Webinar: School Mental Health - From Implementing ➜ Funding (Moved to Jul 7th)!

Lara Kain 6/16/214:05 PM

(UPDATE: We moved this webinar to July 7th 11-12 PST)

In this webinar, we’ll discuss the unique importance of school mental health at this time, what schools can do to support it, and how these efforts can be funded (including accessing ARPA funds).

Join experts in school mental health/trauma-informed program design, implementation, and funding streams to explore how schools committed to supporting student wellbeing can find a path that considers both your school capacity and the needs of your students.

Learning Outcomes

Planning & preparation:

What will the student and staff challenges look like?
What approaches are available and how can school and teacher capacity be factored in?

Implementation (tools & systems):

How do we structure school environments to support school mental health?
How to sustainably manage mental health initiatives?

Funding:

What avenues of funding exist to support student AND staff mental health efforts?
How can schools access these funds?

Add Comment

Comments (2)

Newest · Oldest · Popular

Michael SirbolaMember

Hello All, We've (school district of Broward County, FL) approved & contracted for "suicide evaluations" of "selected" students. Is this correct?

I have not seen the suicide-evaluations but I have sat through the full yearly psychology presentation and the PD, professional development so teachers can better identify (target) children at risk (of being a problem in the future). I came away from these experiences convinced that district "solutions" like these are a big part of the problem. For this reason I encourage you to reach out to an organization called PACE, Positive and Adverse Childhood Experiences. Their president and founder's name is Jane, she will know who to steer you to, California is implementing these types of tests Statewide so someone is providing this type of one-stop service somewhere for sure. I suggest the district make this inquiry ASAP, a pre-solicitation perhaps, to PACEs to provide their PACE/ACE tests and to provide a post-test evaluation and follow-up service to us (and other school districts such as ours) as part of a "suicide evaluation." Consider adding a PACEs add-on to the current district mental health evaluation plans, and additionally consider making it universal to all students to eliminate the associated stigma as being a potential trigger exacerbating safety concerns in regard to at-risk students.

How much of our motivations in our mental-health efforts are to identify "potentially dangerous" students? Is there any truth to the accusation that our motivating purpose is to HUNT, not HELP, and that the bulk of counselors, nurses, and SRO's would not be in our schools otherwise - the proof being that this level of effort was not in our schools before MSD, but the problems in need of counselors and nurses definitely was!

1) Even without evaluating the scientific basis of the districts "suicide evaluation," I cannot believe there is any actual data of any significance relating their test questions to actual outcomes in regard to suicide risk - other than to simply ask if the person has had or is having suicidal ideation.

A huge Kaiser longitudinal study of over 100,000 persons has since been expanded. The top killer diseases, all seemingly unrelated, are related to one common factor, stress. For evolutionary reasons, to speed evolutionary change and adaptation, especially in times of stress and scarcity, there is a DRAMATIC decrease in longevity. This means it affects all the top diseases, as a group, the biggest killers. Traumatic stress when experienced in childhood has a hugely significant DIRECT EFFECT: Double-Digit Decreases in Mortality for the biggest killer diseases even though they all seem completely separate and unrelated; cancer, heart disease, obesity, Alzheimer's, stress-related inflammatory diseases, pneumonia, flu, mental illness, suicides. Can you imagine a magical pill that could decrease all of these by double-digits and add years to one's life? Truly magic, yes?

These diseases ARE linked - ALL are strongly linked by well-vetted science to Adverse Childhood Experience, ACEs, or PACEs, Positive & Adverse Childhood Experiences, as some prefer to call it. Proponents of the name change from ACEs to PACEs did so, I suspect, due to something that could be called Critical Traumatic-Stress Theory, CTST.

CTST, or simply CTS, is similar to CRT, critical race theory, in that at a systemic, implicit level the status-quo is continued, which means there is continued behavioral transmission of the traumatic-stress, writ-large - just as CRT describes how systems perpetuate racism, CST describes how neurobiological, cultural and sociological systems conspire to perpetuate trauma-transmission. What is meant by this statement? This, that: The P in PACES isn't a purely positive influence if one means pro-social behaviors by "positive."

Positive experiences and lack of negative experiences also alter the brain and how one perceives the world in a myriad of ways OTHER than just to prevent negative changes from traumatic experiences and cause "positive" changes, whatever those may be, such as conferring protection from trauma, also called increasing resilience.

