Brown County Schools has received nearly $200,000 in grant funding to make sure all students are supported academically and emotionally so they can successfully enter college or the workforce after they graduate.
The Brown County Schools Board of Trustees approved the $192,800 comprehensive counseling initiative implementation grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. at their Oct. 5 meeting.
“We’ve never really had a comprehensive approach to school counseling before,” said Debbie Harman, director of student learning.
A graphic of how the counseling model will work has Brown County students and families at the center. From that, it branches out to address the social/emotional wellness of students through “learned optimism,” college and career pathways through early awareness of students’ options; and academic preparedness through opportunities offered in the classroom.
Teachers, counselors and administrators; community family counseling resources; and community business partners shore up the model to create “regional prosperity in southwest central Indiana.”
This is the second large grant the district has received since summer. It also received a $150,000 grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. through the Regional Opportunities Initiative Inc.’s Ready Schools Initiative. That grant funded the creation of a new job, Brown County Schools district readiness coordinator, which former Van Buren Elementary Principal Christy Wrightsman is filling.
A study by ROI showed that employers in this region struggle to find workers to fill all levels of jobs. They acknowledged that K-12 schools play a significant role in addressing these challenges.
“In order to make sure they’re educated, they have to be receptive to learning. In order to be receptive to learning, they have to feel good about themselves,” Harman said.
“We have students who come to us from traumatic circumstances every day. … It is enough of a problem that we intentionally need to address it. We need to understand who is coming through the door every day — meet them where they are and take them wherever they need to go.”
“This is going to help us to do that. But we can’t do it alone. We’ve got to harness the resources of all Brown County has to offer,” Harman said.
Takes a village
The comprehensive counseling grant included two phases.
The first was a planning phase, funded by a $29,975 award in January from the Lilly Endowment. Using that money, Brown County Schools assessed its current counseling programs and surveyed people on what they thought about counseling services in school, and did some professional development.
“We learned there’s very little academic counseling going on, if any, in the younger grades. We noticed … we haven’t been intentionally focusing on talking to kids about careers or college at the elementary level,” Harman said of the surveys.
Local mental health care provider Centerstone partnered with the school system to support the development of the grant proposal.
Family support specialists from Centerstone have been working in all buildings since last school year, Harman said.
Additional family support specialists, recovery coaches and therapists also provide support in all six schools as needed, said Amanda Kinnaird, Child and Family Services manager with Brown County Centerstone.
Centerstone pays its own personnel; the school district provides work space and other supplies.
Services are billed through insurance or other contracted providers. But not having insurance shouldn’t deter families from getting their child help, Kinnaird said. It’s possible that treatment could be covered by the Children’s Mental Health Initiative, a scholarship, or a sliding fee scale.
“Bottom line, if someone feels like their child could use the support, don’t let insurance be the deciding factor. Call and see what we can do to help them access services,” Kinnaird said.
Centerstone also can help individuals and families seeking treatment to enroll in state-funded insurance.{div class=”gmail_default”}The family support specialists work with school counselors, the Career Resource Center graduation and career coach, teachers and administration to address student and family needs. {/div}Kinnaird also sent a survey to Brown County Schools staff. “Probably the biggest takeway she found was that everybody thought it was going great, but they weren’t quite sure what was happening,” Harman said. “They knew Centerstone was in and around, but they weren’t quite sure what they were doing, what the goal of the program was necessarily, who could have access.”
As a result of those surveys, Harman and Kinnaird have been visiting each school building to discuss the role of each type of counselor and how students access services.
At Brown County High School, there are two full-time guidance counselors who help students with academics and academic planning. Those counselors also may talk with students about social or emotional issues.
“Do we deal with social and emotional issues? Yes. But there will be a tipping point there where we need and are required to make a referral to a different kind of agency, and that’s where Centerstone steps in,” Harman said.
The development of this model using the planning grant dollars has also brought counselors in the district together who haven’t had the opportunity to work together or understand what they do in their buildings before.
In addition to the high school guidance counselors, the district has a counselor that works three days at the junior high and two days at the intermediate school. A full-time counselor works at Sprunica and Helmsburg elementary schools and a part-time counselor works two days a week at Van Buren Elementary School.
Using the comprehensive counseling initiative implementation grant, Harman said the school district wants to hire another part-time counselor to serve the intermediate school who would eventually be paid using Title I dollars.
Ideally, the district would like the intermediate school to have a counselor three full days a week and the junior high to have a counselor there four days a week, Harman said.
Next steps
Another piece of the counseling puzzle is the Check & Connect program.
Currently, Shannon Brunton, the graduation and career coach with the CRC, is using the program at the high school with a select group of students who are at risk of not graduating.
“She’s acting as a mentor to those students. What we want to do is we want to grow our ability to have mentors at different levels,” Harman said of plans for the grant.
Check & Connect matches students with mentors either within the school or the community at large, Harman said.
“We might match teachers with students at some level, and then we might also match community members, business folks depending on the nature of the mentoring,” she said.
“I am not going to say every student needs a mentor, but we’ve seen the impact of community members. When community members get involved with students in the school, good things happen.”
Using grant money, the school district also will purchase Naviance, a college and career readiness tool that parents and students can access.
Students will be able to log in and take surveys to learn about their strengths, dislikes and likes.
“They will learn about themselves as people, as team players,” Harman said. “What you get out of that is students see that going to school is what I do to be able to achieve the goals that I want to achieve. It teaches goal setting. … It will provide a curriculum for deciding what you want to do when you grow up.”
The program will also show students and their parents different pathways to certain careers, along with what courses they need to take in Brown County to reach that career.
Naviance will be available to students beginning in fifth grade. The initial start up cost for the program is $22,000, then $10,000 the following year.
“Eventually it gets down to a reasonable amount and we’ll be able to charge every family a few dollars in textbook rental,” Harman said.
