The Voinovich School’s Planning Evaluation Education and Research (PEER) group paired with Paint Valley Drug Addiction and Alcohol Services to provide a need assessment of 22 school districts in Fayette, Highland, Pickaway, Pike and Ross counties. The Improving Access to Mental and Behavioral Health Services for School-Age Children project is aimed at kindergarten through twelfth-grade students and seeks to find common problems that affect the lives of these students.
The focus groups, consisting of school personnel as well as behavioral health professionals, determined that many of the children and teenagers suffer from depression and attention problems across all of the school districts. In order to help solve these problems, the project team recommended that mental health workers be made available in the schools. The team is currently in the process of putting together a survey for parents of the students so that they can weigh in on the issue to see if there are other possible solutions to the problem.
Remaining goals for the project include assessing the available resources or funding opportunities that could be directed to address children’s mental health needs and adopting a strategic plan to address the identified needs.
Ashley Demyan, a criminology graduate student at Ohio University, evaluated the transcripts from the focus group meeting with school personnel and assigned responses into five categories: significant issues, contributing factors, available resources, barriers to access and services, and recommendations. She then prepared a separate report for each of the 20 school districts.
Ashley said that the experience allowed her to see the realities of rural sociological problems such as inequality, poverty and lack of access to necessary facilities. The project also allowed her to gain perspective on the criminal justice system and see that not everyone in jail comes from an urban environment, which is valuable information for her continuing education, a doctorate in criminology and studying juvenile crime.
Related sites: