As a part of the “Project Adding Direct Support” (ADS) grant, the school system will be working with higher institutions with approved school counseling and social worker licensure programs. Those are the University of North Carolina Charlotte, the University of North Carolina Pembroke, and N.C. State University.
According to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI), this grant will “incentivize local generalist counselors and social workers to ‘respecialize,’ meaning that they complete additional work to become licensed to practice in schools.”
Pender County Schools’ Director of Student Services Leanne Radabaugh said the grant won’t allow them to hire more mental health care workers, but it will, “basically [be] tuition assistance for employees who need some classes to maybe get their school social work degree or to complete their school counseling degree, and some incentives to be in some high needs schools.
It will also provide, “professional development for our mental health staff, our counselors and our school social workers, that's really about the extent of what we can use it for, is to support the education of those positions,” Radabaugh said.
And there is some mental health care staff, according to Radabaugh, who are still on provisional licenses, so this grant will help support them in their journey to become fully licensed.
The school district qualified for the grant because of its “high percentages of free and reduced lunch eligibility, percentage of students economically disadvantaged/in poverty, a high student-to-qualified mental health services provider ratio as compared to other LEAs (Local Education Agencies) statewide or nationally, and infrastructure and accessibility to partnering institutes of higher education (IHEs),” according to DPI public information specialist Todd Silberman.
Mental health in Pender schools
Pender County has over 11,000 students in 20 different schools. According to Bob Fankboner, communications coordinator for Pender County Schools, the district currently has 25 school counselors, eight full-time school social workers (with four interns), seven school psychologists (with one intern), a licensed clinical social worker, and two behavior analysts. And they also contract with two behavior consulting companies to support schools as needed.
Radabaugh said fortunately Pender has no current vacancies for those social worker and counselor positions.
In comparison, in New Hanover County Schools, there is about one counselor for every 304 students; one social worker for every 510 students; one mental health therapist for 690 students, and one psychologist for every 1,458 students.
When asked about the highest needs for students in Pender, Radabaugh said, “we're still trying to address the effects of a worldwide lockdown of people not being connected to each other — the effects of the adults and the kids being separate for so long and just the trauma of that.”
She added that when Hurricane Florence hit in 2018, students were out of school for more than four weeks, which caused issues compounded by the pandemic.
Another growing pain for the school system is “just the sheer size of the district, and the amount of people that have moved in is astronomical. We have a very different population than we did 20 years ago,” Radabaugh said.
According to recently released results of the federal 2021 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), North Carolina high school students are showing improvements in terms of decreasing the amount of bullying on school campuses, drug and alcohol use, and smoking and vaping; however, loneliness, feelings of not being valued, and suicide attempts have all increased. Those in the LGBTQIA community have a higher risk for suicide than their heterosexual counterparts.
When asked about these recent survey results, Radabaugh said, “We have been very conscious [about this]. I've been in this role since August, but we have worked really hard with the influx of money that everybody has gotten because of the pandemic to focus a lot of our hiring on it. Pre-covid, we had maybe two social workers in the whole district, maybe just one.”
Radabaugh said that the district is trying to meet the needs of all the district’s students because it’s hard for them to concentrate on academics, “if [they] don't feel safe and valued and connected to their school communities.”
While Radabaugh is “really happy to be able to keep some of our people in the profession” based on the financial support with this grant, an ongoing issue in “public education [is], people don't make a tremendous amount of money, and it's a burden sometimes.”
Radabaugh added, “but really, if you want people to have advanced degrees and be really qualified to serve our kids, then they deserve to be paid. Because it is not cheap to get your master's degree.”
The next steps, according to Radabaugh, are doing some needs assessments with the district’s social workers and principals to see which trauma-informed practices they could learn about to help support the ongoing needs of their students.
