CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19) RESOURCE CENTER Read More
Add To Favorites

There’s a growing teen mental health crisis because of the pandemic. This is how the Bethlehem Area School District is addressing it.

Morning Call - 5/16/2022

Liberty High School Principal Harrison Bailey III thinks every school in the country needs to address the growing mental health crisis among students.

“To think that we’re going to see academic success in our classrooms without dealing with mental health concerns that override students’ ability to process, think and remember things, we’re fooling ourselves,” he said.

Bailey and his team prioritized students’ mental health by creating the school’s wellness center — a dedicated space for therapy — in 2019.

The wellness center centralizes therapists and helps more students receive services by way of group sessions. The center also has a “peace room” for students who need a dedicated space to calm down and practice coping skills. The center has decreased stigma in the school about seeking help, school leaders said.

“What we’re doing here is trying to serve as a pilot for the state,” Bailey said.

Now after seeing the impact of Liberty’s efforts, Freedom High School — the Bethlehem Area School District’s other high school — will open a wellness center of its own in the fall. Construction for the center begins this summer as the school converts its planetarium into counseling offices and a peace room. Freedom Principal Laurie Sage said this project is needed because students have been experiencing increased anxiety since returning to school, following the height of the pandemic.

Specifically, students have struggled with suicidal ideation and self-harm, Sage said, as well as communication skills as they reacclimate to in-person activities. These are trends in mental health seen at the national level, too.

According to a recent survey from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 37% of high school students experienced poor mental health during the pandemic, and 44% felt persistently sad or hopeless. The survey, which was conducted during the first six months of 2021, also found girls and LGBT students reported higher levels of poor mental health and suicide-related behaviors.

“Liberty started with this journey prior to the pandemic, and I give Dr. Bailey a lot of credit for having the foresight into seeing the mental health needs of our teenagers,” Sage said.

The district plans to pay for the center with about $50,000 to $75,000 from federal funds directed to schools with a low performance among subgroups of students, such as English language learners and special education students.

Additional money will come from the district’s budget, Sage said, but a proposal has not yet been created. Liberty’s center was built with $26,000 in federal funds and prior class gifts.

The wellness center will allow for therapists to collaborate on students’ care plans and see more students daily through group therapy, while also making clear to students and staff where services are offered. Freedom High School has about 1,875 students.

“It’s just maximizing our space and our therapists’ ability,” Sage said.

This school year Freedom has had 388 referrals to the Student Assistance Program. Of those referrals, about 75% were for students needing regular counseling sessions and having more serious mental health concerns.

However, Freedom only has three full-time therapists and an additional three part-time therapists.

“We knew that there was going to be a large number of students coming back this year needing support,” said Naomy Diaz-Sierra, Freedom’s Communities In Schools site coordinator. “But I don’t think we could have foreseen the amount that actually came in all at once in the beginning of the year.”

Liberty has also seen the impact of the pandemic on its students’ mental health. Robin Sorensen, the clinical supervisor at Liberty, said the issues students are facing have intensified throughout her years on the job, and with the pandemic, these mental health concerns have become even more serious. This school year has been her hardest.

“I dealt with kids who broke up with their boyfriend, they’re fighting with their parents,” she said of past student problems. “Now, these kids have so much trauma: things happening from COVID, isolation, anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation.”

Liberty, which has 2,800 students, has had more than 700 SAP referrals this school year, compared to 500 at the end of last year, Assistant Principal Nikolas Tsamoutalidis said. There are also about 100 referrals for the peace room, which allows students to spend 10 minutes in the space to calm down before returning to class.

The wellness center has allowed for therapists to more easily collaborate on their caseloads by implementing group therapy sessions while destigmatizing mental health among students, Sorensen said.

“Kids want to come down here, they want to be in this program, they want to go to therapy,” she said. “That didn’t used to be the case not very long ago.”

One student is Josiah Correa. The senior started using the wellness center to talk with a therapist whenever he had something he wanted to get off his chest. Now, he uses the coping skills he learned in therapy to handle the stressors of his after-school job.

“I’ve learned to handle situations differently, to think about positive things instead of negative things,” Correa, 18, said.

The school only has two full-time therapists and two-part time therapists to see students like Correa, along with a small group of occupational therapy interns from Moravian University who work with students in the peace room.

Liberty has funding for four additional therapists — two full-time therapists and two part-time — but there’s a shortage of mental health workers to fill these positions, administrators said.

While the wellness center has helped Liberty manage the mental health impacts of the pandemic, administrators said investment from state and federal funding will be important to find therapists, and help new centers open at schools in the future.

“I can’t imagine what more of a year we possibly could have had without this,” Tsamoutalidis said of the wellness center. “This is definitely the proactive way of the future.”

Morning Call reporter Jenny Roberts can be reached at 484-903-1732 and jroberts@mcall.com.

©2022 The Morning Call. Visit mcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.