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Want Students to Achieve Academically? Provide Mental Health Services

Of the 718 public schools in West Virginia, 129 have school-based health centers (although note that some elementary/middle or middle/high schools share a center). Just over 30 percent of those, including Riverside High School in Belle, have mental health services.

“I think it’s [the mental health services] a good thing because a lot of teenagers struggle with depression or something wrong with them – they think that – especially in adolescence, the way the brain develops and all that stuff,” said Lillian Steel-Thomas, a senior at Riverside.

Steel-Thomas has had, as she calls it, “a tough life.” Over the past 18 years, she has lived with every relative who would take her in. She has also attended six or seven different schools. Steel-Thomas is currently living with her boyfriend’s parents – the most stable situation, she said, she has had in a while.

“Most of the problems they end up going away after you get older, but sometimes they don’t and getting help young helps you not have all kinds of horrible issues when you grow up,” she said.

Steel-Thomas has been diagnosed with depression and anxiety. She is one of seven students I talked to from three schools who have similar challenges. Most said having a therapist available at school is invaluable. Two young women from Greenbrier East High School said they wish they had access to one (they actually do – they just didn’t know about it).

“For many, many years focus on academics – many school leaders didn’t see the relationship between mental health and academics,” said Barbara Brady, School Counseling Coordinator with the WV Department of Education. “There are many, many studies saying academics impact mental health and mental health impacts academics.”

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, one in five children ages 13-18 have or will have a serious mental health condition. West Virginia currently has very little data about the state’s childhood mental health and none that was publically available.

Riverside is Steel-Thomas’ second high school. The first did not have mental health services. I asked her if having mental health services available at school made any difference to her grades. The short answer? Absolutely.

“I have good grades now because I can study, but before I couldn’t because it wasn’t that great,” said Steel-Thomas. “Where I had bad grades they believed I wasn’t a good student or a good person and I told them I was having a horrible time, told them all kinds of personal things and they pretty much told me to my face that I was lying.”

0119MentalHealth.mp3

Full audio story as heard on West Virginia Morning

Steel-Thomas failed all her classes that first year of high school except for the two that were graded based on “participation.” She said she thinks she was truant about half the time.

“I just didn’t feel like going to school anymore,” she said. “What’s the point of going if nobody cares? And my grades are bad anyway and it sucks being home, but at least I can go jogging or something.”

Being at Riverside, she said, is a world of difference. She feels more supported by both teachers and administrators who in turn, she said, seem to feel more supported by having referral services available on site.

The on-site services also mean she doesn’t have to leave school for appointments or make up hours of work. She just shows a teacher her appointment card, then heads down the hall to the clinic waiting room. It’s an envelop of support that for most of her life she hasn’t gotten from home.

Cases like Steel-Thomas’ seem like a success. But administrators like Brady are quick to point out that if schools are not creating an overall better environment for students, placing therapists in school will not be enough.

“It’s critical to have those universal preventions, those universal supports. Teaching all students the skills they need to succeed, teaching all students anger management skills, teaching all students conflict resolution s

kills, social skills, so on and so forth.”

The idea is to slowly change the way schools think about mental health and behavioral support. It’s not a one size fits all prescription. Schools in Cabell County have very different challenges than schools in McDowell. These schools need to have programs available that they can pick and choose from that work for their school at this time.

A complementary story, on the programs currently available to schools, will air Monday during West Virginia Morning.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation.

Record Number of Entries for Contest on Alcohol Awareness

The state Alcohol Beverage Control Administration has received a record 78 entries from high school students for a contest discussing the dangers of drinking and driving and underage alcohol consumption.

Sixteen high schools submitted essays or videos for the contest. Winners will be announced in late January. Prizes include $5,000 for first place, $2,500 for second place and $1,000 for third place. Prize money must be used for school-sanctioned events or equipment.

The agency says in a news release that students from the winning school will help develop a 60-second public service announcement which will air statewide during this year’s prom and graduation seasons.

The NO School Spirits contest is funded with grants from State Farm, the National Alcohol Beverage Control Association and the Governors Highway Safety Program.

Promise Scholarship Applications Available Beginning Monday

High school graduates can begin applying for West Virginia’s merit-based Promise Scholarship on Monday.

Applications will be available until March 1.

The scholarship pays up to $4,750 for college tuition and mandatory fees for in-state students who maintained at least a 3.0 grade average in high school. To be eligible, students also must have scored a composite 22 on the ACT or a combined 1020 score on the SAT college entrance exams.

Higher Education Policy Commission director of financial aid Brian Weingart says students should apply for the Promise Scholarship even if they don’t think they’re eligible.

Weingart tells The Charleston Gazette-Mail that eligible students who don’t meet the deadlines for the fall semester can still receive the scholarship. But they won’t receive the awards until the spring semester.

