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Montgomery Area School District offers students ways to cope with mental health issues

MONTGOMERY — With the apparent escalation of mental health issues among students across the country even before COVID arrived, Denise Liscum, secondary school counselor at the Montgomery Area School District, detailed for the school board the initiatives the district has implemented in dealing with this problem.

“I’ve seen estimates that even as many as 25 even upwards to 40 percent of American students are struggling with some type of a mental health related issue,” Liscum told the board at their meeting earlier this week.

“Just substantial levels of stress and anxiety and depression often go unreported,” she added.

Liscum highlighted some of the programs that have been in place in the district for some time to address these problems. She noted that more recently the district has started to provide school-based outpatient mental health counseling and that within the last two hear the district has partnered with the Community Services Group so that students can have access to professional level counseling services while they are in school.

“It breaks down the barriers of transportation and travel for a lot of families. That was one of the big things that was getting in the way of kids being able to receive individual counseling services,” Liscum said.

Liscum said that after implementing these programs, the district realized that more was needed to help students deal with mental health issues.

“We kind of got to the heart of maybe our students need more education about a variety of issues. Then we started to provide different programs that really allow our kids and empower our kids to take a little bit of control over their own mental, physical and emotional health,” she stated.

She explained that the district instituted a healthy, wealthy and wise program which talked about everything from sleep habits, healthy relationships to stress reduction.

“A whole variety of topics just to teach our kids and empower our kids to start to look at their own health as being very important,” Liscum said.

The district has provided teachers with mental health first aid training and suicide prevention and Liscum noted that “to my knowledge, 100 percent of our teachers, k-12, have some type of mental health first aid training or suicide prevention training.”

After obtaining a grant, the district was able to hire a full-time licensed professional counselor so that students have access to therapeutic intervention at an individual and group level. The district actively screening for mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety and has also added social emotional learning curriculum at various grade levels.

Liscum stressed that these initiatives don’t just represent programming.

“The greatest thing that Montgomery School District does is we provide endless support to our student body through our teachers, our staff, our coaches, our administration. Everybody is at the heart of this effort,” Liscum said.

“Our teachers are teaching out to kids. They’re talking to kids. They’re expressing concerns and making phone calls to parents. The amount of time and heart and effort is just incredibly admirable and these relationships that they create in and of themselves, provide probably the greatest protective factor for mental health,” she added.

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