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Episode 3: Collaboration - Teamwork Makes the Dream Work!
546 Plays2 years ago
Episode 3 features a conversation about collaborating to make school mental health work! Jamie Ganske, Director of Mental Health and Resilience for Chippewa Falls Area Unified School District, discusses how Chippewa Falls has enacted comprehensive school mental health with the support of various community partnerships. Dr. Leah Featherstone brings the provider perspective as the Vice President of Clinical Operations at Professional Services Group, which collaborates with several southeast Wisconsin school districts to provide school mental health services. Both share how to start building school-community partnerships, ideas for engaging stakeholders including families and school staff, and reference the Communities of Practice available to both School Mental Health Navigators and School-Based Clinicians, an initiative of the Coalition for Expanding School-Based Mental Health in Wisconsin.
Show Notes
Coalition for Expanding School-Based Mental Health in Wisconsin
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction - Comprehensive School Mental Health
Wisconsin School Mental Health Framework
Cardinal Care - Chippewa Falls Area Unified School District
Professional Services Group School-Based Mental Health
Communities of Practice - School Mental Health Navigators or School-Based Clinicians
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Mental Health in Schools
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to School Mental Health Works, a quick-dip monthly podcast presenting dialogues on school mental health in Wisconsin as viewed through the lens of the array of stakeholders who play a role in the comprehensive model of school mental health services in Wisconsin. Our mission is to share the successes and challenges experienced by a range of partners in Wisconsin as communities continue to collaborate and show that school mental health works.
Meet the Experts: Dr. Leah Featherstone and Jamie Ganske
00:00:41
Speaker
My name is Dr. Leah Featherstone. I'm the Vice President of Clinical Operations at Professional Services Group. And I'm joined today by Jamie Ganske, Director of Mental Health and Resiliency with the Chippewa Falls Area Unified School District. And we're here to talk about the importance of collaboration within a school mental health framework.
What is Collaboration in School Mental Health?
00:01:01
Speaker
So I thought it might be good first just to give a brief definition of collaboration to make sure we're all on the same page. So I looked on dictionary.com and according to that, collaborate means to work one with another or to cooperate. And I think any of us that are doing this work regularly would probably identify collaboration and partnership as one of, if not the most important component of implementing this type of school-based mental health program successfully.
00:01:31
Speaker
So with that in mind, Jamie, why don't you start by talking a little bit about your role in Chippewa Falls and how that intersects with this whole idea of collaboration? Well, thank you, Leah, and thank you for having me today. As you mentioned, I'm the Director of Mental Health and Resiliency for the Chippewa Falls Area Unified School District. One of my favorite parts of my role is getting to network with our community and create new partnerships
00:01:58
Speaker
that allow us to continue to add and grow our mental health supports. The work that we are able to do together is far greater than anything one person could do alone. I am incredibly grateful for all of our community partners and all that they do to help our students and their families.
00:02:20
Speaker
That's really great to hear, Jamie. So as you think about that a little bit more, can you give us maybe some more information about some of the ways you're utilizing collaboration with community partners in your current role?
Expanding Mental Health Support in Chippewa Falls
00:02:33
Speaker
Sure. By working together, we've been able to create a wide variety of mental health supports. So I'll talk about some of the mental health supports that we currently offer in our school district. So back in the school year of 2014 and 2015 is when we first identified a need for supports.
00:02:53
Speaker
And so we started with school-based mental health. And this is when a community clinician comes into the school building during the school day and works one-on-one with a student. And we provide the space within our school for this to take place. So back in that 2014-2015 school year, we started very small. We had one therapist and one agency that we worked with.
00:03:20
Speaker
And now as we've continued to grow throughout the years, we have made wonderful partnerships with many agencies. We're currently working with over 30 mental health agencies to bring clinicians into our schools for school-based mental health. And boy, do we appreciate each and every one of them. As we started growing with school-based mental health, we determined it was time to create what's called a district and community leadership team.
Building Leadership for Mental Health Supports
00:03:50
Speaker
This is where we bring all of our community partners to the table so that everyone is on the same page, we're in alignment with our mental health supports, and we can kind of determine big picture ideas based on both community and school data.
