School wellness coordinator Barb Slayton walked through the halls of Franklin High School last Friday greeting students and waving down teachers and counselors to discuss grant money that needs to be spent on behavioral heath and wellness projects before the end of the year.
In her role as wellness coordinator, Slayton manages a program targeted at improving behavioral health outcomes while working with counselors from outside organizations who provide mental health resources to the district.
She also leads the monthly Zoom meetings of Franklin’s Community Management Team, a mix of people from different social service organizations who are trying to create a better support system for the city’s students.
The Community Management Team is part advisory board, part networking group. The members are mental health experts from Riverbend, teachers from Franklin, coordinators for substance abuse prevention organizations like the Franklin Mayor’s Drug Task Force and suicide prevention groups like NAMI-NH, and state workers from DOE bureau of student wellness, to name a few.
Participants say the team meetings have been particularly helpful during the pandemic, supporting students with increasingly severe mental health needs. One day several months ago, Slayton said, the school wellness team handled four simultaneous student mental health crises, which involved sending three students out for a suicide ideation assessment, making two reports to the state child protection agency, and summoning police officers to the school twice, within a three-hour period.
“That was a bad day. That’s not every day, thankfully,” Slayton said. “Having that open communication helps to have the community partners aware of what a crisis it is right now. We’ve always had a high number of mental health crises among our students in Franklin. It’s really kind of shining the spotlight on the mental health needs of students.”
The idea behind the group is that working together allows each organization to make better use of Franklin’s limited resources and sharing information about challenges students are facing, which can be a fast tracked toward solutions.
At the March 18 meeting for example, a Franklin Middle School counselor asked the group for specific advice: resources for the family of an eighth-grader who had been caught sending and asking for inappropriate pictures. The question prompted a brainstorming session about the overall problem of teen safety and conduct online, and within minutes group members had suggested holding an online safety training for students and recommended several organizations who could do the training.
“Sometimes it starts as a conversation about a family, and when we start talking with community partners, we realize that it’s more of a systemic thing and there might be more of a systemic approach taken to it,” Slayton said.
Franklin’s Community Management Team was started in 2015 as a requirement for a Project AWARE-NH grant from the NH Department of Education. Under the grant, the Community Management Team had five goals it had to follow, which included making health services accessible, decreasing risk factors and increasing safety and protection factors for students, engaging families, and increasing social-emotional skills among kindergarteners and first graders.
But even after Franklin’s grant ended, the team members kept meeting, no longer restricted on what they could tackle.
“We had the freedom as a team to just kind of be like, ‘we don’t need to have this community meeting anymore, nobody’s making us, so what do we want to make it?” Slayton said. “I think that’s where it took a turn.”
Kandyce Tucker, the coordinator for the Franklin Mayor’s Drug Task Force, is a regular attendee of the Community Management Team meetings. Tucker said one issue the group tackled was protocol around students who were caught vaping in school, which used to result in an out-of-school suspension. The team mobilized a subcommittee of parents and community members who developed a discipline system that is restorative rather than punitive, ensuring students caught vaping are given evidence-based education around tobacco and drug use instead of being excluded from school.
“It was great for the students as well as teachers,” Tucker said. “We were able to kind of show that we were hearing what they were saying and provided some opportunity for change in the school.”
Much of what the Franklin Community Management Team discusses goes beyond the limits of the school day to include factors that impact students in all aspects of their life — housing and food insecurity, mental health, poverty and domestic violence.
In Franklin, where risk factors for youth are statistically higher than the average New Hampshire town, participants say the team has been invaluable.
Franklin School District has 920 students who are 90% white and half are considered economically disadvantaged, according to NH Department of Education data. Franklin High School students ranked at 30% reading and writing proficiency and 14% math proficiency in 2021, well below New Hampshire’s set targets of 64% for reading and 51% for math.
Data from the 2019 Youth Risk Behavior survey shows 16% of Franklin High School students had a parent or other family member incarcerated in past 12 months, compared to 6.7% of students state-wide. Nearly half of Franklin High students have lived with someone who has a problem with drugs or alcohol compared to 30% statewide, and 29% of Franklin students have seen adults in their home physically abuse each other, compared to 17% statewide. Franklin students are also more likely to skip breakfast than most students statewide.
“Just getting them to school fed and able to learn with clothes on their backs, that’s a win,” Slayton said. “Supporting the entire community is going to support the students in the school. They’re not two different things.”
Having open channels of communication with mental health organizations like Riverbend have been vital, particularly one Friday night last fall when Slayton received a report — which ultimately turned out to be a false alarm — that a community member was planning a suicide attempt.
“I texted the director at Riverbend and was able to say, ‘I think this is happening right now in Franklin. Somebody reported this to me. What should we be doing?’ ” Slayton said. “Fortunately it was a non-situation, but we had the relationships in place so that we already had kind of a response team ready for what we’re going to do, on a Friday night.”
The presence of community partners is everywhere in Franklin’s school buildings. The PEMI Youth Center has a room in Franklin High School where it holds free after-school programming for teens during the week. In the in-school suspension rooms, students who are being disciplined for violence complete online intervention & prevention courses, purchased with funding from Merrimack County’s STOP grant. A former maintenance office has been converted into a cozy space with a sofa, soft chairs and lamps for counselors from Riverbend and HealthFirst to meet with student clients.
“It opens up access to a lot more services for a lot more kids,” Slayton said. “We now have that at all three of our buildings, where those providers and partner agencies can come in and see kids right at school. Really all we’re doing is giving them a room and they’re showing up and using the space and we’re facilitating the process.”
Often teachers will bring their own ideas to Slayton, like making “calming corners” in their classrooms with beanbag chairs and squishy toys for overwhelmed middle schoolers or starting an outdoor adventure club for thrill-seeking students at risk of substance use. Slayton obtains or allocates grant funding to make the ideas happen.
Teachers also incorporate their own social and emotional wellness practices into their classes — Slayton said one math teacher begins every class with a “mindful minute,” while one Spanish teacher begins with “chime time,” playing a soothing tone on a chime instrument.
According to the Department of Education, there are currently 10 New Hampshire school districts that either have or are exploring the idea of community management teams, using DoE behavioral wellness grants like Project AWARE, System of Care or Promising Futures. White Mountains Regional School District in Coos County and Raymond School District in Rockingham County are two that have community teams.
For the participants of Franklin’s Community Management team, meetings are a way to centralize all the wellness initiatives and help each other out, whether it’s crowdsourcing Christmas food baskets for families in need or drumming up attendance at community events.
“This meeting has been so helpful in helping me to connect to who community partners are in the Franklin area, and be really able to learn about what resources already exists,” said Deanna LaFrazia, Center Manager for Franklin Family Resource Center. “I can easily share at this meeting what’s going on in the Resource Center and I just found it to be a super helpful way to connect quickly to who’s in our area.”
Franklin Superintendent Dan LeGallo said that so far, the team has been the best way for Franklin schools to have the highest impact on their students.
“When you get that team together in the room and you look at all the people pulling in the same direction, it’s amazing,” said Franklin superintendent Daniel LeGallo. “Frankin is a community that needs that kind of support, so it’s really nice to know that we have leveraged all the resources internally and exter nally, but that they’re working together and working off of each other. Because it’s the only way we’re going to have maximum impact.”