of the initiative works with a tool called the student risk screening scale, which is a systematic way for teachers to identify students with behavioral challenges. 

“Depression and suicide rates among children have been on the rise nationally,” Heard-Hughes said.

The Youth Mental Health First Aid Training is “a widespread national model of training,” Heard-Hughes said, with the priority of training people who aren’t mental health professionals. 

“It’s not meant for counselors, therapists, people that know about medication in a clinical way.  It’s more to give them fundamental tools for understanding mental health and supporting and interacting effectively with people who have mental health issues,” he said. 

“It’s modeled very similarly to physical first aid. You’re not going to perform surgery, it’s a first aid... You’re just going to stabilize the person and get them the professional help if that is what is needed,” Long said.

Youth Mental Health First Aid also connects students with follow-up services inside the schools. Anthony said Homewood has taken time to involve outside agencies who partner and provide mental health professionals. 

So far, they have trained 101 employees through the program and have another training session planned in June. In three to five years, all employees should be trained.

Heard-Hughes also leads the Mental Health Priority Group, which meets locally as a larger, open-table group created as a way for various people and organizations to plug in and support each other in goals for a more comprehensive mental health system. For more information on the group, contact 327-3801.

By the Numbers

From 1999-2014, the:

► overall U.S. suicide rate increased 25 percent.

► suicide rate for girls 10-14 increased 200 percent.

► suicide rate for boys 10-14 increased 37 percent.

► second leading cause of death of children ages 10–19 was suicide. 

Source: CDC, 2018