A $1.7 million grant from Ohio’s opioid settlement money will allow a program to continue that supports students amid concerns over youth mental health.
Student resilience coordinators have added to mental health resources in 30 area schools districts since 2022.
Placed by Dayton Children’s Hospital, the coordinators work one on one with students, helping them build research-based resiliency characteristics — skills like relationship building, healthy coping and personal confidence.
Th grant from the One Ohio Recovery Foundation — the opioid lawsuit settlement — will help continue that work, as its previous funding ran out.
Without that additional money, the program would have been cut from nine districts to just four coordinators, said Sue Fralick, director of the Center for Emotional Well-Being at Dayton Children’s.
“Our hope is to be able to fund the prevention side so that we can stop things before they get worse, before it goes all the way downstream, because prevention programing is not billable to insurance or to Medicaid,” Fralick said.
By focusing on resiliency, she said students build the skills they need to face current and future stressors.
“There'll never be enough inpatient beds or enough crisis centers or enough day treatment seats for kids to get help,” Fralick said. “And by us being able to do this program, connecting trauma with coping skills, we're able to impact kids before mental health and trauma conditions take deeper root.”
Teachers often refer their students to the program, said Anqelique Bailey, a resiliency coordinator at Archbishop Alter High School.
“They're so happy that they have somebody they can call when they see or hear something,” Bailey said. “We look at children who are having trouble academically, making connections, not participating like they should, or just had past trauma that we are aware of.”
She then meets with parents and uses multiple assessments to screen for existing strengths, alcohol use, suicide risk, trauma and social determinants of health.
They use the seven Cs of resiliency characteristics to build a care plan: competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, and control. Those are based upon Kenneth Ginsburg’s book "Building Resilience in Children and Teens," a book each of the coordinators are required to read.
Bailey said they choose two to focus on: the Cs that students could use some help building upon.
“We can rule out which ones they're already good at. We pick the two that they need the most help in,” Bailey said. “Then, they come into my office, and we sit down and we start to really build rapport. The care plan gives the goals that we should be working on, but I have to get to know them first. And it's a beautiful journey, it really is.”
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