School-Based Mental Health Initiatives with Counseling in Schools' Kevin DaHill-Fuchel

Can better mental health support in schools transform student success? Join us as we explore this critical question with Kevin DaHill-Fuchel, Executive Director of Counseling in Schools (CIS). With him, we uncover the profound impact of integrating mental health professionals into school environments, a strategy that has notably boosted attendance and graduation rates in New York City. 

Our conversation takes a deep dive into the challenges faced by schools, especially in accommodating the influx of asylum-seeking children in 2023. We discuss how CIS adapts its strategies to meet the unique cultural needs of diverse school communities, emphasizing the necessity of addressing basic needs and engaging families. Through effective communication and recruitment, CIS positions school counselors and mentors as credible messengers who build trust and respond to students' specific situations, including high rates of homelessness. This approach ensures that students receive the support they need to thrive amidst challenging circumstances.

In today's technology-driven landscape, connecting with students extends beyond academics. We discuss the intersection of mental health and education, underscoring the importance of fostering emotional and social development alongside academic progress. We highlight strategies that empower schools to support students holistically. This episode not only shines a light on the critical role of mental health in education but also inspires listeners to champion these initiatives in their own communities, creating an educational environment where every student can succeed.

Chapters

• 0:00 Impact of School-Based Mental Health Support
• 5:07 Mental Health in Schools
• 14:55 Support Strategies for Student Success
• 26:41 Emphasizing Mental Health in Education
• 34:30 Promoting Student Mental Health Initiatives

Transcript

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 0:00

Today we're discussing the impact of school-based mental health counseling, a topic that affects millions of students across America. Welcome to the brighter side of education, research, innovation and resources, innovation and resources. I'm your host, dr Lisa Hassler, here to enlighten and brighten the classrooms in America through focused conversation on important topics in education. In each episode, I discuss problems we as teachers and parents are facing and what people are doing in their communities to fix it. What are the variables and how can we duplicate it to maximize student outcomes? The American School Counselor Association has established a recommended student-to-counselor ratio of 250 to 1 to ensure effective support for students. However, according to their most recent data, the national average far exceeds this recommendation. The importance of these ratios has been powerfully demonstrated in a comprehensive multi-state study published in the Professional School Counseling Journal. This research, led by Dr Peg Donahue, found that schools with more favorable counselor-to-student ratios showed higher SAT scores, increased post-secondary enrollment and lower rates of chronic absenteeism. Particularly telling was their finding that in states with higher counselor-to-student ratios, school experienced more suspensions and worse academic outcomes across subject areas of English, math and science. Building on these findings, the National Association of School Psychologists emphasizes that comprehensive school-based mental health services are essential for creating safe and supportive learning environments. Their research demonstrates that when students have access to qualified mental health professionals in schools, we see improvements across multiple areas academic performance, school attendance and overall student well-being.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 1:52

Now, despite this clear evidence of impact, there's still significant challenges in providing equitable access to these vital services.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 2:00

The US Department of Education's civil rights data collection has highlighted significant disparities in access to school counselors, particularly affecting schools in urban areas and those serving predominantly minority populations.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 2:13

This research underscores the vital importance of organizations working to ensure every student has access to quality mental health support in schools quality mental health support in schools and today we're fortunate to have with us someone who's been leading this charge in America's largest school district for nearly four decades. Kevin Dahill-Fuchel is a pioneering force in school-based mental health counseling. As Executive Director of Counseling in Schools, cis, a nonprofit that embeds mental health counselors throughout New York City's school system. Under his leadership, cis has grown to place over 200 mental health professionals in more than 70 schools and community centers, reaching over 10,000 individuals. The impact of this work speaks for itself, with CIS schools seeing a remarkable 20-day increase in student attendance and achieving a 95% on-time graduation rate for eligible seniors. Kevin's insights from working in America's largest and most diverse school district offer a unique window into both the challenges and possibilities in school-based mental health support. Welcome, kevin, it's an honor to have you with us today.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 3:18

It's a pleasure to be with you, Lisa.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 3:20

Could you start by explaining what CIS is and how it supports students in New York City schools?

