Mental health grant lapses, ending funding for county schools

Funding provided by the CDC and State of Wyoming, which went toward providing mental health resources and education to students and their families in schools across the Big Horn Basin, will lapse at the end of December. The program allocated monies to schools in Cowley, Lovell, Greybull, Burlington and Basin in Big Horn County, and Meeteetse in Park County. 

The grant emerged from funds awarded to the state at the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020. In 2021, Wyoming’s Department of Health found itself with a surplus of funds and a quandary — how would they best put the money out into the community and what was the most effective way to access the rural communities of Wyoming?

That question led the Department of Health to the state Department of Education, which agreed to a partnership to develop a program that would go toward alleviating the mental stress and trauma the pandemic had on Wyoming’s youth. Having already established programs across the state with federal monies and working under the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration’s Advancing Wellness and Resiliency in Education model, the Department of Education determined the CDC funds would be given the same goals, objectives and leadership.

The initial wave of funding lasted 18 months with the program planned to sunset in June 2023. Following positive momentum, the Department of Education was able to allocate a second wave of funding through state COVID resources through ESSER funds for an additional 18 months, which extended the program through December 2024.

Krystal Crosby, based in School District 1, served as the program’s mental health project coordinator and was tasked with managing the allocation of the funds. She liaised with the various school districts, counselors, administrators, families and regional and state officials about the program, its resources and opportunities.

“Each district has its own needs and plans to meet those goals, so it was unfair to say they all had to implement a particular resource or program,” Crosby said of her approach to working with five districts across six communities. “The grant was set up to meet them where they were at.” 

Funds were used for staffing her role, aides, licensed professional counselors and paying for services. While insurance was billed, families were never charged co-pays or deductibles through the program, and the full cost was covered for those without insurance or a third-party provider. Crosby explained that a portion of the money also went toward educating staff and the wider community. In Greybull, the program put on the comedy show “1 Degree of Separation: A (Funny) Look at Depression (and Suicide)” for free, and in Basin, the program sponsored Green Night Out at last season’s basketball game between Riverside and Greybull.

The program also aided in developing infrastructure to support school districts as they built their Multi-Tiered System of Support-Behavior (MTSS-B), a comprehensive system encouraging the holistic wellbeing of students through social, emotional and behavioral supports while learning.

“Some districts utilized funds to implement a social-emotional curriculum, which addresses concepts such as empathy, respect and honesty at the elementary level and, at the higher grades, teaches conflict resolution and stress management coping skills,” Crosby said. “Others directed funds to implement student to staff communication by purchasing apps that allow students to provide daily feedback on their emotional, mental and physical status for the day, allowing the teacher to make adjustments in real time. Some districts utilized funds to provide training for their staff, discussing staff stress management skills or better classroom procedures for trauma sensitivity. Other times, it was for specific groups of staff working with higher numbers of at-risk students, and funds were (put toward) Youth Mental Health First Aid training.”

In all, 249 cases were referred to the program for telehealth therapy services over the course of 30 months, averaging out to roughly eight students monthly. Those who chose to work in-person locally, use an alternate telehealth provider or already are working with a provider one- on-one were not included in the data Crosby collected, meaning the referrals were a limited view of the demand for mental healthcare and services felt by area students.

“We are just a snapshot of the overall need in the community,” Crosby said.

At a district level, administrators agreed and felt the program had an overwhelmingly positive impact on students. Doug Hazen, the superintendent of School District 2, said, “Our community, like many others in the Basin, has community mental health partners, but there’s a limit to that. The ability to offer telehealth counselling to that list of available options was very appealing to us to complement our town or in-person providers.”

Hazen noted that, at one point, the grant extended beyond the students to benefit anyone in the district who had a student or lived within the district’s boundaries and required mental health services. His district also provided training to the staff, sent staff to workshops and brought in speakers for assemblies.

Superintendent Matt Davidson of District 1, who oversees Cowley and Burlington schools, agreed with Hazen’s assessment and said he felt the program had an overall positive impact on the district’s schools.

“It provided an avenue for more students, families and staff to have access to services in a timely manner,” he said. “(The program) came at a time when our need for mental health services had increased significantly.”

“It was a need that everybody saw,” said Betsy Sammons, the principal of Rocky Mountain Middle/High School in Cowley. “It was something we needed to do better with kids with their social-emotional learning.

