WILMINGTON, MA – Wilmington School Superintendent Mary DeLai published her weekly blog post yesterday, detailing some of the ways the school district is supporting students’ social and emotional health.
Read her post, in its entirety, below:
In last week’s Superintendent’s Blog, I presented results from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey that was administered last spring to over 900 Wilmington students in Grades 7-11. One category of the survey related to student mental health and, more specifically, student’s attitudes and behaviors related to suicide. That data showed that 11% of high school students seriously considered attempting suicide in the past 12 months and 21.2% of middle school students had seriously considered attempting suicide in their lifetime. These results speak squarely to why it is important for schools and our community to understand and proactively address student’s behavioral health needs.
About one in five children suffers from an emotional or behavioral problem in which their symptoms meet the psychiatric community’s criteria for a diagnosable disorder. Half of this group lives with a disorder that is significantly impairing. One in 20, or about 5 percent of all children, have serious dysfunction. (http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/mentalhealth/pdfs/ c3.pdf) Untreated mental disorders tend to become more severe, and their behavioral effects spiral, when compounded by years of the frustration of failing grades and negative feedback from family members, peers, and authority figures. As youth, and later as adults, those with mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders are more likely to use alcohol and drugs—both because they may be more biologically vulnerable to chemical dependence and more likely to want to alter their moods to blunt their distress. More than half of those with a lifetime mental disorder also have a substance abuse disorder. (http://www.nhpf.org/pdfs_ib/IB799_ChildMentalHealth.pdf)
On October 28th, we will gather as a community to engage in a dialogue about substance abuse in our community and how we can strengthen support for children and families. Based on the research and the statistics we see, we cannot address the issue of substance abuse without addressing the behavioral health needs of our students. Addressing behavioral health is not just a substance abuse prevention strategy, it is a best practice approach to ensuring student success. School districts across the country, including ours, need to play a greater role in facilitating social-emotional development and learning. The reality is that the problems of most youngsters are not rooted in diagnosable disease or disorder and many symptoms can be prevented with appropriate supports – environmental, familial, and educational. For our part, we need to do more to build resilience in our students.
Research on risk and resilience demonstrates that the most effective prevention and early intervention strategies focus on changing the environment and relationships that a child experiences, instead of intervening directly with a child. (http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/25/3/670.full) The most proactive practices include ensuring strong positive relationships with adults and creating a safe and positive school climate. We also need to work together with families to help students develop the coping skills necessary to address the challenges and stresses of everyday life. From forgetting a homework assignment to not grasping a math concept or having an argument with a friend, these are manageable stressors that, with appropriate strategies, can provide students the opportunity for social and emotional learning and growth.
We also need to develop empathy in our children. One of the most critical skills in our 21st century world is the ability to collaborate. Students cannot collaborate if they are not able to show empathy to a struggling peer or identify the unique challenges and strengths that each member of their team possesses. One student may have strong computational or analytical skills but weak presentation abilities while another may possess strong presentational skills. When working as a team, empathy allows the group to leverage the strengths of each individual member of the team and allows members to build rather than weaken the self-esteem of their peers. Empathy is one of the most important social skills we can develop in our students.
So what are we doing to address the social and emotional needs of our students? Last year, we created a district-wide Behavioral Health Task Force – a group of twenty educators, behavioral health staff, and administrators representing every school in the district. This group of dedicated staff has developed a three-year action plan for implementing the behavioral health frameworks in our district. This year, we were joined by the district’s School Climate and Culture Committee to create a true Safe and Supportive Schools Team. We are working on four key objectives this year including: identifying appropriate programs to provide positive behavioral supports as well as appropriate interventions for students who struggle with behavioral challenges, researching and recommending social-emotional learning curriculum to implement in the district beginning next year, providing targeted professional development to staff and educational opportunities to parents, and developing a plan for implementing a true system of tiered behavioral health supports and interventions in our district.
An example of a proactive approach we are taking this year is the relationship mapping exercise that each school is completing this fall. The objective of the exercise is to identify students who might not have strong connections to many adults in the building or who, based on behaviors, may be identified as at risk or in need of behavioral support. It is a straightforward process where staff are asked to indicate which students in the building they have a strong positive relationship with and which students they are concerned about. Once staff have completed the exercise, they are able to identify which students may have few strong adult relationships and which students staff are concerned about. Once identified, the team works together to ensure that staff proactively work to establish those positive adult connections and provide the supports needed to address any behavioral concerns. This is a simple but powerful exercise that will be repeated in the spring so that progress can be monitored and will be re-administered annually as one of our behavioral health screening tools.
Another effort started this year is the piloting of a behavioral health intervention known as Collaborative and Proactive Problem Solving. Developed by Dr. Ross Greene, author of The Explosive Child and Lost at School, the premise of the approach is that children who exhibit challenging behaviors are lacking the critical skills to address unsolved problems. Rather than addressing the behavior, the approach seeks to identify the skills that the child is lacking which prevent him or her from behaving in a more productive way. The analogy that is used is that of a child who has a fever. We are not satisfied with simply administering medication to reduce the fever, we seek to understand and resolve what is causing the fever. This highly-successful, evidence-based approach is being piloted at the West Intermediate School, while some staff in other schools are learning the strategies through book groups and independent study. Dr. Greene will be releasing a book this spring specifically for parents and we are looking to have him present a parent education workshop following the release of his book.
In closing, we want parents and families to know that we are working diligently toward our goal of implementing strong behavioral health supports for our students and a more holistic and integrated approach to supporting the needs of students and developing the social and emotional skills and attitudes necessary to be successful. Our approach is evidence-based and relies on the research that establishes that the best way to ensure strong social and emotional health is by creating a safe and supportive learning environment and by ensuring strong positive relationships with adults and peers. We will continue to provide information to parents and families so you are aware of our efforts but also to help you learn strategies to better support your children and to empower you to be active partners with us in the critical task of educating the whole child.
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