Wild Rose School Division requests meeting with Health Minister regarding student mental health

“[It’s] specific to depression, suicidal ideations, friendship issues, all kinds of things that can lead to a downward spiral of mental health, and we know that if students are in that downward spiral, they’re not in a position to learn,” he said.

The board expresses the division’s budget dollars are meant for educational instruction rather than mental health supports, the latter of which should fall under the Alberta Health portfolio instead of Alberta Education, the division believes.

The letter then states that, over the past school year, a caseload of 1,811 students and families have received mental health supports provided by the division’s roughly 19 Family Wellness Workers and assistants. Sessions varied from few to many depending on the case, according to Volkman.

The 10.4 full time equivalent Family Wellness Workers, hired many years ago, he says, are certified Social Workers.

The pandemic, however, exacerbated demand for them, Volkman said.

The board claims that over the past two years, while the division’s region had access to four Mental Health Workers through Alberta Health Services (AHS), there were times when communities like Rocky Mountain House and Drayton Valley went a few months without mental health services.

“We’re finding quite often we’re sending kids with suicidal ideations, or who have even attempted suicide, that at the hospital level, they can’t often keep them there overnight and do the proper work that needs to be done. There have been cases where they literally keep them for a very short period of time and send them home and kind of back to u,s and we’re saying we can’t sustain this,” he said.

AHS states that wait times for mental health and addictions services in Drayton Valley and Rocky Mountain House are 10 and 17 days respectively. They also state that one reason for the delay is the challenge in hiring mental health professionals in rural communities.

They also said in a statement that processes were altered for the previous school year for student mental health supports due to the pandemic.

“In the 2020/21 school year, Alberta Education announced a new funding model that resulted in funds for the Regional Collaborative Service Delivery (RCSD) model that supported school-based AMH [addiction and mental health] programming, transition from AHS directly to school authorities.

Now the delivery of in-school addiction and mental health services is dependent on whether contracts are established between individual school boards and AHS or other addiction and mental health service providers. Some children requiring addiction and mental health care may be required to access services through centralized intake or through a community addiction and mental health clinic, they said.

Resulting from increasing demand, the division hired 8.5 full time equivalent Family Wellness Worker Assistants, who are Educational Assistants with extra training in mental health, to take on lighter cases.

Due to the cost, however, Volkman said there will only be 5.5 assistants in the upcoming school year.

In reaching out to the Minister of Health, Katherine Stavropoulos, Press Secretary to Education Minister Adriana LaGrange, responded with a recent government announcement released on June 1 of new funding for students affected by the pandemic.

“As part of the cross-ministerial work we’ve done in the Alberta Child and Youth Well-being Action Plan and through Budget 2022, Alberta’s government has allocated an additional $110 million over three years to address mental health and wellness and COVID-19 learning loss. This includes up to $10 million per year for 2022/23 and 2023/24 to support pilot projects focused on enhancing a school authority’s mental health continuum of supports and services, including tools, training and resources for the school community,” said Stavropoulos.

She also states this is in addition to the $1.4 billion in Learning Supports Funding provided directly to schools each year, to help vulnerable students, and funds for the Specialized Learning Support Grant for schools to offer student wellness programs.

As the details for accessing these new funding sources remain unknown, Volkman says trustees would still like to meet with the Minister. He acknowledged that governments have had to make difficult decisions over the past few years and hopes this information can help provide insight on what is happening in schools and the sadness in seeing how this struggle is interfering with the learning of students.

“In our school division, we talk about providing powerful learning environments and we focus on two major themes: learning and wellbeing,” said Volkman. “Those two things are so interconnected and we train all of our teachers that whenever they’re teaching their lessons, they have to have one foot in each of those big ideas.”

by Alessia Proietti

Wild Rose School Division requests meeting with Health Minister regarding student mental health

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