Most of the new plan keeps with goals from the year before: giving mental health training to teachers and staff, offering grant-funded teletherapy to students, and updating contracts with various health agencies. But there are some new additions.
Key changes
The Pender County school board charged assistant superintendent Kevin Taylor with coming up with the new plan. To do so, he had to think broadly.
“The plan itself is broken down into prevention, early warning signs, and training to help mitigate and catch early and support students with those types of mental health concerns,” he said. “So that we can help overcome those challenges, and so they can participate in the educational curriculum.”
There are a couple of key changes coming to Pender County Schools (PCS). First is its anti-bullying task force, which Taylor hopes will “address the root causes and effects of bullying in our schools.”
The Board of Education also tweaked the guidelines on helping students at “outside agencies” re-integrate into public school. As mental or physical health issues arise, PCS students sometimes join assisted living programs, reduce their class schedules, or move to online courses. But even after they recover, they face another challenge: re-adjusting to public school.
“Moving for any student is difficult and traumatic. So we want to try to do our best to make sure those things are taken care of, and provide support,” Taylor said.
The new mental health plan requires students returning from residential psychiatric care to attend an alternative learning program before going back to their regular school. PCS is also requiring re-entry meetings between staff, students, and families to discuss student needs. Taylor hopes that these meetings will give students a little more support as they adjust.
“We want to invite the families to come in and give us their input as to where they feel like we could support them,” he said, “In any number of ways — whether it be smaller class size, additional supports, whether it be a special federal program that would help them access the curriculum.”
Supporting staff
The focus of Pender County Schools’ mental health plan is students. But students are not the only ones struggling.
“We learned early on coming back from Hurricane Florence and COVID that we were kidding ourselves if we didn't think that our staff had not been adversely affected by those things,” Taylor said.
A 2022 Gallup poll found that 44% of K-12 staff reported feeling burned out "always" or "very often" at work — the highest rate of all surveyed industries. Burnout and other mental health concerns appear to be major factors in teachers leaving the industry altogether. And more teachers are leaving: North Carolina's teacher turnover rate spiked from 10% in 2020 to 15.6% in 2022, with Southeastern North Carolina seeing the highest rates of attrition in the state in 2021.
This year's mental health plan indicates a slight shift in county policy. Taylor said that last year, PCS administrators began to emphasize staff mental health in its programming. The newest iteration of the mental health plan states that staff "will be provided the opportunity to participate in various activities to promote classrooms and schools where the effects of stress and [sic] recognized and minimized."
When pressed, Taylor alluded to another change to the mental health plan: a partnership with the staff training program Safe and Civil Schools. The thinking is that giving additional training programs to teachers will both help them have better mental health and model better mental health for students — whether that will help remains to be seen.
"We took the mindset of, you know, when you're on a plane, they tell you to put your [oxygen] mask on first before you put your child's mask on," Taylor said. "Because if you don't do yours first, you can't help the child."