Seneca county community schools mhat project - family counseling service of the finger lakes (fcsfl) will train school staff (teachers, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, aides, etc.) and community…

Seneca county community schools mhat project - family counseling service of the finger lakes (fcsfl) will train school staff (teachers, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, aides, etc.) and community agency staff who work with at-risk youth, in youth mental health first aid (ymhfa) and applied suicide intervention skills training (asist). The focus of the mental health awareness training program will be on the three districts of the seneca county community schools consortium. We will also partner with glove house and the united way of seneca county to ensure our programs have extended reach in our region. The training will ultimately benefit the young people in three high-needs rural school districts in seneca county, NY: seneca falls, south seneca, and waterloo. Ymhfa and asist are both evidenced based programs that teach adults how to identify students in crisis and strategies to use to help DE-escalate, intervene and refer the student to mental health resources. We partner with seneca county community counseling, who delivers mental health services conducted by licensed psychologists and social workers. Accessibility to mental health care will be addressed directly by improvement in the number of screenings and the number of school aged youth served. During this project, we will train 50 regional turnkey trainers in applied suicide intervention skills training (asist) and 18 in ymhfa. In addition, by the end of the fifth year, 1,760 youth mental health first aiders (teachers, aides, administrators, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, law enforcement, and community partner staff) will be trained in ymhfa. 2,000 staff will be trained in asist. These efforts will continue beyond the funding of this grant with the annual capacity to train and retrain over 800 community members in each evidenced based program moving forward: goal 1: increase the capacity of participating school districts to recognize and appropriately respond to students experiencing mental health problems. Objective 1-1: by september of 2026, 1,900 professional staff will be trained as implementers in ymhfa or asist. Objective 1-2: by september of 2026, 1,860 community members and support staff will be trained as implementers in ymhfa or asist. Objective 1-3: by the end of the 2025-26 school year, the number of referrals for mental health care will increase to 2600. Goal 2: increase the capacity of participating school districts to partner with community agencies to refer and support students experiencing mental health problems. Objective 2-1: the number of students aged 14-18 screened annually for behavioral health concerns will increase from baseline by 50% by the end of the 2025-26 school year. Objective 2-2: the number of school-aged youth served annually by seneca county community counseling and family counseling service of the finger lakes will increase from baseline by 35% by the end of the 2025-26 school year.