Grant helps healing process in Morrison schools

MORRISON – The good news keeps coming for Morrison elementary schools counselor Steve Braasch.

His application for a state grant was rewarded with $100,000 that’s helped the district make massive strides in mental health care this school year.

Wednesday morning, he found out that Sinnissippi Centers therapist Carrie Mahar, who was brought onsite 2 days a week as a result of the grant, will be back next year, barring the unforeseen.

But what about all the other rural school districts that must send students to bigger cities for mental health care? He’s hoping for some tremendous news on that front.

“On the grander scale, it’s a model that can be duplicated in other school districts,” Braasch, 46, said. “We’ve shown that it can be successful, and that it’s sustainable – that the client base is there. It might be a new way to provide mental health services.”

The grant allowed the district to buy additional clinical assessments, technology and play therapy supplies.

The biggest difference it made was in personnel – not only bringing Mahar onsite, but also making Laura Smith, a Sinnissippi family care coordinator, who serves the four-county area, more of a fixture in Morrison. Before, she was available. Now, she spends a day each week with families in the district.

The grant was funded through Illinois Children’s Health Care Foundation, but Braasch said years of work with Community that Cares and fostering relationships helped land the funding.

“There was some degree of trust and respect for what we were doing through Morrison and the CtC,” Braasch said. “They were looking for innovative programs to fund, which kind of became the birth of embedding a clinician in the district.”

Breaking ground, ice, barriers

Mahar has been with Sinnissippi for 15 years, since she was in college, in fact. She started her hours in the Morrison district’s four buildings in mid-October. No more hour-plus round trips for families, parents taking off of work and, sometimes, kids missing half a day of school just to get help.

“All the barriers people have to get to mental health treatment are huge,” Mahar said. “And this is breaking down those barriers.”

Next, add in the anxiety that comes with admitting there’s a problem, making the phone call to set an appointment, then walking through her door at her Sterling office, not entirely sure what to expect.

“Here, they view me as a therapist, but not this big, scary, new person, because I’m in their familiar environment,” she said. “I’m meeting them where they are.”

In Sterling, her schedule is made up of 50-minute appointments. In Morrison, she can take 15 minutes to check in with a student, or take 90 minutes if there’s a lot of work to be done to overcome trauma.

Previously, she might have played phone tag or traded emails all day with a parent or school counselor.

“Now, if there’s a problem with a kid, I walk down the hall and talk to the counselor or the teacher,” she said. “There’s immediate communication with someone who knows what services they’re getting. I have access to a lot more information than I had before.”

The grant is funding additional professional development – play therapy training and youth mental health first aid, among other sessions – but Mahar is training teachers on the fly, too. If a student suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and the teacher knows little about it, let alone how to accommodate the student, she talks them through it.

“I love my job in the Sterling office, but this is just a totally different dynamic,” Mahar said. “I feel like I’m part of the school, and I have such constant communication with the staff and the principals. Kids have three worlds: their home life, their social life, and their school life. I get to experience all those here. I get to talk with them, their teachers, and I get to see them interact with their friends.”

Some barriers harder to move

Braasch said kids’ needs haven’t changed much during his 9 years as a counselor – the past 7 in Morrison. Technology, however, has changed at light speed.

“The biggest change is access to technology, and the tools that might expose them to things at an earlier age,” Mahar said. “Things are more instantaneous. You search YouTube for something very benign, and you don’t know what’s going to come up.”

That’s where Smith going to families’ homes and being able to scope out the environment is paramount. Mahar, too, often meets with parents after school or has lunch with parents to go over effective ways to reinforce progress made in therapy at home.

Another hurdle to clear is personnel – more specifically, Morrison High School relies on two retired, substitute counselors, since their full-time counselor went on maternity leave toward the end of last school year and wasn’t replaced. Like many other staff positions, quality counselors are tough to find and hire, since there’s more money to be made in other practices, including the private sector.

Meet Meebie

Mental illness has many faces. Fortunately, so does Meebie. The purple, fuzzy friend didn’t come cheap – the therapy dolls cost about $200 – but at about 0.2 percent of the $100,000, that’s a steal.

Meebie comes with sets of eyes, noses, mouths, and eyebrows, as well as a broken heart, Band-Aids and teardrops that children can affix to the doll’s face to express what they’re feeling.

Mahar has a makeshift Meebie she’d cobbled together in her Sterling office.

“In community health, we don’t have a lot of resource money,” she said. “I have this ghetto Meebie, because I couldn’t afford it.”

Kids who might have otherwise kept their guard up when they walked into Braasch’s office are loosened up immediately now.

“It’s the first thing kids grab when they come into my office,” Braasch said. “Being big and purple, kids gravitate right to it.”

Insensitive as it might seem, time is of the essence with mental health care in schools, which are strapped for all sorts of resources – not just money.

“Time is very sensitive,” Braasch said. “We now have tools that allow us to break the ice, and we can get to what is presenting a problem and what’s concerning a child much quicker using those nondirective techniques. It speeds up the healing process.

“A lot of the things we’ve been able to invest in are things that will be used for years to come,” Braasch said. “I’m guessing Meebie will last the rest of my career.”

The results

Braasch said Mahar’s caseload hasn’t affected that of the district’s other counselors, meaning that the estimated 75 students – and their siblings and parents, in many cases – are additional people receiving health care because of the program.

Mahar said they expected her caseload to be 25 to 30 kids. Thus, her client base has made the program viable for Sinnissippi.

“As of right now, where we’re sitting, it’s sustainable,” Mahar said, relaying the message from Sinnissippi management at Wednesday morning’s meeting. “We should be able to do it again in the fall.”

The grant was for only 1 year, so the $100,000 essentially was seed money. The stalk that’s fired out of the ground is impressive.

Whereas before many kids were simply on medication but weren’t receiving therapy, a reverse course has begun. Almost 20 percent of students receiving mental health care through the program were merely being medicated before.

“That’s how I practice – therapy first, medication second – and a lot of these kids were on medication and had never done therapy before,” Mahar said. “Medication is a piece of it. But it’s not going to change their environment or their communication skills. There’s so much therapy can address. It teaches you lifelong skills that no one can take away.”

Missed appointments have been virtually eliminated. Nearly 80 percent of the district’s kids are getting their mental health care in school, making the district the de facto service provider. Braasch said there’s been a 93 percent reduction in students’ self-harm, and that an estimated 80 percent of students would not be receiving the care they’re getting, if it weren’t offered at the school.

To think they haven’t even marketed the program yet. Mahar said she often hears students expressing envy of classmates who get to talk to someone about their feelings. Staff members have asked about opportunities, too.

“The more exposure we get, the bigger the program will become,” Mahar said.

There’s no such thing as too big, she said.

“That’s how we always function in community mental health,” Mahar said. “We don’t turn people away."

EXCERPTS FROM THE GRANT APPLICATION