Elkhart Community Schools is trying to change the narrative around mental health.
The school district is partnering with organizations in the community to offer more opportunities for students to learn positive mental health habits.
Sources of Strength
Every so often, when the lunch bell sounds at North Side Middle School, a group of about a dozen students detours from the cafeteria and heads to lunch inside a social worker’s office.
They are in a group called Sources of Strength.
They have a mission and a message.
“So, in the lunchroom today we are handing out bracelets,” says Jordan Powell, a 7th grader.
On the day WSBT visited the school, Powell and the other Sources of Strength students grabbed large boxes of bracelets from the office and handed them out to all students during the lunch period.
The writing on the bracelets included ideas of healthy activities. Activities like being outside, making art, and hanging out with friends.
“We are going to talk about things that we could do to find peace for us,” says Cristian Padilla, another 7th grader in the group.
Sources of Strength is an evidence-based program that provides “training and curriculum for youth and adults, utilizing a strength-based and upstream approach to mental health promotion and prevention.”
Basically, the program uses students to come up with messages and spread awareness to the larger student body.
“Sources of Strength is a suicide prevention program that focuses on protective factors,” says Alicia Sisk the Communication Manager from Oaklawn, “things like physical health, mental health, healthy activities, mentors, generosity, spirituality, it is tapping into all of these Sources of Strength.”
Oaklawn is a community partner with Elkhart Community Schools.
Oaklawn is helping to fund and manage the Sources of Strength program at Elkhart Community Schools, Goshen Community Schools, and School City of Mishawaka.
Sisk says, the program shows that when young people have multiple sources of support, when times get hard, they have options of where to turn.
“As we work on these Sources of Strength and build resiliency in kids, it reduces suicide. It also has the effects of reducing other negative behaviors like bullying, violence substance use,” says Sisk.
The program has been in Elkhart for about a year.
The students in the program at North Side are diverse and come from a variety of social groups.
Together, they come up with ways to help the other students in the school feel more included and empowered.
“Sources of Strength really empowers students to kind of run the program and run the messaging,” says Sisk, “it is also about empowering students to connect their peers to help if they find something is wrong. If someone is suicidal, one of their peers is likely going to be the first to know about it, so connecting their friends to a trusted safe adult if they know someone is in danger.”
Over the past few weeks, the students have left notes on the walls of the schools, on lockers and are now handing out information during lunch.
“I feel like that, let’s say you are having a bad day and we just put those notes out there and it just makes you feel good,” says Padilla.
“I definitely feel like we are making a difference and there are people that have thought differently about how their life is,” says Powell.
An important mission
The students at North Side know how important their mission is.
“The last meeting, we were talking about red flags,” says Padilla, “our solutions were to just be there for them and help them.”
Last year, a 12-year-old North Side Middle School student died by suicide.
The family of Rio Allred said she had been bullied.
“We just need to spread awareness that it actually happens, that they are not just stories, they are happening every day,” says Padilla.
Padilla and Powell say they didn’t know Allred, but they were saddened by her death.
A 2021 report by the CDC found the number of adolescents reporting poor mental health is increasing.
The CDC data shows, four in 10 high schoolers in the U.S. said they felt persistently sad and one in five seriously considered attempting suicide.
Some groups of kids are more affected than others including LGBTQ students and black students.
The CDC reports that prevention should include strategies to help all kids feel more connected.
That is what Sources of Strength aims to do in Elkhart schools.
The hope is the students can take it beyond middle school.
“So, students absolutely need that kind of positive foundation of good mental health so they can function in school and in life,” says Sisk.
More Mental Health Partnerships
Elkhart Community schools is one of a handful of schools in Indiana to receive Project AWARE grant funding.
Two years in, the grant has helped the district hire mental health coordinators, counselors, and social workers.
It has helped boost and train employees on the district’s bullying prevention and intervention program, Olweus.
Crosswinds Counseling, a partnering organization with Elkhart Community Schools, now has a team of licensed mental health counselors that visit Elkhart High School to talk with students one-on-one.
The grant has also offered more professional development and training to teachers, staff and school bus drivers.
In Elkhart’s elementary schools, regulation rooms funded by Project AWARE, are aiming to teach young children how to identify and process emotion.