Rochester city school leaders are assembling a committee to take an in-depth look at how the district is addressing student mental health.
The volunteer-based committee is expected to include students, parents, teachers, school counselors, mental health care professionals, and community members.
The school board recently passed a resolution to establish the committee. It lists six key areas of concern, including staff training, access to services crisis response, and reducing stigma.
“How can we reduce the stigma of mental health, where our young people feel like a school isn't a safe space for them?” board member Isaiah Santiago said, pausing on those words. “How do we start really pushing for community collaboration during these times where our community are in need?"
Santiago proposed the ad hoc mental health committee in March as a means to create policies that would put systemic changes in motion within the district. That came days after a 15-year-old School of the Arts student, who was reportedly in the midst of a mental health crisis, fell from the roof of the school building and later died.
“We're at a place where we have to answer to our young people, and either we're going to do it or we're not,” Santiago said during a March 27 school board meeting. “There are many different ways to do that and this is not the exact and the only answer to the issues that we face. But it's something. And our young people need something.”
As a student at School of the Arts several years ago, Santiago advocated for more robust mental health education and support for students across the district and across the state.
Now as a school board member, he is pushing for a closer look at what resources are in place, what’s missing, and who has access.
The ad-hoc committee resolution passed 4-1. Board member James Patterson said he could not weigh in on the resolution due to a personal conflict of interest and was not present for the vote. Commissioner Cynthia Elliott was absent. Board member Jacqueline Griffin opposed the measure.
“I think that we need to table this and address the other issues at hand, which is the literacy, the math and things of that nature," Griffin said. “Those are the curriculums that we need to be addressing with our kids to reduce the mental and social emotional illnesses that our children have.”
Griffin said there are already resources in place to address mental health.
“We gotta stop pouring into things that we're not getting anything out of,” she said. “We need resolutions. But what I don't see is a lot of resolutions. Where are the resolutions for our kids, our children, so that ... they don't become mentally challenged?”
School board member Beatriz LeBron, who voted in favor of the resolution, said there are never enough mental health resources.
“One of these root causes of issues in this community is untreated mental health, and it shows up in a variety of ways, right? So we have to learn how to check our own biases around it,” LeBron said. “There are mental health resources even within our system. What is not present... (is) a cohesive sort of bird's eye view of all of these resources that do exist and where we may be lacking either support and accessibility.”
The school board has until May 9 to submit names for consideration to be included in the committee, which is expected to convene beginning on May 21.