Beyond being purely protective of trauma, how one sees the world is changed significantly, self-interest v. group interest alters, reactivity to negative v. positive experiences changes, the brain morphs to adapt as significantly to negative as to positive changes in the environment - words like "positive stress" and "negative stress" take on new meanings once one grasps the full adaptive evolutionary purpose of this attenuated stress response in highly social creatures like ourselves.

2) Asking the PACEs screening questions is far LESS INTRUSIVE and far LESS TRIGGERING to the "selected students" if instead of "targetting" only certain students to receive a Suicidal Assessment, hopefully without any bias, one simply administers the PACEs screening test of 15-30 questions to EVERYONE.

School districts typically prefer to hire such things out to service providers --> Can and WILL PACEs PLEASE CONSIDER offering to provide the tests and to provide a post-test evaluation and follow-up?Please?

***** ****** ******* ******

F.Y.I. - SEPARATELY, SORT OF... If you think a child that cannot read amongst his peers who can is not at a significantly higher risk of suicide, then... grrr (that's me, growling at you).

FACT: OVER HALF OF U.S. CHILDREN ARE FUNCTIONALLY ILLITERATE UPON GRADUATING HIGH SCHOOL! Over 70% of 3rd-grade students cannot read at grade level!

Dozens of books directly into the hands of every student, theirs to own. Fast. Delivered with regularity on a first-come-first-serve basis.

State law mandates that school libraries cannot accept donations of free used books when offered - We can reach out to local thrift and Goodwill stores. Many books are disposed of or recycled. Libraries take book donations that they resell along with the significant number of books that city, county, state and federal libraries regularly retire. It all adds up. Here in Broward County we have a very progressive Library director that can help, fyi!

Every child grade three and lower can have a whole bookcase of books, dozens of books, with one hundred being the goal. This is realizable. Every library can target 5,000 books as its goal. This will be accomplished within the year. We can speak to Handy about constructing and refurbishing those needed, I've already spoken with them.

Also - Reading Education in Schools of all kinds currently begins with HOW and ignores Why and What: We Fail to Teach Kids THE WHYS & WHATS OF READING! Half are illiterate. It isn't them, the problem is us, and testing specifically.

BEFORE even trying to Teach HOW to read - FIRST must come WHY and WHAT is reading?

Note that this applies to science and math also!

WHY Read?

WHAT is Reading?

Only once a child has these two things down-solid should one entertain any thought of teaching HOW to read.

Private, public, charter, religious, new age, old-school, in-person, fully-electronic, self-directed, hands-on... they ALL SUCK the FUN TO LEARN part out of Learning to Read so that 100% of our children literally are brought up thinking that reading is no different than any other imbecilic irrelevant meaningless topic or subject to be tested-on in our schools.

The point of all school subjects taught is not the subject but the testing itself as a measure of one's competency as a student and person in society. How crushing! How crushingly sad. Kids don't have a clue at first what reading is or why reading is a big deal, they learn what it is from us- and coast to coast we teach them reading is just another subject to be tested on. We suck. Few kids will get to see reading as something they will want to do for the thrill of learning and exploring - so very sad.

Weep for all the illiterate children graduating HS year after year. Sigh.

Learning and School and Testing are about how hard one is willing to work at memorizing irrelevant facts from irrelevant random passages as measures of one's compliance and obeisance to authority. Lucky kids.

If we educators were hired to help Golden Retrievers retrieve, expect to see armloads of balls, a timer, a gate, a finish line ribbon, a starting pistol, an automatic ball thrower, a judging board, whistles, and military-like uniforms - and expect to see all the poor doggies running out the nearest door for the hills.

Funny image, yes? Golden Retreivers running from tennis balls - ha-ha? Sigh.

Poor kids, but lucky dogs: dog lovers and PETA would NEVER LET anyone mistreat a dog so badly they'd run at the sight of a tennis ball - yet this is what happens when children see a book or teachers see another multi-tiered scientific reading protocol, and run, literally.

Sigh.

Poor little human children & teachers!

Also worth pondering...Continuous Improvement and continuous improvement Culture have become a Continous Improvement CULT that serves to perpetuate Racist Cultural Norms.

Pushing for 5% goal improvements even when the starting point is a 70% failure rate is a textbook-perfect example of what Critical Race Theory, CRT, is all about. Yes?

6/25/218:49 AM

Michael SirbolaMember

The school district of Broward County, Florida has 250k kids & 250 schools - we have contracted for "suicide evaluations" of "selected" students. This is preposterous.

Can and WILL PACEs please offer to provide the PACE tests and to provide a post-test evaluation and follow-up to my school district of 250K students and 15k teachers as part of a "suicide evaluation?" Consider it, please? Let me explain...

