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Episode 8: Open Doors and Open Minds - Family Engagement in School Mental Health
223 Plays1 year ago
Our guests for this episode are Jamie Ganske, Director of Mental Health and Resilience for Chippewa Falls Area Unified School District, and Heather Birk, Lived Experience Representative with the Coalition for Expanding School-Based Mental Health in Wisconsin. Jamie shares how her district works to engage families in school-based mental health with an emphasis on promoting mental wellness and sharing resources. Heather brings the parent advocate perspective, discussing barriers to family engagement and suggestions to overcome them by building authentic relationships. School Mental Health Works when schools and families come together to open doors and minds!
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
National Center for School Mental Health Advocacy Tipsheet for Families
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:17
Speaker
Welcome to School Mental Health Works, a Quick Dip monthly podcast presenting dialogues on school mental health 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.
00:00:40
Speaker
This series is a podcast of the Coalition for Expanding School-Based Mental Health in Wisconsin, a statewide coalition with a mission to advance and support expanded, comprehensive, and integrated mental health services within the school setting through school, home, and community partnerships.
Meet Jamie Ganske
00:01:04
Speaker
Hi, my name is Jamie Ganske. I am the Director of Mental Health and Resiliency for the Chippewa Falls Area Unified School District and a board member for the Coalition for Expanding School-Based Mental Health in Wisconsin. I have Heather here with me today. Heather, would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah, thank you. My name is Heather Burke. I'm a lived experience representative on the board for the Coalition for Expanding School-Based Mental Health.
00:01:33
Speaker
Well thank you for being here with me today Heather and taking the time to discuss family engagement with me. My first question for you is how does your district engage families?
Family Engagement Strategies
00:01:45
Speaker
Sure. So our district has been going through a lot of changes recently, including new leadership and our family and community engagement has really been at the forefront of those changes. So making sure that we really understand that our community is driving our schools. So things like listening sessions, together feedback and hear concerns from stakeholders to educational and informational sessions to educate the community on how our schools operate. And then, you know, from there,
00:02:16
Speaker
It kind of just trickles down into the schools, right? So our principals form personal connections with families and then our teachers are doing the same thing as well. We really have an open door policy. So reach out and contact anyone at any time for any reason.
00:02:33
Speaker
And then trying to get our families back into the buildings too has been a really big drive, especially this year. It feels like we're still kind of recovering from COVID a little bit. There were families last year who still didn't know that they could come inside of the building. So having those back to school nights, open houses, more in the building events and activities just to bring families in and form those personal connections. That's really been our goal over the last few years. So what about you? What are you seeing up by you?
00:03:02
Speaker
I love how you said that your community is driving your schools and that you have these listening sessions. What is the listening session in Tidal?
00:03:12
Speaker
So this really started with our superintendent. When he took over a few years ago, he wanted to get to know the community and he showed up in person at every school in our district as well as at one or two, I believe, community locations as well. And it was open door. Anybody could show up, teachers, support staff, families, community members, students as well.
00:03:36
Speaker
And he had like a presentation about himself and his background and everything and then he just he wanted to hear from us like what's going well, what's not going well, what are the concerns and he tracked all of that data and he compiled it into you know the direction that he needs to go to move the district forward and address a lot of issues that were found.
00:04:01
Speaker
That sounds amazing. I like how he not only was listening to the community, but it sounds like he actually did something with that feedback so that you felt heard and you had a voice in the changes that were made. That's wonderful. I know in our district here in Chippa, we also do a few things that help to engage our community.
Community-Driven Focus Areas
00:04:22
Speaker
One of our bigger events that we just held again this last year was called a community conversation, where we invite our community members as well as our staff members to all come together and the community determines what are the most relevant things that they want our school districts to focus on.
00:04:43
Speaker
And the last couple times we've done this, mental health has continued to be in the top three focus areas that our community has said we want our schools to focus on. And so it's really nice to see that community support and the community recognizing the significance and importance of working on mental health for our students. A couple other things that we have done here in Chippewa is
00:05:10
Speaker
Whenever we have an open house or a parent-teacher conference, we have started to put our cardinal care pop-up booths, meaning we have a booth that talks about all of the mental health supports that we offer in our district.
