While the blog goes on summer vacation, we’ll spend the coming weeks sharing past blog posts about how City Connects helps students thrive.
This week’s roundup looks at how City Connects Coordinators promote students’ mental health.
* * * * *
A creative solution for providing mental health care in Salem
February 16, 2023
Currently, there is a massive mental health crisis among students. The need is so pressing that President Biden called for increasing mental health services in schools during his recent State of the Union address.
Students who are referred for counseling often end up having their names put on long waiting lists, which was the case in Salem, Mass.
“A lot of the community partners that we would typically go to have waitlists that are weeks or sometimes months long,” Mia Riccio, Salem’s City Connects Program Manager, says. “The access just isn’t there. It’s especially hard for families who are under- or uninsured.”
To meet this need, Salem’s City Connects program is working with community partners to offer help more quickly by providing tele-mental health services.
Since 2016, Salem has deliberately taken a citywide approach toward meeting children’s needs, and last year, the city formed a Mental Health Task Force. At the time, as the local news source Patch media explains, school Superintendent Steve Zrike sent a letter to the school community, promising to leverage resources to “ensure that our community receives access to the highest quality services in a timely manner.”
* * * * *
Providing grief support at school
December 7, 2023
As a City Connects Coordinator at the Sankofa School of Success in Indianapolis, Ind., Omega Robinson saw students at her school who had lost loved ones and needed help coping with grief.
So Robinson reached out and formed a partnership with Brooke’s Place, a local nonprofit organization that provides “support groups, therapy services and education to empower children, teens, young adults, and their families to thrive in the midst of grief.”
Staff from Brooke’s Place come to Sankofa to help students by facilitating a grief support group at school, where it’s easy for students to access this service.
Forming this partnership helps Sankofa achieve its work of “creating a collaborative school community that focuses on student achievement” and meets students’ needs “through mindfulness and trauma-informed care.”
* * * * *
Mental Health and Integrated Student Support
May 2, 2024
In 2021, well into the pandemic, an alarm rang. The American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health. Since then, students’ mental health needs have continued to alarm educators.
A recent National Center for Education Statistics survey found that “About 4 in 10 school leaders said they were ‘moderately’ or ‘extremely’ concerned about their students’ mental health (43 percent) and the mental health of their teachers or staff (41 percent).”
Here at City Connects, our Coordinators are addressing these needs, and as an organization we are reaffirming our longstanding commitment to focusing on students’ physical and mental health — one of the four domains in students’ lives that we look at, along with academics, social-emotional wellbeing, and family.
“I have seen more mental health challenges with middle schoolers,” Maggie Longsdorf, the coordinator at Risen Christ Catholic School in Minneapolis, says. “Kids have anxiety about the future and about where they are going to high school because in some of our families, parents haven’t gone to high school. There are a lot of new things.
“And a lot of our families have gone through quite a bit of trauma regarding being new to the country. Or kids have changes in their home lives, parents who are not at home.”