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 3:27

Sure Well, cis, or Counseling in Schools, is a nonprofit organization in New York City that provides social-emotional supports to students in schools.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 3:38

Right now our main focus is as it has been since 1986, on public schools, and our services integrate largely into communities where there is a bit of a gap in access or availability of social emotional support services as a broad category, but as a deeper category really, mental health perspective and mental health service providers.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 4:02

So we connect with school communities, or school communities connect with us through various means of contracting. Often they're government sources of contract or programs our mission is aligned with or foundations that support the work. And then we meet with that school community. We understand what it is that they see their needs as being and what types of elements are going to be the right ones to kind of address what they're concerned about in their community. And then we hire people who become full-time members of that team in the school, so they work for counseling in schools but they really embed themselves in the school on an everyday basis and when we're doing our job really really well, counseling in schools staff appear to be another staff in the building doing work along with all the other staff in the building.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 4:53

That's amazing. So now, new York City has a longstanding history of being referred to as America's melting pot, and you've had a lot of recent influxes with thousands of asylum seekers, so that student population remains incredibly diverse. How does CIS adapt its approaches to meet the varying cultural perspectives and those needs?

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 5:13

Sure, well, counseling in schools, we really take a community-based approach. So you'll hear me in referencing and answer to your question. Sometimes I'll refer to a school community reaches out to us that takes the place of a principal, or'll refer to a school community reaches out to us that takes the place of a principal or an individual in a school building. But we think about it from the perspective of the community in which that school sits and who are the students and the faculty who make up the school building as a community of people. So when we take that approach, we're aligning our needs assessment and then we're aligning our program design to what's happening in that community. So, with the large influx of asylum seeking children that came into the city and to 2023, there were 60,000 students that entered the New York City public school system who had not been in the country months before, let alone in a school system within the country. So there was an awful lot of work to do, which started in most places with meeting very basic needs and working on being a partner in the community's response around creating basic need supply services whether it be, you know, coats and shoes and access to food and really basic kinds of services. And then one of the things that we did within those communities that we're working in, we went into and we're continuing to do this going into the temporary housing facilities that the city provided for them so that we were working directly with the families, not just the students, so that they would be oriented towards what it is that their children would be experiencing in the schools and they would learn how to work with that. Yet the step before that that we needed to take with that particular population was really make sure that we had a broader range of staff who were really familiar with that immigration experience from South American countries, which is largely what that influx included. So we very specifically created recruitment campaigns for staff in other languages to recruit people into these efforts with us, and that was really an important step for us to really be able to communicate effectively.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 7:32

One of the concepts that I put forward in a lot of our work is that you need people who, within the communities we're working in, are seen as credible messengers, and that can be anyone from.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 7:42

You know who's delivering any, delivering any kind of socio-educational piece or if you're doing real sit-down mental health types of interventions. But you need to be credible to the person who you're addressing, and people can bridge that credibility gap pretty quickly if they can kind of relate a little bit more to the experience. So we use the melting pot of the city to our advantage. I would put it that way because it's not like there weren't a community of people here. It just became a crisis because of those numbers and it probably was known that the way that people came here was not of their own volition necessarily. They voluntarily came into the country but they weren't necessarily thinking they were coming to New York City coming to New York City. So there was really a lot to do there and we were able to get people in the city to participate with us who had the right qualifications to work around the mental health needs of the students and families.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 8:33

You also have a lot of different citywide challenges other than that like 9-11. And you also are facing at the moment one of the highest levels of homelessness since the Great Depression of the 1930s. That affects about one in every eight students in your city schools. How have you seen the role of school counselors evolve to meet those kinds of children's changing needs?

