Social Workers Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Students from Oak Hill High School’s (OHHS) Oakheal Outreach Team hosted a Student Mental Health Conference Wednesday to help other schools and counties establish student-led mental health supports.

Cassie Ganeau, a social worker at Oak Hill, said her role started in the transitional period coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. With mental health declining, she and her colleagues determined more needed to be done.

“We did what’s called a needs assessment in social work,” Ganeau said. “We just kind of developed our team and added students, and we found it was super important to include their perspective as well.”

Lily Zukowski is an Oak Hill senior and the president of the Oakheal Outreach Team. Students like her act as a bridge between school social workers and mental health resources, and also put on events focused on mental health.

Zukowski said she noticed a positive change in the student body since the outreach team’s creation two years ago.

“We’ve had a lot more engagement within the student body and people talking to each other,” she said. “We’ve had a lot more different events and just fun things to do to get out of the house and do other things. I’ve seen the uplifting environment that it’s created in our school.”

Students, counselors, educators and administrators from 17 counties attended the conference at the Fayette County school. Organizers say they hope the attendees will establish their own teams back home.

“It’s definitely something that a lot more schools are wanting to implement,” Ganeau said. “We have elementary schools here, we have K through 12, high schools as well. It’s really interesting to see that in those schools as well, they need a team of their own.”

An audit of the Bureau for Children and Families says the Department of Health and Human Resources needs to focus on the safety of Child Protective Service workers making home visits throughout the state.

Legislative auditors presented their review of the bureau to lawmakers with six recommendations on how to improve safety for workers monitoring cases and conducting investigations outside of their county offices.

Those include:

1. Increase focus on worker safety and create a culture that emphasizes worker safety through creating a central and uniform focus on safety.

2. Avoid any further delays in providing personal safety devices for all CPS workers and develop a statewide, uniform practice for their use.

3. Identify areas of weak/nonexistent mobile phone coverage and explore the use of other communication technology.

4. Provide agency mobile phones to all field workers and require their use for state business conducted from remote locations.

5. Provide methamphetamine safety training and establish stringent methamphetamine safety guidelines for social workers.

6. Require annual safety training.

As auditors explained their recommendations to members of the Joint Committee on Government Organization, they explained the bureau has been aware of communication issues during home visits since a CPS worker was killed on the job five years ago, but have yet to make any changes to the devices workers are carrying with them.

Bureau Commissioner Nancy Exline said over the next few months, they will be testing a variety of communication devices including satellite phones, life alert type badges and cell phone boosters to determine which technologies will be useful in different areas of the state.

“We’re currently doing a complete inventory of all of our cell phones, the technology they have, where they work, where they don’t work, where we need booster,” she said. “It is my hope that in December we can begin to make decisions about what devices we need to have where and which ones are the best to use for all of our field staff.”

Legislators asked Exline to return with a report in December detailing the devices that will be used by CPS workers and how additional safety procedures have been implemented as suggested by the audit.