Project Awareness: Professional development training for all district staff on mental health awareness and crisis management. - Elizabeth Public School’s (EPS) Project Awareness is a comprehensive training program with the goal to provide mental health awareness and verbal de-escalation techniques to thousands of in-district staff. The training will provide district staff with critical training in identifying mental illness, de-escalation skills in response to episodes of mental illness, and a system of reporting and referring to immediately address students’ needs. EPS’s Project Awareness will have the potential to impact over 28,000 school age children and the thousands of families that interact with EPS staff on a daily basis. EPS comprises a population of 28,431 students with an ethnic breakdown of 68% Hispanic, 18% Black, 9% White, and 4% Asian. 78% of this population is on free/reduced lunch. 21% of this population is English Language Learners. 12% are students with special needs and 3% are serviced through Section 504. During the 2019-2020 school year EPS mental health staff made approximately 570 referrals for mental health related services. Throughout the lifetime of the grant our partnerships with Crisis Prevention Institute (CPI) and Handle with Care (HWC), we will train over 100 district mental health staff (i.e., School Counselors, Social Workers, and Division of Special Services) in hands-off policies, that teach staff to respond to crisis situations with a focus on verbal de-escalation techniques and safe, non-restrictive interventions. Certifying a large group of mental health professionals in CPI and HWC will provide the district with the capacity to turn-key this training to critical staff such as Security, Transportation, and all classroom/personal assistants at all our 36 schools, divisions, and departments. Additionally, we understand the value of ALL staff having a basic understand of identifying students with SMI/SED and intervening to de-escalate situations that may arise. Therefore, over 2,000 certified staff will receive yearly training on mental health awareness. It is the intent of Project Awareness to train over 2300 EPS staff members yearly in verbal interventions by which staff will learn to recognize the stages of an escalating crisis and evidenced-based techniques to appropriately de-escalate. Furthermore, the project will develop and maintain an accessible referral system that allows our trained staff member to efficiently report instances of SMI and/or SED. We recognize the importance of having personnel properly trained in identifying these incidents in order to refer students to the appropriate level of care. Over the next 5 years our goals are to increase the number of student mental health referrals to adequately address/intervene with students exhibiting SMI and/or SED, in order to decrease ineffective disciplinary consequences (i.e., suspension).