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 8:54

Yeah, I mean I think you know, go back to what I said a few minutes ago. I mean I think it really is starting with basic needs, right? We kind of say, like it's Maslow over Bloom, you have to really start there. Not that that wasn't always the case, but you could kind of assume that maybe a few of the students that you were working with would need some basic needs, but most of the time you would be going up that ladder to try to get into some of the other developmental stages. But before you can really do that now, because of the numbers that you mentioned and 108 is a staggering number in our city, which has close to a million students in the system, and that's just the public education system. That leaves out the charter schools and the private schools and the religious-based schools and so all of those students who are going through that, you really come into their educational experience in a very different sort of orientation towards the goals that they may have or the opportunities that we think that we're providing them with.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 9:52

You know, what we're seeing is that children and families don't see much past next week or a month from now, whereas in the education system there's do what you need to do today, but the vision is a longer goal. When you get that degree, when you get that diploma, when you get past that, then the opportunities open up. It's very, very difficult for students and families who are in a day-to-day life situation, for their basic need of housing, to adopt that or really feel connected to that mission, to that mission. So you have to stay with people on really the fundamental food, shelter, clothing, things that they need. Seeing goals there be met then allow them to sort of be a little bit more open towards working through some of the other things. So one of the other ways that we address this is that part of counseling in schools work is also working with the staff in schools. So we call our staff counselors and they are embedded in the building. We have also a team of people who do training for all of the staff in the school.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 10:53

So we think that it's really, really important that everybody takes a particular lens towards understanding who the students are in their school and how to interpret what the responses the children are giving to you along the way, and so you know homework that may not be done in the same way, or the conditions that someone shows up in with either the material that you gave them the night before or the clothing that they're wearing.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 11:19

You know, how do you understand what that is and how do you respond to it are really things that are nuanced in a lot of ways, and teachers who are steeped in their content areas aren't necessarily as educated yet in terms of how to attune to those relationships that need to be built on a little bit of a different manner, and so we really work on that as part of what we're doing in schools to make sure that we're not the sole responsible for the social emotional support of students.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 11:48

One of the things I like to say is that every single person resides within a school building is going to affect every other person's emotional well-being and their view on how they socialize, and so it's important in the adult community in the school building that there's alignment and understanding. No matter what your role is, no matter what your degree is, you're having an impact on the emotional and social experience of everyone else around you. So understanding that and appreciating that goes a long way towards alleviating sort of the sole responsibility for a child's well-being on one or two people because that's what their title is but gives every child a chance to have that net around them that they can get growth opportunities, whether it's in the lunchroom or in the math class or in my counseling office.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 12:36

What kind of mental health issues are you seeing amongst the students in your schools today?

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 12:42

I think this is similar across the country. There are really heightened degrees of anxiety. I think coming out of COVID the social anxiety increased quite a bit. I think the face-to-face integration, people understanding how to work through the smallest of challenges or what I. Well, now I'm judging that, but I'm saying smallest of challenges because it would have seemed that way if I would think about other years pre-COVID that were easily sort of negotiated. Particularly the younger children are having a harder time working that out. So there's needs there and there's a kind of anxiety that you see throughout that level. We're definitely seeing higher rates of suicide, ideation of young people feeling hopeless and disoriented towards life in general, what they're doing, where they're going.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 13:34

Another issue that's been coming up quite a bit lately here in New York City there was the legalization of marijuana and I think the access to some of the ways in which it's not necessarily smoking, but the access to that availability, whether it's things that young people eat or gummies or what have you, is really not a good thing. It's just too easily accessible. I know it's not intended to be that way. I mean I suspect after prohibition there was maybe something similar going on, but it's something of great concern to us, maybe something similar going on, but it's something of great concern to us. I think the other thing I would add to that that does add to the social anxiety and everything else and being grappled with on a policy level here in the city is the impact of social media and therefore the transmission of social media through cell phones. You know, that idea that students are kind of always on somewhere, that the news of the world and the news of their friends is a constant stream into their consciousness leads to some of that anxiety but also contributes to a kind of distractibility and a challenge with focus and also at times, obviously, depending on what that content is, can lead towards various forms of mental challenges depression, anxiety, frustration, anger, different types of feelings as well as different types of stressors.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 14:52

