The Pasco County School Board has approved a plan that allocates additional funding provided by the Florida Legislature to address youth mental health needs.
The Legislature’s decision to provide more money to address mental health issues came in response to the Valentine’s Day shooting spree at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.
The Pasco school district was allocated slightly more than $1.7 million in mental health funding, according to Melissa Musselwhite, director of student support programs and services for the district.
Ninety percent of the funding must be spent to provide mental health services and 10 percent can be spent on prevention, she said.
So, the district has designated $1.4 million for services for at-risk youths and slightly more than $150,000 for prevention services. It also has allocated $123,000 for public charter schools.
The district’s plan calls for contracting with Central Florida Behavioral Network to help the district manage access to mental health services and help the district with data reporting.
It also will help the district with wraparound services for students.
“Many times we refer kids out and parents don’t go. We need to be sure that we’re diligent about tracking those kids and following up,” Musselwhite told the Pasco County School Board during a workshop on July 24.
The district’s plan, which required school board approval, was due to the state by Aug. 1.
Board members approved the plan at their evening meeting on July 24.
“There hasn’t be a comprehensive approach to referring kids out for services and support, and the follow-up and the wraparound with the family,” Musselwhite said, noting she would spend close to $100,000 in general fund money every year for a limited number of students.
By working with Central Behavioral Florida Network, the district will be expanding its reach to community resources that it didn’t know about before, Musselwhite said.
The mental health plan also includes:
- Contracting with behavioral analysts to work one-on-one with students most at risk
- Training in youth mental health first aid
- Training in trauma-informed care
- Training in Positive Behavior Intervention
- Increased funding for alternatives to suspensions program
- Additional adult assistance to help with students who are severely at risk for various reasons
- Increased data collection to help the district make more informed decisions
- Refining threat assessment procedures to be sure the law enforcement and district personnel are speaking the same language
- Adding a high-performing school nurse, school psychologist and school social worker who will serve in a coaching/mentoring role for district staff
The district also plans to incorporate Social Emotional Learning across the curriculum, to help kids to learn how to effectively deal with anger, disappointment and difficult situations that arise.
Ray Gadd, deputy superintendent, is a proponent of the approach.
Social Emotional Learning helps kids “deal with the emotions of maybe not being the best player on the team, or not being able to play nine innings every game, or maybe having to sit on the bench for the good of the team,” Gadd said.
“Those things are upsetting to some folks, but how do you learn to handle that because those things that happen in life.
“SEL is trying to help teachers understand how to help kids to build foundational skills so they learn to manage those troublesome behaviors,” Gadd said.
Musselwhite said the district is looking for ways to embed SEL across the curriculum, “so that it’s not something stand-alone, and that it can be holistically done throughout the district, not in one subject or during your time with your school counselor.”
Gadd put it like this: “What we need is more SEL and less people with guns. If I had my choice, I would have rather have seen the Legislature fund a lot of SEL programs all around the state to help kids build those foundational skills so they never get to a point where they want to shoot people.”
Also, the district plans to add another Crisis Intervention Team.
It has four teams and will be adding a fifth.
“There was a huge increase, a 46 percent increase, in our crisis callouts for the crisis intervention team over the last year,” Musselwhite said. “It was pretty taxing last year on the four teams that we had.”
The teams are voluntary and are made up of student services team members and school counselors, who receive additional training to respond to crisis situations throughout the district.
Published August 1, 2018