“They gave access to all kids needing counselling, so we had a much easier time getting kids in need counselling, even specialized counselling, which is not something we offer as a school. It was really nice and convenient, and we were able to help a lot of kids. They could do it online at school and it was facilitated, which makes a big difference.”

Rocky implemented a Character Strong curriculum with MTSS-B, which Sammons said was having positive impact among the student body. She, like Crosby and the other administrators, found having the option of telehealth and additional mental health resources made available at school encouraged students to come forward. Some, Crosby said, were students that had not been previously identified as at-risk, while others felt more secure in seeing a provider who was not local.

In Greybull, high school principal Ty Flock said the program came as an enormous relief, noting, “At the time we came out of COVID, we had an overtaxed system of mental healthcare providers. They couldn’t take on new clients because they were so booked. Having that online telehealth was helpful because there was an abundance of counselling services available.”

Renee Waddell, the Greybull High School counselor, praised the program for connecting the districts and counselors to share information, trends and resources, and for providing critical information to parents in free booklets.

“The handbooks had risk factor programs and information on QPR (Question, Persuade and Refer) training,” she explained. “It’s a validated suicide prevention program that trains people to recognize the signs of a potential suicide crisis and then Question, Persuade and Refer someone to seek help.”

Looking ahead

Flock and Waddell both said they were sorry to see the program lapse. Waddell said students from Greybull will be offered the option to continue receiving treatment through Oxbow Counselling, a local provider. Students in other districts are being offered the same option.

“It’s disappointing, for sure,” Davidson said of the program’s loss, “but I think Krystal has done a good job in contingency planning and working with other resources so that we can transition and make the impact less significant. But certainly it will be different without the services we’ve had for the last several years. We are continuing to explore other options.”

In Cowley, the social-emotional curriculums will continue, but Sammons worries about the impact of losing counselors on students.

“We’re working on partnering with other providers, including Oxbow, but it’s going to be tougher,” she said, noting administrators have already met with other telehealth providers as potential alternatives for students. “It’s definitely going to be tougher and not as streamlined.”

“We’re looking at everything,” said Hazen of District 2’s strategy. “The state did allocate more resources last year to mental health services, but those are one-time funds. We’ve used some of our other funds, some of our Title IV funding, to provide services and maybe even some of our other Title funds for at-risk students. We’ve utilized those to make sure we have one counselor in every building already in our system, and then we look at our outside providers in our community to fill in those gaps. 

“We’ve put a pretty strong focus on mental health over and above before we had this grant. This was just an added piece in there, so we’ll continue to do that; look at our needs and remove as many barriers as we can from our students accessing mental health services.”

“We’ll be lobbying legislators and encouraging them to appreciate the full need and positive impact that proactivity would have on mental health intervention,” Davidson added. “I think everyone should grow in their understanding of mental illness, the needs that are there and how to better address those needs. I hope it doesn’t quit.”

In the wake of the funding loss and her departure from the program, Crosby is still looking for ways to inform the community on actionable items to self-educate and support each other.

“Something we found, whenever we did staff or community education, was that we saw a rise in self-referrals,” she recalled, noting the importance of self-education as a catalyst for change. “People would say, ‘I didn’t realize that I needed help for that.’ As we educate ourselves, we often see things that need addressed in ourselves.”

Crosby shared a letter from the Wyoming Department of Health, which stated that, as of July 1, 2024, the state has reformed its mental health services. The state will continue to pay for the treatment of those who have a household income at or below 200% of the federal poverty level and do not have public or private health insurance, or fall into “priority populations” as established by state law. 

She also pointed toward Mental Health America (mhanational.org), the National Alliance on Mental Illness (nami.org) and the CDC (cdc.gov/mental-health) as reliable sources of information for those seeking to find help or learn more. She stressed the importance QPR training as well (qprtraining.com/setup free with code WYO).

For parents, she recalled the positive response she received from sharing Parent Guidance (parentguidance.org) with families at informational seminars.

“It’s 10-minute videos that educate parents on how to help their kid that’s struggling with, for instance, OCD,” she explained, “or seasonal depression, or an eating disorder. It’s not the therapy side of it, it’s the parent side of it ­­— how to be that support and not necessarily fix them, but just support them. It demystifies it, so it’s not as scary and they have a bit more information.”