Truthfully, it is the district's double-speak way of saying it wants to sick the police and SRO's onto "potentially dangerous" students. We aim to HUNT, not HELP. However, at least we are decent enough to know we should lie about what we are doing, so that's a little something... I guess. We are the district in which the MSD shooting (murders) occurred, if this helps to understand the situation any - and also worth noting, this is the deep, deeeeeeep South.

1) Even without evaluating its scientific basis, I cannot believe there is any actual data of any significance relating their test questions to actual outcomes in regard to suicide risk - other than to simply ask if the person has had or is having suicidal ideation.

The Kaiser longitudinal study was for over 100,000 persons and has since been expanded. The top killers, all seemingly unrelated, are related to one common factor, stress. For evolutionary reasons, to speed evolutionary change and adaptation, especially in times of stress and scarcity, there are DRAMATIC increases-in and a hugely significant DIRECT EFFECT well into Double-Digit Decreases in Mortality on all of the biggest killers and many seemingly unrelated diseases; cancer, heart disease, obesity, Alzheimer's, stress-related inflammatory diseases, pneumonia, flu, mental illness, suicides.

However, these diseases ARE linked - ALL are strongly linked by well-vetted science to Adverse Childhood Experience, ACEs, or PACEs, Positive & Adverse Childhood Experiences, as some prefer to call it. Proponents of the name change from ACEs to PACEs did so, I suspect, due to something that could be called Critical Traumatic-Stress Theory, CTST. CTS is similar to CRT, critical race theory in that at a systemic, implicit level the status-quo of continued behavioral transmission of the traumatic-stress, writ-large. What is meant by this statement?

This, that: The P in PACES isn't a purely positive influence if one means pro-social behaviors by "positive." Positive experiences and lack of negative experiences also alters the brain and how one percieves the world in a myriad of ways OTHER than to prevent changes from traumatic experiences. Beyond being purely protective of trauma, how one see's the world is changed significantly, self-interest v. group interest alters, reactivity to negative v. positive experiences changes, the brain morphs to adapt as significantly to negative as to positive changes in the environment - words like "positive stress" and "negative stress" take on new meanings once one grasps the full adaptive evolutionary purpose of this attenuated stress response in highly social creatures like ourselves.

Schools districts typically prefer to hire such things out to service providers --> Can and WILL PACEs PLEASE CONSIDER offering to provide the tests and to provide a post-test evaluation and follow-up?

Please?

***** ****** ******* ******

F.Y.I. - SEPARATELY, SORT OF... If you think a child that cannot read amongst his peers who can is not at a significantly higher risk of suicide, then... grrr (that's me, growling at you).

FACT: OVER HALF OF U.S. CHILDREN ARE FUNCTIONALLY ILLITERATE UPON GRADUATING HIGH SCHOOL! Over 70% of 3rd grade students cannot read at grade level!

State law mandates that school libraries cannot accept donations of free used books when offered - Here in Broward County we have a very progressive Library director, fyi! Every child grade three and lower can have a whole bookcase of books, dozens of books, with one hundred being the goal. This is realizable. Every library can target 5,000 books as its goal. This will be accomplished within the year. We can speak to Handy about constructing and refurbishing those needed, I've already spoken with them.

BEFORE even trying to Teach HOW to read - FIRST must come WHY and WHAT is reading?

Note that this applies to science and math also!

WHY Read?

WHAT is Reading?

Only once a child has these two things down-solid should one entertain any thought of teaching HOW to read.

The point of all school subjects taught is not the subject but the testing itself as a measure of one's competency as a student and person in society. How crushing! How crushingly sad.

Kids don't have a clue at first what reading is or why reading is a big deal, they learn what it is from us- and coast to coast we teach them reading is just another subject to be tested on. We suck. Few kids will get to see reading as something they will want to do for the thrill of learning and exploring - so very sad.

Weep for all the illiterate children graduating HS year after year. Sigh.

If these we educators were hired to help Golden Retrievers retrieve, expect to see armloads of balls, a timer, a gate, a finish line ribbon, a starting pistol, an automatic ball thrower, a judging board, whistles, and military-like uniforms - and expect to see all the poor doggies running out the nearest door for the hills.

Funny image, yes? Golden Retreivers running from tennis balls - ha-ha? Sigh.

Poor little human children & teachers!

6/24/218:16 PM

Skip to main content

Learning Outcomes

Add Comment

Membership Required

Remove From Your Block List

Manage Follow Preferences

Block

Please wait...