Student Support Services Mulled By Cherokee School Board

CHEROKEE COUNTY, GA — The Cherokee County School Board on Thursday heard an update on the district's student support services efforts, including suicide prevention.

Superintendent Brian Hightower spoke about student support services programs and their success in saving students’ lives.

Following input from the community as part of the process to design the Blueprint five-year strategic plan, in 2019 the school board agreed to expand student support services to include an initiative that the district referred to as Social and Emotional Learning, known as SEL. One of the drivers behind starting SEL was the increasing rate of student suicides.

Student support services is a longtime aspect of the school district and includes counselors, nurses and social workers, who all provide numerous services as part of their roles. With the adoption of what the district referred to as SEL, the school district appointed two student support specialists, who are staff members trained to support students struggling with mental health needs and to refer them to additional supports outside of school. The school district also, under SEL, has provided training to employees as to how to recognize students potentially struggling with mental health and thoughts of self-harm or suicide, so they could be supported by Cherokee Schools' student support specialists and referred for additional help.

Since the start of the SEL initiative in 2019, the district has intervened to assist 57 students in crisis, Hightower said, “and, in many of these situations, saved them from an attempt on their life.”

“We’re saving kids’ lives and that is what’s important,” School Board Chair Kyla Cromer said, who was joined by school board member Clark Menard in praising the initiative.

The SEL initiative also has included training for employees as to how trauma – from a parent’s death to financial hardships – can affect a student’s mental health and ability to achieve academic success, and the importance of referring them to school counselors or student support specialists for assistance. The expansion of positive behavior programs, which already existed in the district, has been considered part of Cherokee Schools' SEL initiative, as have efforts to foster a positive school culture and to expand staff well-being and self-care programs.

The most recent step in the initiative was the roll-out for this school year of curriculum developed by the district's student support services staff to use once a week in homeroom; the curriculum is posted in its entirety on the district's website. The creation of curriculum by Cherokee Schools staff eliminated the need to use contracted curriculum.

For next school year, Hightower announced during the meeting, the one SEL survey used by the school district will be replaced with a survey created by district staff. In recent years, the district has used a survey from Panorama for grades 4-12 to allow student self-assessment of their grit/resiliency, learning styles, self-management, growth mindset and self-efficacy; the district has not used any other surveys or curriculum from Panorama. With the recent hiring of several programmers in the technology division, Cherokee Schools now has the capacity to create a system for sorting the survey data to provide principals and the district's student support services team with similar insights as to students’ self-assessments to allow for individual support and curriculum improvements. Parents will continue to have the opportunity to opt their children out of participation in the survey, and they will receive a copy of their child’s survey results.

Hightower said it has been disappointing to hear misinformed allegations about Cherokee Schools' SEL initiative and to see examples of SEL from other school districts held up as representative of all SEL programs. In response, Hightower said, he and his staff no will longer use the term SEL, but instead will use #CCSDcares, a hashtag already in use by student support services, as it more accurately represents the purpose of their work.

“Our program is unique to our school district,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that the good work of our counselors, social workers, nurses, student mental health specialists, teachers, administrators and other dedicated employees has been muddied.”