I. THE SETTING
A few years ago, when Cody Haviland was an undergraduate at Kansas Wesleyan University, a professor from Harvard spoke to Haviland?s class about the current state of mental health care in Liberia.
Wesleyan, along with higher profile universities like Brown and Harvard, was part of a volunteer initiative charged with providing mental health services to the small, war-ravaged West African nation. Dr. Patrick Lee described the effects of trauma ? the levels of anxiety and depression, the incidence of suicide, the rates of substance abuse ? on a country that had only recently emerged from two violent civil wars.
But this isn?t a fate unique to the more ravaged portions of sub-Saharan Africa, Dr. Lee told the students. There?s a crisis at home, too. To prove his point, he directed the students? attention to one patch on the world map where the prevalence of mental health issues coupled with the limited access to care was comparable to that found in Liberia.
Here, Lee said: southeast Kansas.
Haviland sat up in his chair. He was from southeast Kansas, from Chanute, and had plans to return to the area after graduation. That fact entered Haviland?s brain like a shot arrow and lodged there, and is lodged there still.
II. THE SETUP
It was 2013. Misti Czarnowsky had only recently completed her master?s program at Emporia State University and was in her first year as Humboldt?s school counselor. A typical counselor?s duties are wide-ranging, often cumbersome, and include seemingly mismatched tasks, from attending to a pupil?s emotional woes to helping students with test prep. It was the same for Czarnowsky.
But on this day, all her thoughts converged on a single point. A student was in the midst of an acute crisis that involved talk of suicide and an attempt at self-harm.
Czarnowsky did all the right things. She contacted the parents, the student?s teachers, a local case manager. She arranged a series of meetings with all of the concerned parties. And she consulted the local mental health center.
But the distance between the school and the town?s mental health center ? though in reality less than a mile away ? felt, at that time, enormous. ?Trying to get ahold of the therapist was always very difficult,? recalled Czarnowsky. ?When we would call from the school side to see if we could get an appointment for a student, it would take weeks if not a month to get them in. What we needed was to figure out a plan for [this student] that would work here at school. So there were a lot of roadblocks to actually getting students mental health care.?
Comprehensive on-site mental health training was not a part of Czarnowksy?s education anymore than it was a part of the educations of any of the other teachers or administrators in the building that day.
?It just blew my mind that we never made the connection that mental health services should be available in the schools,? said Czarnowsky, ?given that?s where students spend the majority of their time,?
And so she acted.
In 2016, after researching pilot programs in other parts of the state, Czarnowsky applied for a grant from the Kansas City-based Health Forward Foundation that would allow for the introduction of a therapist and case manager into the Humboldt schools. That grant was denied. But she stuck with it and applied again, and in 2017 the Humboldt school district was awarded the funds to employ a full-time therapist and children?s case manager from the Southeast Kansas Mental Health Center.
Since that day, other districts ? Iola, Moran, Yates Center, Erie ? have adopted similar programs in conjunction with SEKMHC.
In fact, in the spring of 2018, Kansas lawmakers passed a pilot program, which, in pairing a handful of school districts with their local community mental health centers, sought to approximate in other parts of the state what Humboldt had so effectively accomplished under its own power.
By any measure, Humboldt?s ?Peace of Mind? program, as it?s been dubbed, is a success. Since its inception, scores of students who?d never received services from the local mental health center are benefitting from these services for the simple reason that they?re available at school. Plus, the district?s discipline referrals are down by a factor of three as are the number of students who are considered ?at risk.?
