Greenville County Schools recently received a $483,000 grant from the Greenville Health Authority.
The grant is called a Healthy Greenville Grant, and will be used to expand school-based counseling services in the district. According to Tara Dean, executive director of academic innovation and technology, the funding allowed Greenville County Schools to place 15 additional licensed mental health counselors in the district.
“We’re very thankful for the grant, and we know that our students, our staff and our families are going to benefit,” Dean said. “The core mission of a school is to educate, but we know that in order to educate students, they have to feel safe emotionally, mentally and physically.”
With this new addition, Dean says that two-thirds of the school district now has permanent, district-hired counselors. The district has been working to hire its own mental health counselors for the past few years, after previously contracting out workers from the Greenville Department of Mental Health.
According to Dean, the district struggled to keep these contracted workers in the school system for long periods of time. So, they decided to pilot a program in eleven schools with district-hired mental health workers.
“Keeping those positions filled was becoming more difficult,” Dean said. “So we [wanted] to see, if we hired our own mental health counselors, would we be more likely to keep them because they would feel like a part of our schools?”
The answer to Dean’s question turned out to be a resounding yes, and the district made the decision last year to expand the pilot program to 49 of its schools. This is half of the total schools in the district.
Now with the grant, two-thirds of the schools have these employees in place. This includes the district’s child development centers, which are receiving mental health services for the first time.
For the schools that do not currently have district-hired counselors, Dean says students are still able to receive services in school through the Greenville Department of Mental Health. The hope, though, is to eventually have these employees in every school.
“We’re exploring that expansion,” Dean said. “A big part of our strategic plan is working to make sure we’re meeting the needs of the children.”
Blue Ridge High School was one of the schools to receive a mental health counselor as a result of this grant. Greer High School and Greer Middle School already had one in place from the pilot program.
For more information on Greenville County Schools, visit their website.
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