Over the course of the last ten years, the MCPS board of directors and the administrations of each high school have taken multiple steps towards confronting the county’s mental health problems. A significant portion of the county’s budget has been dedicated towards training counselors and faculty to respond to these problems effectively.
This September, students from around the county have been voicing their complaints about the new wellness initiatives at their schools. They have come in many different forms. At Montgomery Blair High School, Innovation Day is a dialogue between students and teachers once every three weeks, and Churchill has a similar concept with their program, Wellness Wednesday. These activities have taken time away from class instruction, but they are created in hopes of helping students with the overwhelming burden of school.
These efforts have been considered noble by all, but they have also been proven to be ineffective at managing mental health problems. For example, at Blair, students had been forced to convene in their homeroom classes for a seminar, which turned out to be a suicide prevention role play. While the intentions were good, there was a prevalent lack of training for teachers, a large amount of typographical errors, and the entirely unrealistic role plays.
After dozens of students, including myself, collaborated on a cover letter to the school administration, the activity was discontinued. But the lack of transparency from the administration throughout the entire process, coupled with the school’s failure to replace it with a better, more effective approach, makes us wonder, why can’t MCPS handle mental health?
Some students point out that they are not being taken seriously, and thus belittle the severity of the mental health epidemic.
Others mention that they are redundant, since mental health should be handled in small groups.
To answer this question, we have to start with the one thing that’s going well: the counseling staff.
Each MCPS school has a student support team consisting of counselors, a school psychologist (who may rotate through a cluster), a pupil personnel worker, and a school nurse. These individuals are at the heart of their school’s mental health program, and are called upon to handle small-scale and school-wide mental health problems when necessary.
What’s important to note about these staff members is that they have years of education in handling emotional crises and are well equipped to lead the way for others. Their specialization in the field of mental health has been proven effective in combating depression and anxiety, among other mental health issues, for thousands of students. And that’s why these individuals are so impactful: they can build relationships.
Interpersonal relationships between students and counselors involve open communication and a dialogue about the appropriate steps that need to be taken. While a peer or a teacher can aid in giving emotional support, a counselor has experience in helping students cope with the difficulties of high school life, and for that reason, he or she can provide the help students need.
One way is through a 504 Plan, an education plan designed to help a student with a physical or social obstacle. Montgomery County counselors are trained to assign 504 Plans where they see fit, giving students who are struggling with mental health and academia a chance to balance their load. Students across the county have lauded this plan as a step in the right direction for struggling students.
Improving mental health awareness means improving the successful pieces that are in place, such as the 504 Plan. While it has been effective for students who have received one, it has not yet been understood by all students. This is why there needs to be stronger communication about this plan between teachers and students, as well as between teachers and parents.
Another advantage of the student support team in Montgomery County is the aid provided by school psychologists and the pupil personnel workers. Both occupations are in schools statewide, giving students a chance to seek mental health advice from a professional.
Many private therapists charge anywhere from $65 to $250 or more, and with low-income insurance plans increasingly excluding therapy coverage, co-payments can be sky-high for struggling families. That’s why school psychologists and pupil personnel workers are so crucial for the county’s mental health problem. They give students a chance for affordable help
But here’s where the progress is lost: MCPS schools cannot distribute these resources on a broader level. When trying to create a school-wide discussion on mental health, administrators often trivialize the issue by forcing participation from those who don’t want to get involved.
This brings us right back to Blair High School, where this exact problem was exposed by student activists. They saw the sinkholes in the suicide prevention activities that students engaged in during their homerooms which all created an unsettling environment. It was obvious to students that all parties involved wanted the activity to be over, and nobody was willing to proactively give their time.
“We realized that the suicide prevention program was not given the proper attention it warranted,” junior Anika Seth said, who helped launch the efforts last year. Seth, along with a group of friends, interviewed teachers and faculty members to understand their experiences in conducting the activities. “Teachers were given training for this activity two days in advance. [They] were told to show a PowerPoint and were never explicitly told how to run it,” she continued, “The whole thing was meant to be methodical.”
Methodical is perhaps the best summary of the MCPS public health agenda. Throughout their efforts to expand the conversation to students who otherwise would not think about suicide prevention issues, administrators gave teachers minimal training and assigned an obscure activity for each one to carry out. This is the opposite of the progress that the counseling staff has made. While counselors have been able to build relationships and create intimate conversation, teachers have been forced to carry out robot-like tasks without any specialized training.
And yet, we cannot end the discussion right here. It would be very convenient to decide that Montgomery County is succeeding on the micro-level and failing on the macro-level. While that is true, school-wide awareness is a necessity in public and private high schools, and a solution must be found. MCPS has to find a way to transform the lens through which the community sees mental health issues without shattering the glass.
There are a number of ways to go about this. The most simple is to expand knowledge of the counseling departments resources. Administrators can replace the icebreakers and uncomfortable discourses of wellness meetings with objective information about how the facets of the counseling department. Teachers will find it much easier to describe the functions of the health workers and counseling initiatives than to conduct a conversation about wellness. Participating students will have a direct means of addressing their own mental health concerns and those of their peers.
Most ways of transforming the mental health infrastructure of our schools can only come with huge strides in education. A number of the issues impacting mental health are at the heart of public education problems. These include large classroom sizes, student burnout, and sleep deprivation, among countless other issues. Solving these issues will take more than a bi-weekly meeting or a principal’s announcement. It will take a transformation in school-wide culture. This will mean that teachers, students, and administrators will have to adapt their own personal policies in order to create an academic system that supports student health.
Article by Shariar Vaez-Ghaemi of Montgomery Blair High School
Graphic by Sophia Li of Takoma Park Middle School