Mental health coordinator for Calhoun County schools stays busy
Aug. 20—Amber Butler started her second year as Calhoun County schools' mental health services coordinator Aug. 9. Her list of tasks is extensive.
"Last year, I made 360 referrals," she told the Calhoun County Board of Education and the teachers and administrators who attended the Thursday afternoon meeting. Butler then answered a list of questions the board had asked her about her first year.
Tasks that Butler started last year and hopes to continue include conducting crisis intervention. She also refers students and families to the appropriate agencies, teaches teachers how to handle a crisis, assists administrators involved with truancy issues and addresses discipline problems before they become mental health issues.
After reading her answers, Butler described a project that she and three other administrators completed over the summer, an online curriculum aimed at training teachers about the importance of emphasizing soft skills and career readiness. These soft skills emphasize the need for communication, self-reflection and setting goals. Butler said the career readiness is aimed at helping students become adults.
"We hope the teachers, too, will get something out of it," Butler said.
Butler, social workers Nicole Burgess and Kristen Fargason, and retiree Karen Carr made 20-minute lessons to be taught on each Monday of the school year. The name is of the curriculum is "Mindset Monday."
"Also, we provided the teachers with interactive games, PDFs (digital documents) and activities," Butler said in a later interview.
The curriculum's four creators hope the lessons will help not only students but also teachers who experience stress.
"We are coming out of virtual learning after the COVID-19 shutdown," Butler told the board. "This is a hard transition for a lot of our students."
The hiring of a mental health counselor is but one element of the board's efforts to make schools safer. Those efforts include close communication with the system's safety director, Randy Reaves, who updated the board on the status of the Department of Justice's Community Oriented Policing Services grants, which should be awarded later this fall. The grant will provide the remainder of the schools with cameras that can share interior views of school buildings with law enforcers.
"All schools have trained for lockdown drills the first week of school," Reaves said, "and the schools will be doing more."
Reaves has checked all the doors in the school system to control access. In one school, he is having an interior wall built near the front door to make the school more secure. He is working with law enforcement officers to assist the schools with risk assessments, such as assessing students who might harm themselves or be at risk to harm others.
"Thanks to Sheriff Wade, there are changes with our SROs (school resource officers)," Reaves said, referring to Calhoun County Sheriff Matthew Wade's goals of keeping the SROs on campus. Wade obtained and distributed gasoline cards to the SROs so they can fill up their patrol car without returning the sheriff's office. Also, he was able to obtain funding to pay SROs for overtime for work they must do after the school day ends.
Another speaker at the meeting was Morgan Jennings, the Child Nutrition Program's director. She told the board members about the closure of the Dothan plant of the Borden Dairy company, which means Calhoun County schools will need a new source of milk after Sept. 30.
"We serve between 43,000 to 55,000 cartons of milk a week," Jennings said. "We cannot sit on this problem."
To ensure that milk is supplied to schools, Jennings has contacted other companies that may be able to provide milk.
