Palm Beach County schools land $1M grant to beef up mental health programs

Two established programs aimed at helping Palm Beach County students recognize and address mental health concerns in themselves and their classmates will be getting a $1 million boost from a federal grant.

The money will expand the programs exponentially, reaching thousands more students at more than a dozen additional campuses, the district's Chief of Equity and Wellness Keith Oswald said Wednesday at press conference with U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel, D-West Palm Beach.

"This grant will do amazing work in Palm Beach County," Oswald said.

The district is among three in the state to land a chunk of the Department of Justice's STOP School Violence money. Frankel said she believed in the long run, the programming will help prevent school shootings.

But the two efforts getting the cash infusion more often seek to spot trouble long before then.

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Teen Mental Health First Aid is an expansion of the district's youth program of the same name that has been in operation since 2016.

Training students not to fix the problem but to just be aware

The concept for the expansion is to train high schoolers not to diagnose or fix the problems, but simply to recognize the warning signs that come with a mental health problems, understand the risk factors and know how to connect to help themselves or others.

"It empowers teens to talk about mental illness and addiction with friends," Oswald said. "It gives them skills to identify and respond to mental health and substance use concerns, including how to seek the help of a trusted adult."

The money will pay to train teachers to present this curriculum, which would be delivered, for example, as part of social studies class, Oswald said. The state requires five hours of mental health education and this would count toward that, he said.

He anticipates reaching more than 19,000 students over the three-year course of the grant.

The grant will also expand the district's Safe Schools Ambassadors program that is already operating in a handful of high schools.

The ambassadors are students picked for their leadership and communication skills and trained in ways to intervene and de-escalate sometimes bubbling or tense social situations that invariably arise on campus.

The program bills itself as one that "harnesses the power of students to prevent and stop bullying and mistreatment," according to materials supplied by the district. "Student bystanders see, hear and know things adults don't, can intervene in ways adults can't and are often on the scene of an incident before an adult. They are a critical and necessary resource for positively impacting the crisis of bulling in our schools."

School board member and former principal Marcia Andrews said students can help change the climate of a school in ways adults alone cannot.

"When students are having a bad day, they're more likely to tell a friend," said Andrews, who was on hand for the announcement made on the steps of Alexander W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts in West Palm Beach.

Each high school would have a cadre trained ambassadors on campus, with the goal of training about 1,260 students, Oswald said.

Frankel said that having established these programs and a plan to grow them was essential in landing the federal grant, which also went to Lee and Hillsborough county schools.

She said addressing mental health and school safety are a prerequisite to education. "So kids are taking notes and not having to take shelter," Frankel said.

The push to bolster mental health education and the presence of counselors on campus has been decades in the making, but only in the wake of the 2018 Parkland shooting did Florida schools see lawmakers open the spigot and write legislation that made significant change possible.

Educators say the need has only grown under the strains of the pandemic. So far this year, more than 3,000 of the district's students have been referred for mental health support, significantly more than ever before, Oswald said.

Board member Alexandria Ayala said she hears of significant distress from parents whose children have tried to hurt themselves or who go into a tailspin under the pressure of testing that requires psychiatric care.

@sonjaisger

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