That again from the outside person. When you're not in that space with them, it becomes harder to understand what someone is responding to or where they're coming from. I'm a clinical social worker myself and worked in the schools for quite a while, and one of the tenets that you always do is that you want to meet your client where they are. You want to find out and understand how to connect with them on where they're at and the access to other types of information and experiences that students have on the internet make that really challenging to sort of break through and feel like you're really connecting with someone, that they've really been able to communicate to you all of what it is that's kind of on their mind or in their experience, and that's something that is being grappled with all over, but certainly in New York. There's a lot of discussion right now on whether or not you can remove cell phones from schools, whether you can't, and all of the challenges around that.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 15:44

Especially when schools want the technology integration and if they don't have the funding to be able to support maybe a one-to-one device and the students have the phones, that's a way to maybe meet that standard. But when you're thinking about the news of the world I had never considered that weighing on them. If you're seeing it streaming all the time as soon as you open up your phone looking at the negative things that are going on in the world, it's just like another thing added on to the hopelessness feeling maybe of wow, I feel bad now because of my situation, but I'm looking out what is there to look out towards, because this doesn't look good to me. I had never considered that before, so it's a great perspective.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 16:24

Yeah, definitely, and so much of that information comes through in imagery, which is so much more even impactful and hard to know always how someone's going to interpret the images that they see. But the images also do tend to, you know, sort of stick. I'm just thinking about it today with all of the images that I was seeing of the fires in Los Angeles that are just devastating to look at and people are talking about their houses burning down. Well, I know there's a lot of kids sitting in shelters who are there because of house fires. Houses are burning and I don't have a home.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 16:56

Where's someone going to go with that? And why should they have to try to figure that out at age seven or eight? Even if you just heard, oh, there are fires in Los Angeles, that might be bad. Even if you just heard, oh, there are fires in Los Angeles, that might be bad. But those images are everywhere because they're so graphic, they communicate the experience that's going on there so well from a media perspective. They're not going to edit them. They're going to find the clearest ones to portray, for us to sort of feel that concern, but we don't really have a way to filter our children from those same experiences. There isn't anything that's come along to do that.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 17:34

Right, that's good enough to filter it towards children's level of mental maturity and, with all of those battles that children are facing, that it adds to a resistance to want to go to school. They're having a hard time wanting to attend. Yet your data is showing that there is actually remarkable improvements in attendance and graduation rates with the students that CIS is serving. So what kind of strategies have you seen that have proven to be effective in addressing chronic absenteeism?

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 18:06

Yeah, I mean I think there is, by and large, that we have been able to move the needle for a lot of the students I wish I could say all of our students, but a lot of our students and I think it's a couple of things. One of our programs that seems to have really been moving us forward called Success Mentoring, which is essentially pairing a group of students with someone who is not that necessarily far away in age from them. So some of the high school students who have graduated and maybe gone to community colleges or done some other things and stayed in the area, we've employed them on a part-time basis to come back into the school or in the community that they grew up in and form a mentoring type of relationship. I mean, I use mentoring a little bit loosely because that can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but it becomes a contact person, someone you can just have an easy conversation with, but someone who's going to follow you on a day-to-day basis. So if you're not in school they're going to be the one making the phone call. Before we set that relationship up, we send a card home to the parent with an image of the person who's going to be their mentor. We invite them to come in and meet them. So it's involving the family, it's bringing people from the community to be part of that credible messenger piece I was speaking about before. That really seems to be critical. It really is strengthening community ties within the school itself for the students who are there, so that they know that they are heard and they're a little bit more willing to go through the struggles of not knowing, which is what learning is all about.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 19:33