Mental Health Resource Initiatives
00:05:26
Speaker
And we always have a new fun theme and some fun handouts to kind of draw the people to the table. They get to take the handouts for free, but it sparks conversations about different topic areas related to mental health. But then it's an opportunity to discuss what are all the resources available and how do you access the resources. And so by integrating these casual conversations about
00:05:53
Speaker
accessing mental health supports at a time when they were already in our buildings and just making it part of the experience makes it so that I think we've really reduced the stigma around talking about mental health because it's something that we just do here in Chippewa.
00:06:12
Speaker
It's something that everyone has equal access to, no matter what. Everyone has access to our Student and Family Assistance Program, so four free counseling sessions, as well as either four free parent or youth coaching sessions. And so we can talk about how to access that, and it's for our students or their family members. And so if it's a parent or a family member that needs that,
00:06:35
Speaker
We can talk about how to access that for them as well. New this year, something I'm really excited about, is our high school is rethinking how they are doing parent-teacher conferences.
New Parent Conference Format
00:06:50
Speaker
And in the past, because high school doesn't typically have the best outcome for parent-teacher conferences, they decided to rethink what they're doing and deliver parent experiences differently. And so we're trying something new. This first one will take place in November and
00:07:12
Speaker
It's more of a parent conference this year. And it's very exciting because you still have opportunities for the parents to talk to teachers, but there is going to be an actual conference style presentation. So there'll be some booths there with some more mental health related information. And there'll be both academic kind of conference selection sessions, as well as a heavy focus on mental health at this event.
00:07:40
Speaker
And so even the keynote speaker is love and logic with teenagers, talking more about how can you connect better with your teenagers. Again, you have academics mixed in with some mental health. So there will be things like talking about raise your voice, which is more of a student led thing that we are doing in our schools.
00:08:00
Speaker
There'll be information on anxiety, QPR. Our community also did a 30 minute video called Shaping Destiny to talk about aces and resiliency. And that is going to be showing and then have opportunity for a parent discussion to learn more about aces and resilience at that event.
00:08:20
Speaker
So again it's new and I'm very excited to see how all these different things that they're doing at our high school go. And one last one that's also new this year is we are sending ideas for skill building or life skills that you can use at home and we're delivering that monthly in our monthly parent newsletters. So I'm excited for the new things we're trying this year.
00:08:44
Speaker
Yeah, it sounds really exciting. I hope you update us on how those go. Absolutely. Also, you know, we know that involving families in our school-based activities is going to foster positive engagement with our educators. It's going to increase our family awareness of student progress and improve student achievement and decreases our disciplinary issues. So lots and lots of benefits.
00:09:09
Speaker
So Heather, how does family engagement support your comprehensive school mental health in your district?
00:09:16
Speaker
So I think the important thing for me is that family engagement is really, it's for everybody, and it's kind of that protective measure. So I always think of it as like the tier one support, right? So everybody gets tier one supports. So by building those connections and those relationships through a lot of those activities that you just described, and then also doing things like making positive phone calls home, making personal invitations to show up to events for families who don't,
00:09:45
Speaker
traditionally show up and just building those connections, that is like that protective measure so that when the family or if the family ever needs mental health support and they need to go deeper, hopefully they reach out first before you ever see a problem show up in the classroom. And even if they don't reach out and ask for help,
00:10:06
Speaker
when you notice something and say, hey, you know, I've been noticing this problem, you know, can we talk about it? Hopefully they're open and they'll talk to you because they already know you and they have that established connection with you already. So that's really my goal with family engagement. And then, you know, you can always go deeper too, right? Because there's some situations where students need more support or families need more support. So there's chronic
00:10:32
Speaker
issues. There's, you know, we talked about the difference between mental health and mental illness. There's disabilities, these long term
00:10:40
Speaker
issues where families are just going to need more support. And then you kind of go into that tier two and tier three support. So that's really kind of coming up with a family plan and really trusting the family to know what they need. And so when they say they need something, you go, okay, now let's figure out how we're going to make that happen as best we can. I know for our family and for other families that I've worked with, one of the biggest things has been providing
00:11:07
Speaker
a single point of contact for the family at school.
