Award-winning mental health services at Penn-Trafford look to uncertain future

Penn-Trafford School District psychologist Dr. Wendy Westwood still remembers the calls and emails she and others received from students at the beginning of the pandemic.

“Coming back from covid, we noticed a huge increase in mental health concerns, across the board from elementary to high school,” she said. “We had students emailing counselors and myself. They didn’t have their stability; they didn’t know what was going on.”

The district needed to do something. Penn-Trafford brought in additional mental health support through the Innersight company, with a goal of connecting students to more resources and help.

“We started this program because we were seeing that the need was (so) increased,” Westwood said. “Students didn’t know how to deal with the aftermath of covid.”

The program started at Penn-Trafford through the company, called Bridges, is a “bridge” between the school and mental health services. Dovetailing with the district’s existing Student Assistance Program (SAP), Bridges facilitates anxiety support groups as well as some additional individual therapy hours. Three additional therapists work with the school through the program, taking some of the workload off the district’s counselors.

Despite the success of the programs, Penn-Trafford’s mental health services now are looking ahead with some apprehension. Because the Bridges program was paid for using American Rescue Plan’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ARP-ESSER) money, the district must look for additional funding to sustain it for the future.

The monthly bill for the Bridges program is between $15,000 and $17,000, according to business office specialist Carol Smolka. So far for the 2022-23 school year, the district has paid $78,000 for the program.

“If we don’t get ahold of this and continue with these types of services, if we don’t start teaching students social and emotional learning and have that ‘something’ that needs to be done, we are going to continue to see these problems down the road,” said Dr. Amy Horvat, assistant principal at Penn-Trafford High School and a member of the SAP team.

“I know we are an education and academic type of place, but if we don’t get ahold of this, no academics are going to be absorbed unless we get ahold of the mental health part of it,” Horvat said. “Some of these things need to go into schools.”

Providing assistance

As part of a Pennsylvania state initiative, each Penn-Trafford school building has a Student Assistance Program, a group of teachers and administrators who work together to help students who may be in crisis.

Penn-Trafford High School’s SAP team won a statewide award — the Distinguished Secondary SAP Team Award for 2023 from the Pennsylvania Student Assistance Professionals Board of Directors — for its work with students this past February.

“We are a pretty eclectic group. Our school psychologists sit in on these meetings; we have teachers in various grade levels and various levels of expertise,” Horvat said. “We kind of bounce ideas off one another. … We come to every meeting positive about students, and we try things — we don’t say, ‘That’s not going to work.’ We just try them out and see if they do.”

When a homeroom teacher notices signs that a student is struggling — a sudden drop in grades or change in behavior— they can alert the SAP team. A form is sent to all the student’s teachers to assess the situation, and if the team finds that assistance would help, a permission form is sent to the student’s family to talk about what help is available.

“We can’t do anything without parent permission,” Horvat noted. “(We) set up students with mentors. They have a mentor person — they could be in their class, or they see them in the cafeteria — and students know that is their person to connect to if they have issues.”

Mentors are all individuals who are on the building’s SAP team, she said, but usually not a counselor or principal.

“They build rapport with that student, so those students with any of the issues we mentioned have somebody to go to other than their counselor,” she said. “It’s always a weird thing to come down to the office — we try not to do that unless we have a particular bond with a student that way. For the most part, it’s the teachers who have a mentor relationship.”

Along with mentoring, the SAP program can connect students to assistance services in-school or outside of it, in conjunction with Westmoreland County, Horvat said.

“We might not be aware of something that would help a family, that they can connect them to,” she said.

The Bridges program is present at the high school, middle and elementary levels as of this year. If a student has a therapist outside of school, they can still participate in the Bridges program without it being a duplication of services.

“It allows them to explore and have different types of services at the same time, where typically insurance would require you to complete one service before you go into another,” Westwood said. “You could have different types of therapy together.”

Increased need

Since the start of the pandemic, the district, as well as the region at large, has seen a jump in the number of students who needed help with mental health issues. Horvat described the struggles as “widespread.”

“There are no boundaries, as far as how it presents itself and who it presents itself in,” she said. “It’s just all across the board.”

In December 2022, students at Penn-Trafford High School were asked to anonymously complete a voluntary survey. 58%, or 729 students, participated in the survey out of the 1,256 students who attend Penn-Trafford High School.

According to the survey, 23% of students rated emotional problems and anxiety/depression, negative peer relationships, and focus/hyperactivity as high or very high concerns.

As of the beginning of February 2023, 71 total students at Penn-Trafford High School were assisted through the SAP program.

Counselors and therapists from the school and from Innersight are often busy. This school year at the high school, through the Bridges program, two therapists from Innersight Bridges met individually with 30 high-need students, and three therapists from Innersight Bridges held 10 different therapy groups, with more than 65 45-minute sessions.

As of February, 63 Penn-Trafford students have been seen individually by Bridges therapists, and 141 students have been involved in group therapy with Bridges this school year.

Moving forward

The Innersight Bridges program specifically was funded by ESSER funding during the pandemic. Within the next year, the ESSER funds will no longer be available, meaning the district will need to find new sources of funding or alter its programs.

“(It) is not something that we are going to abruptly stop,” Horvat emphasized. “I know our district will find a way, but we just wanted it to be known that it is an issue still.”

Penn-Trafford has looked for grants and other sources of funds to support the program and plans to continue to do so. Part of the problem is that the Bridges program was not originally intended to be a long-term program, but it continues to provide needed assistance to students amidst continuing mental health struggles, Horvat said.

“This was something we did not realize the scope of when we brought the help in, and we needed the help,” Horvat said. “We were thinking that in two years we could get a good handle on it, but that just didn’t happen, because it grew exponentially. … Now, we absolutely need to find a way to keep what we have going and the momentum that we have going, and those funds are gone.”

Impact of support

In the midst of funding struggles, Westwood focuses often on the positive parts of the Bridges program and SAP at large, and the help that she and the team have been able to provide. She keeps a board of thank-you cards from students and families in her office.

“I get thank-you notes from parents at graduation, that we made it to this point, that our kids are doing good now,” she said. “A lot of people don’t even realize my role, and other people’s roles — they just know that there was somebody supporting their students as they came through.”

Assistance received at younger grade levels can help support a student their whole academic life and beyond, she noted.

“Because I work across the levels, I could see a student at the high school level that isn’t having any issues, that I know we worked hard at the elementary level and provided these services for them, and those things made a difference and they’re well-adjusted,” she said.

When the SAP team can move a student from being on the “active” list to the inactive monitoring list, Horvat feels encouraged that something has improved in their life.

“That’s the best thing for me, when we move them to monitoring, because we’ve talked about them, and there’s a positive (thing) happening, and something’s changed,” she said.