Some schools working with parents to address mental illness

DES MOINES - When a student's mental health care requires more than a typical school counselor can provide, where do schools turn?

In the Pleasant Valley Community School District in Eastern Iowa, they turn to a professional counselor contracted to work with students in need.

'It's a great partnership,” Pleasant Valley Assistant Superintendent Brian Strusz said. 'It's a win-win for everybody.”

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), 13 percent of children ages 8 to 15 live with a mental illness severe enough to seriously impair their life. Yet of those children, 4 out of 5 are not identified and thus do not receive treatment, the organization said.

Schools are not required to double as mental health care providers, but mental health issues arise with students as with any medical ailment.

'Schools can play a key role in the early identification of mental illness and in linking students with effective services and supports. Children spend much of their day in school, and thus schools are in an ideal position to identify emerging warning signs of mental illness in youth,” NAMI's policy platform said. 'School-based mental health programs are needed to reduce the pain and isolation all too often experienced by children and youth with undiagnosed and untreated mental illness and their families.”

For some districts, the responsibility falls to the school counselor. Others, including Pleasant Valley and more than 20 others in Eastern Iowa, pay for help from a professional.

Several sources interviewed for this story said they do not know how many school districts across Iowa employ mental health care staff beyond school counselors. The State Department of Education said it does not track such data.

Pleasant Valley has contracted with Vera French, a private community mental health center, for roughly a decade, paying two therapists $10,000 per year to work at its elementary schools, Strusz said. The district is adding a third therapist this year to cover its junior high and high school, he added.

'Any time you can help students be successful in schools - and if mental health is one of those areas - then we definitely want to address that,” Strusz said. 'Sometimes, the needs are more than our counselors can offer, and that's when a therapist can come in …

and really home in on the areas of need.”

Vera French works with two dozen districts in Iowa, according to Jenny Streets, the company's school-based services program manager.

Streets said Vera French has partnered with school districts for two decades. But the number of districts working with the organization has grown significantly in the past handful of years, particularly at the elementary and high-school levels.

Streets said one important benefit to working with schools is the ability to have the company's therapist 'at the table” when educators and families are discussing appropriate treatment for a student with mental health care needs.

'We can do pretty much anything in the school that we would do in the mental health center, but we have the additional ability to be involved in the special education meetings, the intervention meetings for those kids that are really struggling,” Streets said.

Spotting red flags

Those are the types of efforts Christine Schmidt likes to see schools making. And she thinks they could go even further.

Schmidt lives in Bettendorf and her children attend Pleasant Valley schools. In April 2014, Schmidt's 12-year-old daughter Morgan committed suicide.

Schmidt said Morgan had been bullied and dealt with depression.

Schmidt said she would like to see schools include mental health awareness curriculum in human growth and development classes. That may help elementary and high-school students self-identify mental health issues such as depression, she added.

Schmidt also said school officials should be trained how to identify red flags for mental illnesses and develop better communication between school officials and parents.

'Our school, Pleasant Valley, they are trying very hard to come up with some solutions on how to bridge the gap for the parents and the kids and the schools,” Schmidt said. 'I think that they're trying. I think there are still some areas where they could be doing more and doing better.”

NAMI suggests all schools take an approach to student mental health care similar to what Pleasant Valley has done, while recognizing that such a commitment requires financial investment.

'These programs bring trained community mental health professionals into schools to provide mental health care or to link families to resources in the community. They provide access to services and supports and help reduce the confusion and isolation experienced by youth with mental health conditions and their families,” NAMI says on its website. 'We also understand that schools are stretched very thin.

'We support increased funding to train school faculty and staff on the early warning signs of mental health conditions and how to link students to services.”

Strusz and Streets laud the partnership between Vera French and Pleasant Valley and other Eastern Iowa schools. Strusz said the program helps keep students on a path to realizing their full potential.

'Ultimately the work (Vera French therapists) are doing will help your children be more successful in school and hopefully be more successful beyond school when they graduate,” he said.

Schmidt, speaking from painful personal experience, said the stakes are even higher when it comes to identifying and addressing mental health issues among students.

'It's literally the difference between life and death,” she said.