Streamlining Community Supports
00:11:12
Speaker
So when you have a child who has mental health challenges or disabilities or any chronic long term issue, there's a lot of supports out there in the community, but they are very disconnected. And they don't talk to each other. So you have your county waiver programs, you have your CCS, you know, wraparound programs, and then you have
00:11:33
Speaker
doctors and other therapists and care providers and they're very disjointed. They're helpful but they don't talk to each other so there's a lot of names to remember and roles for families to remember and they're very overwhelmed. And then you get into a school especially when you get into secondary schools where there are more teachers, more staff, more things going on, more moving parts. It's very overwhelming to have to sit there and look at a list of names and figure out
00:11:59
Speaker
Who do I need to contact about this problem that I'm having with my child or that my child is having in school? So just having that one point of contact can be so helpful. And it doesn't mean that that person is solving everything. It just means that that's the person you go to and then that person can delegate from there. And of course, every family is different.
00:12:22
Speaker
That's why I always advocate for some sort of, you know, we have individual education plans for our students, but, you know, an individual family support plan for the more chronic long-term situations.
00:12:36
Speaker
Sounds like your school district is doing some wonderful things with family engagement. I love that you said that they're making sure to do some positive phone calls home. They're inviting people to events to make sure that they know that they're there and to come. And then you've also talked a little bit kind of it sounds like a wraparound plan or they're making sure that the family is involved in all the planning for the supports and then trying to make it easier for the family by having that single point of contact.
00:13:04
Speaker
that sounds like you are on the right track for doing amazing things and that's wonderful to hear because I feel that by engaging with the family members during during um any kind of time in life that may be a bump in the road or just harder to navigate anytime you can make something a little bit easier even like that single point of contact it might sound like a little idea to some but boy can that change the
00:13:32
Speaker
impact of, hey, I feel like I can reach out to school for help because it's one person not trying to look through that whole list like you said.
00:13:40
Speaker
Yeah, and you know, even some of the things you mentioned before with having resources available for families and kind of breaking that stigma, I know another thing that I have found beneficial in our district is bringing the resources to the families. So we held a disability resource fair last spring, and mental health was absolutely included in that. And we had such an amazing turnout
00:14:07
Speaker
from parents and families, and we had staff showing up as well to collect information and resources for their families and students, but just bringing it to where they are. And for some of our families, they maybe can't get to school, especially if they're kind of farther away, and transportation is an issue. So we've been working on trying to push like home visits or more community-based
00:14:31
Speaker
information sessions and whatnot. So, um, you know, if this, if the high school is like five miles away from you, maybe there's a place somewhere in the middle that you can meet and set up a booth or a table or something like that, or even just meeting families one-on-one for coffee someplace, if that's what they need, you know, just being flexible and really bringing the resources to where people are. Absolutely. Well, thank you for sharing all these wonderful examples.
00:14:57
Speaker
Here in Chippewa, I feel that we are trying really hard to engage our family members during times that they were already planning on being at our schools. Kind of like I said, the booths that we have at their open houses or at peer and teacher conferences, like when we know that they're in our buildings, rather than making them come for a separate time to learn about our mental health supports has been really beneficial because then we're talking about mental health at these
00:15:26
Speaker
booths and things like that when they're already there. And as I said before, I really feel like it's helped us to lower that stigma and increase the awareness of the supports, but also the awareness of how to access the supports. And so I think the more that we can maybe find ways to incorporate some of the ideas that you were talking about, more opportunities that parents are there that we could meet with them to talk about mental health is always a positive.
Overcoming Engagement Barriers
00:15:55
Speaker
All right. Well, we know that schools would love to increase parent engagement, but there are some barriers. So some barriers that may prevent parent involvement can include things like childcare, work conflicts, time restraints, language barriers, and that's just to name a few.
00:16:15
Speaker
So Heather, what are some of the barriers to family engagement that you have noticed? And then what suggestions do you have to overcome them? Yeah, so I think, you know, you named kind of the main ones already. And really, I'm always coming into new barriers. I'm always finding something new.
00:16:34
Speaker
You know, some of the ones we think of the most are like transportation. You know, what can we do to help with transportation that's moving the resources into the community or a home visit if that's what's really needed. Forming maybe carpool groups with families if that is something the community is interested in.
00:16:54
Speaker
You know, there's also educational barriers. So families going into schools and maybe they have a low education level themselves. There's a very large percentage of the adult population in this country who are
00:17:07
Speaker
illiterate. It can be overwhelming and intimidating. They feel like they don't have anything to contribute to the school. Really just trying to have our doors open, have our minds open, making sure for educators that we're not using a lot of technical lingo and acronyms and trying to simplify things as much as possible.
