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RIVERTON — Come fall, the Jordan School District plans to have a full-time psychologist in each of its 36 elementary schools.
Work is also underway on a districtwide mental health initiative, in part a response to a significant number of deaths by suicide among teens and young adults in the southwest quadrant of Salt Lake County this past year, seven alone in the Herriman High School community.
"It's also because we have escalating emotional health problems that kids aren't getting attended to and they can't learn if they're not getting some kind of help," said Janice Voorhies, president of the Jordan School District Board of Education.
The school district has 41 school psychologists, one in each middle and high school, and is working to move that number up to 56.5, Voorhies said.
Jordan District has had school psychologists in each of its seven Title I schools, which are schools that have high numbers or percentages of children from low-income families. These schools receive additional federal funding to provide supports to help students reach academic benchmarks.
Elsewhere in the district, school psychologists have been splitting their time between two, even three, elementary schools.
These are just two of initiatives contained in the $710 million budget adopted earlier this week by the Jordan Board of Education. Superintendent Patrice Johnson said the budget reflects “what patrons want and care about.”
The budget also includes raises for teachers and a new program that will offer grants to teachers for education-related activities outside of contracted time such as an agriculture teacher who accompanies students to state or national competitions, Voorhies said.
The budget funds an increase in starting teacher pay to $42,800 annually in the 2018-19 school year, up from $40,000. The school district will invest some $19 million in educator pay raises in the next school year.
Board member Bryce Dunford said the budget reflects "priorities" and "the times we live in."
The school board made deliberate decisions to invest in the expertise of a mental health specialist, both to lead district-level efforts and make connections to community-based mental health resources, he said.
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Herriman community searching for solutions after teen suicides
For Utah teen Elijah Dean, it was the fear of worrying his friends and family that kept him silent."With all the suicides that occurred in the Herriman area, we felt like we are experts in education and we're not experts in mental health. We felt like we desperately needed an expert in mental health to say 'Here's how we deal with that or how we prevent that,' " Dunford said.
During budget deliberations, board members also agreed that trauma kits are needed in each of the school district's 3,600 classrooms in the wake of numerous school shooting nationwide this past year, Dunford said. The board also would like to place larger kits adjacent to automated external defibrillators in schools and offices and train all teachers and administrators how to use them.
The kits include first-aid supplies such as lightweight tourniquets, gauze coated with blood-clotting drugs and compression bandages that could be used to respond to a school shooting or other mass casualty events.
The initiative is not specifically funded in the budget but the district's business administrator John Larsen assured school board members that he'll locate the money within the budget to purchase the kits.
"We will find the money because that's a no-brainer for us," Dunford said.
Board member Darrell Robinson, who represents the Herriman area, said the school board had discussed a districtwide mental health initiative prior to this past school year, examining trends and student needs in several areas.
[...] we felt like we are experts in education and we're not experts in mental health.
–Bryce Dunford
Hiring up more school psychologists in elementary schools will help ease the loads of principals who already wear many hats, he said.
“When I visit elementary schools and stuff and I see the role of the elementary school principal and what they’re doing in terms of counseling and psychologist work, this will be great relief to them being able to focus on running the school instead of tackling these problems that take so much of their time,” Robinson said.
He hopes a like amount of attention will be placed on relieving some responsibilities of middle and high school counselors and psychologists, many of whom are tasked with changing class schedules.
"Do you have to have a someone with a master’s degree change a school schedule?" Robinson said.
Johnson said the budget attempts to address "what counts."
After meeting with stakeholders including parents, students, patrons and community leaders, district administrators and the school board arrived at four priorities: student achievement; empowering employees; customer service; and safety and security.
With respect to the latter, the budget also contemplates increased spending for secondary school hall monitors and safety training for all school personnel.