00:04:09
Speaker
So we brought that into our district around the year 2017-2018 and we started very small. We only had a few people at the table and over the years it has grown into a very large team so that everybody is on the same page and we are creating wonderful supports together and having amazing conversations. We look really deep into both community and school data
00:04:38
Speaker
And then we use that to determine what's most needed right now and how can we provide services around that data together. And that is just a beautiful feeling when you have the school district and your community partners doing that teamwork together to help support both our students and our family members, as well as our community. And so,
00:05:04
Speaker
After we have kind of looked at all this data, we determined there was still more need, and so we created even more mental health supports in our district.
Grant-Funded Free Counseling Program
00:05:14
Speaker
We created what is called a Student and Family Assistance Program.
00:05:19
Speaker
And at first, back in 2018-2019, when we started this, we offered four free counseling sessions to every one of our students or their family members. And that's four free sessions per family. We were able to do this thanks to grant funding. As the years have gone on, we've noticed more and more need for mental health supports.
00:05:44
Speaker
And so we made another great partnership with Group Health Cooperative of Eau Claire and they are helping to fund now four free parent coaching sessions or four free youth coaching sessions for all of our students or their family members.
00:06:00
Speaker
So our SFAP, or Student and Family Assistance Program, has also been able to grow and flourish thanks to community partnerships and kind of looking at the data to determine the need. And that helped us determine, oh, let's look at some other options for our families.
Integrating Community Clinicians into Schools
00:06:19
Speaker
Another wonderful thing that we do in our district is called an interconnected systems framework. And this is just a really fancy way of saying that we absolutely love bringing our community partners into the schools and working with us. So through an interconnected systems framework, we are able to pay our community clinicians to offer our staff consultation
00:06:47
Speaker
They come in and offer professional development to our staff around a wide variety of mental health and trauma and SEL or social emotional learning. We also do what's called co-facilitated small groups. Now these are becoming more and more popular in our buildings where we bring in a community clinician and they lead or facilitate a group of students
00:07:13
Speaker
And we can do groups around a wide variety of topics based on the need. So we can do groups around self-regulation, around grief and loss. We can do groups around coping skills and coping strategies. And we can also do fun groups. One of our most popular ones right now is equine therapy, where we're actually able to bring in miniature therapy horses into our buildings to work with our students.
00:07:43
Speaker
Not only is this one popular with the students, but we have heard amazing results from the staff members. They have seen students that were very quiet, kind of isolated, that through the use of these miniature therapy horses have been able to open up and expand and start talking and making friends during these groups. It has brought teachers to tears at one point. It's amazing what you can do with these groups.
00:08:13
Speaker
And so our interconnected systems framework has really been a fun way for me to create new partnerships and bring in new supports as well. We were very lucky through another grant, our Project AWARE grant through SAMHSA, that's a five-year grant that's helping fund a lot of these programs.
Shannon Larson: Connecting Families with Services
00:08:33
Speaker
But with this grant, we were also able to add a mental health navigator to our district.
00:08:40
Speaker
Her name is Shannon Larson and she has been such an amazing addition. She was already a staff member in our district, however this is a new role for her the last, this is her fourth year I guess, and she works with our family members to help them set up the services. She can make phone calls with our family members to help set it up, but she really can sit and talk and determine what is the best fit
00:09:06
Speaker
for their child and match them to the best mental health support that we can offer. Another thing that we've started to do is really focus on community events because we have such wonderful partnerships and they've been there to support us through our ups, our downs. They're always there to meet our needs when we ask.
00:09:29
Speaker
And so we've created these community events.
Chippewa Strong: Building Community Resilience
00:09:33
Speaker
One of them is called Cardinal Connections. And this is an event where we bring all of our community partners together with our school staff
00:09:44
Speaker
It's meant truly for networking. Our school staff gets to meet our community partners. It used to be in person and now it's virtual. A lot of our community partners have liked the virtual option because more of them are able to attend now. We put them in random breakout rooms and they get into breakout rooms multiple times where they can really have more intimate conversations and meet
00:10:14
Speaker
more and more of the community partners that we have. A new event that we've created is called Chippewa Strong and this is a two-part series that is a true community collaboration. Unfortunately, our district has suffered several tragedies over the years
00:10:36
Speaker
And we determined as a community that it was time to build some community resilience together. And so we've been able to work together to create this. Our first one just took place and we had a keynote speaker of Denise Olson. She is from New York and her husband was a fighter fire in the 9-11 attacks.
00:11:00
Speaker
and he unfortunately passed away in the Twin Towers. And she now spends her life talking about building community resilience and how to move forward after a tragic event. We then asked our community what they needed to help them move forward and build that sense of community and community resilience.