Study Shows Higher Graduation Rates for Students with Disabilities in W.Va.

A new report released this week shows students in West Virginia with disabilities are graduating from high school at a greater percentage than the national average.

The report is called Diplomas Count 2015: Next Steps-Life After Special Education. It’s published annually by a national education magazine, Editorial Projects in Education Research Center and Education Week, that analyzes data from the U.S. Department of Education’s office of special education programs.

Nearly 73 percent of West Virginia students with disabilities ages 14-21 exited high school with a regular diploma in the 2012-2013 school year, according to the report. The national average was about 65 percent.

The report also shows that almost all of West Virginia students with disabilities spend only about 40 percent of the school day in regular classrooms, compared to a national rate where the population spends about 92 percent of the school day in regular classrooms.

Overall, the state’s graduation rate looks to be climbing. 2013 numbers rose to 81 percent, up from 78 percent in 2011.

Second Smallest School in West Virginia Works on NASA Project

Chris Poniris, STEM instructor and Carol Coryea, 7th-12th grade science teacher at Paw Paw Schools.

This week, students at a very small West Virginia school are wrapping up a very big science project…with help from NASA. They’re building a full scale model of a satellite. It’s something you might not expect to see at the second smallest school in the state…but one teacher had the ambition and enthusiasm to make it happen.

Space exploration, the universe, satellites, rockets…it’s what many kids dream about. And for the middle and high school students at Paw Paw Schools, dreams like those are not so far away. 7^th through 12^th graders here are building a full scale model of NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale Satellite.

“In short, the MMS mission is studying how Earth’s magnetic field works,” said Todd Ensign, the Program Manager at NASA’s Educator Resource Center in Fairmont, “In particular, you know, how it helps to protect us from high energy particles. Life on Earth would not exist, the way we know it at least, if it weren’t for Earth’s magnetic field.”

The NASA Center in Fairmont provides free training to instructors who want to teach STEM subjects. Two years ago, Paw Paw’s only 7th through 12th grade science teacher, Carol Coryea, went to one of the trainings. It was about the MMS mission and how its four satellites will monitor solar weather after they’re launched in March.

Coryea was so inspired by what she learned, she immediately brought it into her classroom. She first taught her kids about solar weather using iPads, and then they started making small, paper models of the MMS satellite.

About a year ago, she decided to take it even further when she and her students toured the MMS mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

“I asked the contact person, what would it take to build a model of the satellite,” Coryea said, “what if our students did that? And so one thing led to another, and we came up with this idea that why not build a full scale model?”

Unfinished full scale model of the MMS satellite.

She talked about her idea with her colleague, Chris Poniris, Paw Paw School’s STEM instructor. NASA was so intrigued by their enthusiasm that the agency agreed to provide all the materials for the project.

“We didn’t pick a random school in the state,” said Todd Ensign, “we didn’t pick Paw Paw because it was the second smallest school. We picked it because Carol and Chris have been very involved in NASA programs and specifically they’ve already done MMS with their students.”

The year-long project has taken over Chris Poniris’ construction and engineering shop, and Carol Coryea says sometimes space can get a little tight. But, she says, a small school like this is the ideal place for a project of this caliber.

“We have the same cohort of students,” Coryea said, “so students that I have for Science, Mr. Poniris will have for construction or megatronics, or I may have in a chemistry course or I’ve had them for biology, so we’re all working with the same group of students.”

Pieces of the full scale model ready to be put in place.

Coryea says sometimes the demands on the students can be challenging, but she and other staff take care not to let the project interfere with other subjects.

“We’ve been very cautious not to pull our kids out of courses that they need, you know…that they would be working on otherwise,” said Coryea, “We’ve done a lot of writing, we’ve done a lot of speaking and presentations, so we’ve been able to kind of support those other courses, but yet not actually ever pulling those students out of those classes.”

A year’s worth of hard work on the satellite project is about to come to fruition. On Friday, Coryea and her students will take the model to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and present it to the media and the public. After that, it will be on display at the Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences in Charleston.

As the deadline nears, these kids are putting the final touches on the model.

9th Grader, Kelly White began working on the project with the paper models two years ago. She says it’s bittersweet to see it all coming to an end.

“It’s a little upsetting that I know that the project’s going to be over,” White noted, “but I hope we get to work on more, and it’s going to be neat to be able to see it in the museum,”

“And what’s one thing you’ll take away from this project that you’ll keep with you for the rest of your life?” asked West Virginia Public Radio reporter, Liz McCormick.

“That I can say that I built that project, I was a part of it,” White said.

Many of these kids say they might be interested in a career in a STEM field now, even if they’d never thought about it before. Carol Coryea hopes she’ll be able to take her students to see the real MMS satellites when they’re launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida in March.