Three New Mexico school districts to receive funds for students’ mental health needs | Local News

In a state where existing services meet a fraction of mental health needs, Santa Fe Public School officials are celebrating a grant to help schools expand their ability to support students in difficulty.

The $ 8.9 million five-year grant was awarded to the State Department of Education earlier this month through the Federal Drug Abuse and Mental Health Agency.

Three districts – Santa Fe, Farmington and Socorro – were selected by the Public Education Department based on willingness to participate and existing mental health infrastructure and demographics, including the number of students using English as a second language and poverty rates below families across the district.

Through the grant, the districts will participate in a program called Project AWARE for the next five years.

“I think it will help us do a few things. One is to raise awareness of mental health among our school age teenagers. … For me, it’s also about improving the Santa Fe Public Schools offering, ”said Sue O’Brien, a student welfare coordinator in the district.

O’Brien said the district hopes to use some of the funds to connect Indigenous American students with more culturally specific mental and behavioral health services, in part through a partnership with the Serenity Wellness Center, a local community mental health agency.

During the pandemic, the school district provided services to students who needed individual psychological support. Now that students are retuning to personal classrooms, O’Brien said, some partner agencies that schools refer students to for therapy have suffered staff losses.

“Students were no doubt in a place of isolation,” said O’Brien. “Getting back into these things is a challenge for most of them.”

Only 12 percent of New Mexico’s mental health is covered, according to the University of New Mexico.

Researchers are still investigating the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on student mental health, but in January the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported an increase in the number of children going to the emergency room because of mental crisis.

Between April and October 2020, the height of distance learning for many students across the country, the number of 5-11 year olds going to the emergency room increased by 24 percent and among teenagers by 31 percent under 17 compared to 2019.

As part of the AWARE program, staff from Santa Fe Public Schools and other districts will attend several mental health training courses.

“If we can train school staff to … [that] is very important, ”said O’Brien.

As the five-year grants come to an end, it will be crucial to evaluate the associated programming. Local grants, she added, won’t cover the same amount of money as the federal grant.

Farmington Municipal Schools principal Eugene “Gene” Schmidt said he was glad the AWARE program will bring a behavioral medicine practitioner to the district.

“We have slowly built up our social and emotional support on site over the past two years,” he said. “But this scholarship gives us the opportunity to get to a much more important level, and that is that we connect with a local service provider who is embedding extra support in the school for children who are suicidal.”

In a remote area like Farmington, access to mental health services is particularly sparse.

“One of the sad stories about Farmington is that we are miles away from the child psychologists we would normally send a child to right away,” said Schmidt. “Now we have immediate access to other local service providers who will be embedded in the school.”

Roberto Taboada, a spokesman for the Farmington district, noted that many mental health providers in the area are booked weeks and months into the pandemic.

“This puts a strain on the mental health not only of the students, but also of the staff at our school,” he said.