00:17:31
Speaker
asking the families for their input and their insight and making sure they understand that they are heard. They are their child's first teacher and greatest teacher and making sure that you really hear them and welcome them and even welcome them into the building. You don't have to have a college degree to volunteer in a classroom or even a high school degree. Everybody can do something. Everyone can contribute something in a school community.
00:17:59
Speaker
just making sure everybody really understands those things. And then there's also mental health on the parent side too. That's very important to realize. And then we talked about scheduling conflicts. There are families who work third shift.
00:18:16
Speaker
making sure that you offer different events at different times of days. So maybe you do want to have like a morning coffee and breakfast chat with the school social worker or the principal to get some information and resources and just, you know, move those things around throughout the day and see what sticks. See when people show up and who's showing up when. There is also, I think,
00:18:44
Speaker
In some communities, there's fear of authority in our schools. There's fear of being judged. There's fear of being reported to Child Protective Services. I had a family that I worked with who needed winter gear for their children and they didn't know where to go. And I said, there's a closet at school that has all this free stuff. And they're like, I don't want to.
00:19:09
Speaker
Are they going to report me? Because I can't afford it. And just explaining, no, no, no. It's there for a reason. Nobody's judging you. Nobody's reporting you. And I think getting people to open up in those situations really comes down to self-disclosure. That's one of the biggest ways that we form connections with each other, right, is just sharing something. It doesn't have to be deep and personal. We don't need to let all the skeletons out of our closet.
00:19:34
Speaker
just sharing some something personal to help people open up and understand that you understand where they're coming from and you're not going to judge them for being in a time of need because we have all been in a time of need at some point we're all human we all need help at some point. I love how you are phrasing all of this because it can be really hard to ask for help sometimes and that's that's just being human I think
00:20:03
Speaker
And so when you are truly letting someone know that it's okay to ask, you're not going to be judged. This is what it's here for. Just to try and alleviate those fears that you were talking about, because I think that is a very real barrier is that fear and that asking for help. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's also a fear of just being judged in the community, even if you're not judged by the school staff being judged by other parents.
00:20:32
Speaker
right because there is there's parent clicks just like there's clicks within our kids in the halls at school it happens with parents too so but the reality is that anybody can face mental health challenges or any type of life challenges and doesn't matter your race or economic status or anything like that and so really having those
00:20:52
Speaker
open conversations like you were talking about having those tables out making it a public conversation and saying it's okay. We can all have these conversations and I mean it can it can be the thing that unites us. Absolutely. And I think that's one thing that I really love about our district is that the mental health supports are available for everybody.
Commitment to Equal Access
00:21:13
Speaker
There's no need to qualify for anything. We're very lucky in this way. And so anybody, everybody has the same access to our mental health supports. Everybody can have the four free sessions. Everybody at some point is liable to have a little bump in the road or a big bump in the road and need that little bit of help. And so I really like how you said earlier
00:21:36
Speaker
really keep the doors open, minds open. I think that was a great way to put it for your school district to do that so that everybody does feel comfortable coming in and utilizing the supports that are available. All right, did you have anything else that you would like to add with our time here today?
00:21:54
Speaker
You know, I would just add that family engagement is really the responsibility of everyone in
Shared Responsibility in Engagement
00:22:01
Speaker
a school. So it is not just school staff who are responsible. I don't want anyone to think that I expect more work out of our teachers and our school social workers and counselors and psychologists.
00:22:14
Speaker
you know, they're all overwhelmed. I absolutely understand it. This is really the job of everyone who is involved with our schools. That includes principals and assistant principals and educational assistants, office support staff, custodians, coaches, food service bus drivers, crossing guards if you have them by you, even your district leadership and your school boards. It's a community. Our schools really are the center of our communities.
00:22:43
Speaker
And it is everyone's job to engage our families and students and support them and really support each other. Absolutely. I completely agree with that. And I'm so grateful to be in a community where the entire community is able to work together to support our students, our families and our community as a whole.
00:23:02
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Me too. I feel very lucky to be where we are.
Closing and Call to Action
00:23:06
Speaker
Well, thank you so much for your time with me today, Heather, and talking about family engagement. Until next time, keep working at School Mental Health because school mental health works. Looking forward to future episodes? Make sure to subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice and leave us a rating so that others invested in better mental health for Wisconsin students can find us.
00:23:32
Speaker
Find resources and learn more by checking out today's show notes and by visiting the coalition's website at SchoolMentalHealthWisconsin.org.