And then in the places where most successful the schools are really sophisticated at using data so that's almost an algorithm approach to when someone hits a certain number of days absence, there's sort of a tier one, tier two, tier three, tier four approach along the line, so that we're not just throwing everybody in with the same set of services, but we're using those peer mentors strategically, that the school has staff that they use strategically, that we're maximizing relationships that exist. It might be our peer mentor, but it might also be the school safety officer, or it might be the math teacher, someone who is the right person to sort of push the button when you're just at tier one and if it gets up higher it might be an outside referral. There are situations where you find out there's a domestic violence situation going on, there's someone caring for a really sick adult in their world that they weren't talking about, or they have an illness that isn't really being treated, and so when you get some of that information through these relationships that feel less threatening, then that sense that they've done something wrong and someone is coming, so it's already in this punitive kind of approach. We're going to get them off the street and back into school. That paradigm is still how most people think of absenteeism, but it's the opposite of that Really. It's how do we nurture a relationship, create engagement and have the school become a place that people know they go to to find that kind of support and relief, as well as that education.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 20:55

In the places we're successful and have the most impact, we've been able to expand the range of how students experience their school and the families as well. There's a lot that goes on that we do. We survey the parents really frequently to find out. You know, what is it that you need from the community? What are you looking for? What do you have to offer to the community so that we're not just, you know, seeing people as needy, but we're seeing people as capable.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 21:20

When you start to do that, the feeling of the whole place changes.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 21:23

And so then students who aren't there, when people reaches out and says, hey, you weren't here, we missed you, like they believe it.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 21:29

Like, oh, yeah, they did miss me. Like, oh, my mom does this thing, or my dad does this thing with the school, Like, yeah, that's a place I need to be, we're a part of something. And in our massive city you can easily just be student in row three, seat four on the left. So if you weren't there, it's one less paper to grade, you know. But if you change that dynamic significantly, you really do get better results. And then students start to achieve, and so there's a high rate of students graduating. It's not always a four-year graduation rate, because there are things that are in the way for that, but there is a graduation rate that increases. So that's a really critical step for whatever else is going to happen. There's so much data about the difference between a high school graduate and a non-high school graduate and then you go to college and not, but just the data really supports that getting across that line is a much better indicator for life outcomes is a much better indicator for life outcomes.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 22:22

Yeah, you do a lot of crisis response as well as your day-to-day work, so I can see how it really relates to a lot of different challenges that you are facing in the schools. What kind of crises do counselors typically handle in their day-to-day work? Like, what's that range look like?

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 22:36

Yeah, I mean most times there's what we would refer to as maybe small C crises, involving individual students and things that are in their world our counselors are dealing with more regularly on a day-to-day and that might mean that we spend a little bit more time with that student, depending on what they're going through or what their needs are, or that we're doing a little bit more almost case management, if there are again breaking it down to the basic needs that they're missing or advocacy that we might need to do. And then there are what would be sort of the capital letter crises which are going to affect larger groups of people. I mean we've unfortunately had our share of schools where someone has been killed in the school community, one last year which was really horrific, where one member of the school community perpetrated violence on another member and that person ended up passing away.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 23:22

So the whole school had to grapple with both the loss of this one person, but then also the culpability of the perpetrator, who was also seen as someone that had standing in the community, so really complicated.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 23:35

We do have a protocol, one that had been developed post 9-11, for school-wide, school-based crisis response.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 23:43

We pulled from materials from a lot of different places, so we didn't invent anything on our own have really important factors to create and consider in terms of how you message and how you get the information out, what safe rooms look like and what communication patterns look like, and whether you do or don't do some kind of memorial piece within the school or how you handle the conflict Within that regard, borrowing a lot from restorative practices, of how you bring everyone's voices together to have a piece of how you move from harm and conflict to resolution. So when those things occur, we have about 200 staff throughout the city three clinical supervisors, about 17 program managers. We put together a team to go out to the school because often our staff who are in the school are probably as affected. They may be really important if they can handle being a part of it. But, like in the case that I was referring to. That person was the counselor to one of the people who was involved in the situation.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 24:44

