Candidates running for the Blue Valley Board of Education fit into two starkly different camps on student mental health. The outcome of the November election could reshape whether and how the school district offers this type of support for students and staff.
For the past several years, student mental health has established itself as a priority in local school districts.
Within the Blue Valley School District, this rings especially true. Amid a rise of student mental health concerns, the district has utilized its resources to support numerous mental health initiatives in recent years. Additionally, the topic remains a priority among its school board.
As the upcoming school board election nears, student mental health has shown to be at the forefront of the minds of candidates.
While candidates on both slates agree addressing mental health is important, they distinctly disagree on how that should look within the district — or if the district should use its resources on it at all.
Candidate slates take differing approaches
The eight candidates vying for the four open school board seats have formed two district slates called The A+Team and Blue Valley Excellence.
The A+ Team includes three incumbent school board members — Jan Kessinger, Patrick Hurley and Jodie Dietz — as well as new candidate Clay Norkey. This slate advocates for keeping student mental health a high priority for the district, including having social workers work with students.
Meanwhile, Blue Valley Excellence includes four newcomers, including Christine Vasquez, Trisha Hamilton, Rachel Faagutu and Michael Huebner. This slate of candidates advocates for a “back to basics” academic approach that cuts down on resources for student mental health.
The Excellence candidates have also argued a student’s mental health should be monitored and addressed by parents, and that social workers are an unnecessary budgetary priority.
“As a mother, it’s my role to watch after and nurture my children,” said Faagutu, who seeks a seat representing the Northwest area, at a recent candidate forum hosted by the Post. “We need to get back to reading, writing and arithmetic, and I think we need to respect and honor the parents’ role to nurture and to train and to raise their children.”
Conversely, members of the A+ Team slate voiced support during the forum for the district’s continued use of social workers. While parents represent one important point of support for students, the A+ candidates argued, some students may need more than that.
“I support school counselors, social workers, whatever it is to give a kid a safe space,” said Norkey, who is seeking the At-Large area seat, at the forum. “Yes, I want my kid to come talk to me. But there are some families where the kids don’t feel comfortable. And the only safe space they may have is their teacher or a counselor or social worker at the school.”
An increase in suicides helped form the district’s approach
Mark Schmidt, Assistant Superintendent of Special Education, said the district’s approach to mental health shifted six or seven years ago.
During that time, Schmidt said, the district started to see an increase in suicide attempts — seeing more than one suicide two years in a row. Over the course of the 2016-17 school year, the district had roughly 700 students with a reported mental health diagnosis — about 3% of the student body of 21,700 students.
Parents began pushing the district to address the problem on a wider level. Schmidt said this was not just a matter of maintaining mental health in current students, but arming them with resilience to go off to college — as some of the students lost to suicide were college freshmen.
“We were seeing a lot more students that were coming to us with depression, anxiety and school avoidance,” he said. “We were looking at all aspects of our operations. (We were wondering), ‘Are we putting too much pressure on kids? Do we have supports in place that if we maintain the high expectations for students, we can still support them?’”
School counselors often got through to individual students, he said, but their messages weren’t spread districtwide and might not have reached students who were not reporting their mental health challenges. In addition to counselors, the district had two social workers who only worked in special education.
“We needed to take a systematic approach and wrap our arms around mental health,” he said. “What we have today is really a combination effort that kind of started with those conversations.”
Blue Valley added social workers, mental health programs
Back in 2017, the district formed a task force with principals, counselors and school psychologists to find solutions. In addition to adding more suicide prevention curriculums and programming, Schmidt said the biggest conclusion from that task force was the need to add more staff to the district’s mental health team.
At the time, the responsibility to addressing student mental health fell to counselors who, especially at the high school level, often had many other responsibilities such as organizing letters of recommendation for college and facilitating testing, Schmidt said.
“We kind of had this perfect storm where the kids that were most at risk were also working in environments where the people that are there to help had so many other responsibilities that it really made it tough,” he added.
Today, Blue Valley has increased from two to 40 social workers in the district through a partnership with Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri.
Schmidt said it’s challenging to break down the exact figures of how much the district spends on providing student mental health supports and programming, but collaboration with Children’s Mercy is a part of those efforts. The roughly $1.8 million contract with Children’s Mercy funds the work of social workers who collaborate with school counselors and psychologists on supporting students.
The Blue Valley Educational Foundation also played a key role in establishing mental health programming in Blue Valley. In the years following the reported rise in suicides in 2017, the nonprofit has pushed its donor funding toward a number of mental health initiatives.
For example, the foundation helped raise funds for the Sources of Strength districtwide peer support program and the #GiveMe20 suicide awareness program. The foundation’s BV Well program also supports parents of students navigating mental health challenges.
“These community groups emerged out of unfortunate circumstances, but have grown into tremendous support,” said Courtney Carlson, the foundation’s program and development manager. “The district was really looking at how to provide preventative measures as well as response measures.”
This year, the foundation also announced it would fund an expansion of Mental Health First Aid training across the district. The district plans to train roughly 900 more employees through the program in the coming years. And at last week’s Women’s Giving Circle event, members of the foundation also voted to fund a visit from suicide prevention speaker Kevin Hines at Blue Valley High.
“We’re hearing from students story after story after story about connecting in one program or another that was put into place for suicide prevention, or for just mental health awareness,” said BVEF Executive Director Susan Tideman. “I look to those stories and those comments to fuel our work.”
