Building mental health awareness in schools through project rise: resiliency in student education - the kellin foundation, in partnership with guilford county schools, will build and implement a…

Building mental health awareness in schools through project rise: resiliency in student education - the kellin foundation, in partnership with guilford county schools, will build and implement a comprehensive training plan called project rise (resiliency in student education). Project rise will provide targeted and evidence-based mental health awareness training that builds the capacity to: (1) identify the signs and symptoms of mental illness, and (2) connect students with resources available in the community that can help that youth and family thrive in school, at home, and in the community. Project rise will focus on two target populations: (1) school personnel (with a particular focus on school support staff); and (2) parents of middle and high school students. Guilford county schools has provided essential services to students and their families to meet learning needs, even during the covid-19 pandemic, including additional support for teachers. However, there is a particular need to focus on school personnel that youth interact with every day who are not teachers, but nonetheless have key relationships in students' lives such as bus drivers, cafeteria staff, custodians, coaches, tutors, and others. In addition, prior training efforts have not focused on parents. Project rise will help to fill those gaps by providing targeted, evidence-based, and trauma-informed mental health awareness trainings to these essential groups to create a wraparound approach to mental health awareness. Project rise will train 1,800 individuals over the five year period and has four primary training objectives, including: (1) increased awareness of the signs and symptoms of mental health disorders, particularly serious mental illness (SMI) and/or serious emotional disturbances (SED); (2) increased understanding of evidence-based DE-escalation techniques for students with a mental health disturbance and demonstrated increase in confidence using these techniques when needed; (3) increased awareness of available community resources for students with mental illness; and, (4) increased knowledge of how to make a referral to for needed mental health services. To reach these objectives, careful attention has been given to selecting evidence-based trainings that are culturally and developmentally appropriate for our target populations. These will include youth mental health first aid, community resource model (CRM), wellness recovery action plan (wrap) (targeted for parents to support their children), and crisis intervention training (CIT). In addition, given that the kellin foundation is an nctsn - category III site, trauma-informed care training (based on samhsa's model and framework) will also be offered given the strong connection between mental health and trauma. These trainings can be offered in-person or virtually.