So their experience was tied to it.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 24:47

You can't ignore that we put a lot into our own staff in terms of the support that those people need to be able to stay fresh and continue. So vicarious trauma is something we think a lot about. We ask our counselors to be very conscious of, but also that we very intentionally create learning experiences as well as regular supervisory. And when we say supervision, it's really kind of like medical supervision, right, finding out how you're doing and what are the situations that you're involved in and where do you need additional support or ideas or context to be able to work through those things.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 25:23

So that's an important element and that shows up a lot when there is these sort of large crises in schools that glaring element of when we need to make sure we're leaning into that counselor and their needs as well as the needs of the whole community. But we do do that on an everyday basis as well.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 25:40

There's a fantastic wraparound services that you're providing. It seems like you've thought of just about everything to support all of the people within that school building, which is absolutely amazing. What do schools and communities do if they lack mental health services within their facilities? What kind of pathways or support systems can they reach out to to help their students that are in crisis?

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 26:04

The city has a number of places that schools can reach out to.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 26:07

I think that the challenge is breaking the access gap that services like ours do. But you know, there is something called the Office of School Health here, which is really a bridge between the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the Department of Education, and they do everything from sort of the nurses, which you might think, but they also have this whole group of social workers and psychologists and people that they can, on a crisis basis, allocate to a school. So it is, as a system, prepared, if you would, for these kinds of things, and either fortunately or unfortunately, they happen all too frequently. I think it's the day-to-day piece that I would be the most concerned about within schools that appear to be functioning very well. Like there's a school that we work with in the city, it's one of the schools that usually stands out as one of the higher functioning schools, with students who are going on to achieve, and they were smart enough about three years ago or just after COVID, to recognize that there was more going on there than they were addressing.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 27:05

So they were able to actually raise funds internally to bring our services in, and it's critical there it's really really critical for students who are in high pressure, high situations, that you might look from the outside and you walk into that school building and you think this is paradise, like I want my child to go here. And it's anywhere from there to a school and a community that you would walk through where some of the needs would be more you know, glaring and staring you in the face. One of the ways in which COVID changed the mental health experience was that it was a crisis that was experienced across the board. When I was a counselor in school, there was kind of what I would refer to as a trauma gap, like the difference between my experience of personal trauma and the students' experience of personal trauma was different. I had more to offer, more to give, not that I had none, but there was a gap there in terms of being able to feel like, okay, I can hold this, I've got room and we can work together, and then you're going to find your strength and you're going to work through this and then we're going to kind of be okay together.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 28:07

And when it hit everybody, I was as scared as anybody else. I didn't leave my apartment for four months, like I only went up on my roof of my apartment building to get air once in a while, like washing groceries, like all that stuff that we all did was real and it stayed. And we had a close cousin in his 40s who died from the disease, and people who in the communities had parents and grandparents and siblings were dying, and the freezer trucks in front of the hospitals were real. I mean, this all happened and we all experienced it at the same time, some ways to the same degrees, and I think that shaking of that and that leveling of that gap did a couple of things. It created some empathy.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 28:49

At the same time, it took away some of the stability for children, because the adults become less stable, because we're now more anxious and I think that translates into students being more anxious. We're less certain about what's happening. Students are less clear about where they're heading in their own future. We're more divided within what we can discuss, what kind of conflicts we can resolve, who's really with me, who's not. We're seeing that in children, right.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 29:18

So I think there's such an important element to moving forward right now that the adults in schools, but the adults everywhere, really look at our well-being, what we need to do for healing, not kind of looking at children as the problem or the group that needs help. But we need help together so that children can get back to looking at us as stable, confident, clear, forward-thinking, understanding how to socialize, how to be happy, how to do all those things. When we get there, I think children are going to look at that again and you'll start to see some of that suicidal ideation go down. You'll start to see some of the anxiety drop. It's just being osmosis-wise, sort of passed through and I get really concerned when we don't focus on that. We focus a lot on we got to help the kids and we do, but I think we have to do that in large part by also acknowledging and recognizing and helping ourselves.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 30:16

This is a wonderful piece of advice. You've been working with CIS for over 40 years and have a lot of insight and perspective as to the needs of the communities, the students, the staff, the families in those areas. What message would you want to share with our audience today?