00:11:22
Speaker
And we're using that information for the second part later on in May, where we will have more of an upbeat interactive keynote speaker that's going to do an activity where everyone is involved and then have multiple breakout sessions where we can learn healthy self-care and healthy coping skills and strategies together in a fun community bonding way. So these are some of the wonderful things we've done with our collaboration.
Why Adopt a Comprehensive School Mental Health Model?
00:11:51
Speaker
I think it's really cool to hear all the different pieces you've put together. A lot of us, when we talk about school-based mental health, I think some people struggle with understanding what a comprehensive model actually looks like. And I think it's really cool to hear about all the different pieces and partners and that kind of thing that you've brought together, because I think that truly is how the model is supposed to work best practice.
00:12:15
Speaker
One of the things that I think is a benefit of the coalition and Jamie, I know you would agree we've talked about this within some of our meetings is the different perspectives that come to the table with that. And so, you know, Jamie was able to talk about what she's done and through the school district there.
00:12:32
Speaker
I kind of bring a different perspective because I work with one of those community partners, not that contracts with Jamie's school district necessarily, but we work with several different districts and so I can give our perspective a little bit as a community provider and what these types of programs can look like.
00:12:52
Speaker
As I mentioned, we partner with several different districts, mostly within the southeastern kind of quadrant of the state. But we, like Jamie mentioned, we are providing school-based mental health where, again, where we're embedding a licensed mental health therapist directly into the school building. And then we have really focused more of our efforts on the consulting piece, lots of consulting as it relates to trauma and attachment, looking at those problematic behaviors within the schools and how we can
00:13:21
Speaker
boost staff resources and understanding about behavior and what that's trying to communicate. So our consultation services, we do a lot of trauma-sensitive schools training, whether that's through professional development days at the districts that we're in. We do parent nights within a lot of these districts where we are covering
00:13:42
Speaker
any kind of topic related to mental health, whether that's bullying or social media or depression and anxiety, self-harm and suicide, anything the parents within those communities are requesting more information on. We've recently started providing DBT or dialectical behavior therapy in some of the schools that we're in.
00:14:03
Speaker
and also some more kind of specific staff support, whether that's support groups or small group sessions where we're providing just more information and support through a mental health lens as opposed to an educator's lens. We see the world very differently. We see kids and behavior in just the whole education system differently. And so it's really beneficial to get kind of those two perspectives in a room. One of our newest
00:14:32
Speaker
pilot programs that we're trying to get off the ground within the next few weeks is adding telepsychiatry services into one of our partnering districts that will hopefully increase access to psychiatry services. During the school day, as we know, accessing psychiatry, particularly for kids right now in our state and nationwide,
00:14:55
Speaker
their long wait lists and kids are just struggling to kind of get what they need. And so we're working, we have a grant for that as well. And so we're working to kind of expand that.
00:15:05
Speaker
Okay, so we've given some ideas of our experience about the types of collaboration that districts and community partners can engage in.
How to Start Mental Health Collaborations
00:15:12
Speaker
So Jamie, as you think about this now, what advice would you give to other districts that might be listening, that might be looking to start some of this work and needing to collaborate with outside community partners? What would you tell them? Absolutely. I tell several school districts to start slow and small and work towards growth.
00:15:34
Speaker
My best piece of advice I can give is find what works best for your own district.
00:15:40
Speaker
So just because something works well in the Chippewa Falls School District does not mean it'll work everywhere. Everyone has different sizes and has different needs. So really look around and ask around and study things and look online because we did a lot of that research and really started with one therapist and one agency and grew and grew and grew as we looked at our own personal needs.
00:16:09
Speaker
We only had about 20 students that were seen in school-based mental health that first year. And now we're looking at over 160 students each month in our school district. So truly started small. Same with our DCLT, our district community leadership team. We only had a few key stakeholder players at the table when we first started to kind of really set the groundwork.
00:16:35
Speaker
And then we grew it larger and larger and larger as our needs continued to increase and we brought more and more community partners to the table.
00:16:45
Speaker
One other thing that we really focused on as we were building our supports was communication. We wanted feedback from our school staff. We got a lot of feedback from our pupil service team, especially our school counselors. We never wanted anyone in our schools to feel like this was being done to them. It truly was that communication of
00:17:08
Speaker
asking what are your needs? What would you be comfortable with? Is this system okay? Can you help us plan this? It was a lot of that communication, so it felt like a team was creating this, not any one person doing something to our buildings. And I think that was really helpful that we had such a good teamwork to create our systems.
