VIRGINIA- The St. Louis County School District was boosting its student support systems even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. And as challenges to students’ social and emotional well-being have mounted over the past two COVID-scarred years, the district has continued to evaluate systems and consider more supports.
At their April 12 working meeting, ISD 2142 school board members heard about the newest addition to the district’s efforts to foster student success. Project AWARE is a special five-year initiative intended to pull all of the pieces together into a comprehensive mental health system focused on social-emotional wellness, mental health supports, and suicide prevention. AWARE stands for Advancing Wellness and Resiliency in Education.
Federally funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration of the Department of Health and Human Services, Project AWARE is a collaborative project of the Minnesota Departments of Education and Human Services that is being piloted in only six school districts in the state. The goal is to create an effective school-based mental health framework that can eventually be utilized throughout the state.
Project AWARE Mental Health Coordinator Alicia Isom, MSW, LGSW, told board members that educating staff about mental health concepts and support strategies will be integral to the project.
“We’ll be looking at just how we can educate teachers and professionals to understand what’s going on with some of the students who are really struggling, knowing how to manage and regulate their emotions.”
With the work of senior fellow of The Child Trauma Academy and internationally-recognized psychiatrist Bruce Perry providing the basic framework, Isom said she will be coordinating staff training that is rooted in neurobiology and how it is affected by adverse childhood experiences (ACES), experiences which are considered traumatic and detrimental to healthy social-emotional development. Perry’s neurosequential model, as it is called, is an integrated evidence-based approach to select and apply educational, enrichment, and therapeutic activities that match the needs and strengths of individual students.
“What (Perry) is seeing is that just learning about the neurobiology of the brain will help decrease behaviors,” Isom said. “Learning about where kids are at and that they’re not being spiteful intentionally has decreased behavior itself.”
“It’s been a challenging couple of years. People are stressed,” Superintendent Reggie Engebritson said of district staff. “As we roll this out, we’ll look at how to help teachers understand where we’re going so that they feel there’s some hope.”
Another aspect of the project is to ensure that various support systems are coordinated and aren’t needlessly duplicating services. Toward that end, Isom decided after coming on board in January that a school-by-school comprehensive assessment would be more effective than an overall district assessment, and she provided a sample of the 46-page assessment instrument to the board to inspect. Board members responded enthusiastically and indicated that they would like to see the results for individual schools.
“If you think about my role, I’m really kind of a case manager for the schools,” Isom said. “I’m trying to figure out how to strategically plan and assess a school’s readiness for training. I’m really looking at each school individually and thinking about who is ready for this, just like we would do in a classroom when somebody’s ready to learn information.”
Isom also noted that one crucial element in ISD 2142 being selected as a pilot district for Project AWARE was the county’s suicide rate among young people.
“St. Louis County has had a higher number, unfortunately, of suicides between the ages of ten and 24 for the last ten years, so that is also a reason we received this grant,” she said.
Project AWARE won’t be focused solely on in-school resources, Isom said, but will also look at how schools interface with community mental health resources to help students.
“I do think we’re on the right track,” Engebritson said. “It’s exciting, and it’s exciting that it’s for five years.”