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 30:56

You know what I just said. I would often hear that mental health or social emotional learning is important because it serves the educational progress of a child, and I would just want to tweak that. I really do think that we will do better in education systems if we make mental well-being, mental health progress on par with how we look at academic progress, so that we maybe even develop report cards or mechanisms of measurement of how well is someone doing emotionally? What kinds of skills have people been able to develop socially? You see that in kindergarten stuff and then it drops away and I think we need to keep it. There are many people who are brilliant and their actions socially are a little bit less than what you want to see. So those are outliers to a degree, but they also kind of help prove the point.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 31:50

I hope that we really need to value these things equally and see schools as the opportunity for building those human capacities, for a range of emotional experience, for emotional flexibility, for social skill development, to be able to socialize effectively with anybody, whether you agree or disagree, and how you hold people in your life and how you maintain those relationships and build and grow and network, and all of that at the same time that you're learning about how the world works and how to develop new ideas and think properly about how to contribute to the world as you grow up.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 32:24

So I think those are things that I would hope people would take with them into their school board meetings, into their other conversations. So there isn't like, okay, we hired a counselor, so we're taking care of that. You've hired a counselor, that's good, but is the whole building, is the whole school? Is everybody on board with how we're developing this and are we measuring it? Are we really seeing that we're doing okay with that? I really am passionate about this. I think it really needs to be, just, you know, reorganized in terms of how we think about education.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 32:51

I hope that we can all learn from your wonderful modeling and examples and apply them to our own school districts. So thank you so much for what you're doing with students and communities in New York.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 33:02

Well, thank you, lisa, and thank you for this platform and opportunity to you know, bring this dialogue and the others that you've brought into, you know, into the public square, so to speak, for people to think about and hopefully continue to sort of move forward in those discussions and dialogues, because there's no one answers to any of this, but the more we talk about it and the more people share, I think, the closer we get towards the kinds of experiences that we want to have ourselves, as well as what we want for our children.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 33:30

How can someone reach CIS?

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 33:33

Great way is through our website, counselinginschoolsorg.

Kevin Dahill-Fuchel: 33:36

There's a little link in there that says let's get started. There are a number of resources on our website that are free to download and able to be used both for parents and teachers in classrooms, and you know there's a contact form on there as well, and so we love to, you know, hear from people and understand what it is that we can do to support or, you know, always looking for partners in the work. I mean, I think that's something I would add to Lisa to what it is that's important for us within our work within communities, is that we do bring and connect with a lot of other nonprofits and for-profits and religious groups. Like all of that's really important to not do this work isolated and in an alone fashion, and we don't do that. So if there are those kinds of inquiries out there, people that are looking to partner or want to be a part of what it is that we're doing here, I think we can be a part of it. What it is you're doing somewhere else, we're happy to entertain this.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 34:28

Absolutely, thank you. If you're interested in learning more about school-based mental health counseling or supporting initiatives like CIS, visit counselinginschoolsorg. By investing in student mental health, we invest in their future. If you have a story about what's working in your schools that you'd like to share, you can email me at lisa at drlisahasslercom, or visit my website at wwwdrlisahasslercom and send me a message. If you like this podcast, subscribe and tell a friend. The more people that know, the bigger impact it will have. And if you find value to the content in this podcast, consider becoming a supporter by clicking on the supporter link in the show notes. It is the mission of this podcast to shine light on the good in education so that it spreads, affecting positive change. So let's keep working together to find solutions that focus on our children's success.