00:17:33
Speaker
Another thing that we did in the beginning was we focused a lot on marketing of our mental health support because we wanted our families to know that these were available to them. And so thanks to our grant funding, we were able to have flyers and business cards
00:17:53
Speaker
We created a Cardinal Care website that gives both our families and our staff information about the mental health supports that are available. We have done what's called pop-up booths in our buildings, both for our families and our students.
00:18:11
Speaker
And it's more of a fun, interactive way to give information about the mental health supports. But we also have a nice mental health theme each time where we can teach something and give our information about what's available.
00:18:27
Speaker
We have put logos on multiple things whenever we're involved in anything related to our mental health supports. And so we had someone actually create a Cardinal Care logo for us. And so we wanted that to be seen. And when people see it, they know that it is related to the mental health supports in our district.
00:18:49
Speaker
And for the first few years, it truly was marketing, marketing, marketing. We did news interviews. We were in the paper. We have created videos, anything to get the word out. And that was the main way to give that information.
00:19:07
Speaker
Now we feel very blessed. It's become so utilized that our families are speaking to each other. Our community partners are referring families and students to us. Our community partners, our pediatricians, our mental health agencies are giving the information about the supports available in our schools.
00:19:30
Speaker
to our families and now one of our most common referrals comes from the families rather than the schools like when it first started and to us that is a really heartwarming sign that not only have we created mental health supports that are being utilized they're needed and our families are appreciating it and finding the value in them and
00:19:56
Speaker
And that's kind of a sign to me that we've gotten over the stigma of mental health supports because they're seeing the true value that these can bring and how much help that it can bring to our students and families to help create such healthy individuals.
Building Trust with School Districts
00:20:13
Speaker
Mia, do you have any advice that you can give to others? Yeah, I think on the provider side, I would give very similar suggestions or recommendations to start small. You know, we started back in, I think it was 2015, in a small consortium of schools
00:20:31
Speaker
I was our first school-based mental health therapist because back then it was not as well known or there wasn't a lot of information about like best practice and that kind of stuff. And so same thing, we started super small. And then as we kind of got our feet under us, figured out what we were doing, how to bill it, how to partner with schools, we've kind of grown
00:20:55
Speaker
slowly but surely over the last six or seven years. There certainly is a need, but we don't have to do it all at once.
Creating a Vision and Support Team for Services
00:21:04
Speaker
The other thing I would say is super important from a provider side is to build trust and key relationships with people in the district that you're working in.
00:21:14
Speaker
Like I said, we come at this from different perspectives and it's really important that those relationships are strong and there is a trust built where we expect each other to communicate well. There is an understanding that we're both doing the best we can. We have good intentions even when one of us might
00:21:35
Speaker
make a mistake or do something that the other one doesn't understand. And there have been many, many times where we've had to fall back on those relationships we have with key people in those districts to make decisions or correct things that are happening and to continue to move it forward. I would say also be consistent and open to learning.
00:21:56
Speaker
Much like anything else, this field is moving fairly quickly, and there's a lot of people doing really great work. And it's important to be open to learning how to do that, what the best way is to do different things, how you can tap into different organizations doing this work to learn best practice.
00:22:15
Speaker
different approaches you know the coalition has communities of practice that you know you could become involved in both for mental health navigators and the clinicians that are actually doing the work in the schools so it's just really important to stay plugged in in this work and
00:22:33
Speaker
Get a better sense of what other people around you are doing so you can kind of keep up with the research and the information that's coming out and Then finally, I would just say have a clear vision of what you can offer. You can't do it all we are you know, it takes all of us working together and We have our little piece. There's plenty to go around and so it's important to really build a team around you
00:22:58
Speaker
like Jamie has done up in Chippewa Falls, to really wrap our families and give them the resources that they need to kind of be as healthy as they can be.
00:23:08
Speaker
All right, well, thanks, Jamie, for having this conversation. This was fun to hear about everything you're doing and learn about collaboration. We hope this has been helpful
Resources and Further Information
00:23:16
Speaker
for you. If you would like more information or resources related to school-based mental health or any of the topics we've talked about today, you can check out the coalition's website, which will be linked in the show notes. And until next time, keep working in school mental health because school mental health works.