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Stressed kids need listening ear from schools, families

ALPENA -- Her kids are doing OK, an Alpena mom thinks.

But, with COVID-19 yanking students out of classrooms, a downstate school shooting and local threats raising security concerns, and adult tension trickling down to the children who are watching them, young people in Northeast Michigan might need extra help being OK these days, she said.

Schools try to offer kids that help, with staff and support workers on all levels serving as listening ears while working hectic schedules, school officials say.

State-offered money could help schools hire more mental health experts to protect children's emotional health - if only those experts can be found.

Those efforts, combined with parental support, are crucial for the well-being of today's children and tomorrow's communities, said Sarah Griffore, a social worker in Alpena-area schools.

"When your basic needs are not met, it's really difficult to focus on a math test," Griffore said. "Social-emotional needs have to be something we focus on, too, if we want well-adjusted kids that grow into well-adjusted adults."

'CODE FIVE'

It's not easy being a kid these days, said parent Meredith Duthler, whose four children span three Alpena schools.

She and her husband "don't get real riled up about things," she said, and their kids have inherited that take-it-in-stride calmness.

They're doing OK, they've told her.

Still, children end up on the receiving end of adult stress, she said - like during a recent Alpena incident when a new Ella White bus driver lost her way, delaying the bus and making some parents frantic with worry.

Duthler read social media comments about students arriving home with faces blotchy from crying, upset after watching frightened parents pound on a bus door, trying to get to their children.

Parental concerns over face masks, curricula, and other school issues have erupted into anger at school board meetings and a parent-group lawsuit against Alpena Public Schools.

Adult anxiety over children's safety increased after a school shooting in November in Oxford left four dead and seven wounded.

Threats, some referencing guns, at local schools in the intervening months have led to police investigations resulting in at least one criminal charge, against a Thunder Bay Junior High School student, and a tightening of security rules in Hillman.

Still, the schools are safe, Duthler believes. Staff know what to do if something bad happens.

Her fifth-grade daughter knows that, if someone threatened danger, her teacher would "do a code five," and police would come, Duthler said.

However necessary to ensure student safety, lockdown drills and "code fives" can take a toll on children's emotional health, she agreed.

OVERWHELMED

Children tell Mary Schalk "they just feel overwhelmed," said the project director for Partners in Prevention, a Northeast Michigan nonprofit providing emotional health-related programs.

"Kids are watching and listening all the time," observing and absorbing the stresses in the adults around them triggered by recent health crises and political upheaval, Schalk said.

Children learn how to respond to stress as they watch their parents and other adults take sides instead of making peace, speak out rudely on social media and behave badly in public, complain about rules, and bend under an onslaught of unknowns, she said.

Families can make a dent in the damage done by today's stresses simply by talking to their kids, Schalk said.

To help adults help kids be OK, Partners in Prevention will soon begin a six-week workshop for caregivers of children who have experienced trauma, which includes the traumatic experience of small stresses that add up, Schalk said.

The workshop, available at Alpena and Presque Isle County locations, will teach skills adults can use every day to help the children around them.

Parents can point out unkindness and suggest a better way to behave. They can be purposeful in looking for and avoiding negativity - something that might have come more naturally a few years ago, Schalk said.

EMOTIONAL SUPPORTS

Children struggling to be OK also need support from someone neutral, Schalk thinks.

For many children, that non-family adult support comes within school walls.

Guidance counselors, school success workers, school nurses, administrators, teachers, and other school personnel provide far more than academic lessons for students, said Griffore, school social worker with the Alpena-Montmorency-Alcona Educational Service District.

School workers of all kinds increasingly need to step into a mental health worker role not included in their job description, sometimes under fire from parents who forget they and school staff all want the same thing - for the kids in their care to be OK, Griffore said.

Griffore works with students with greater social and emotional needs than most of the student population. For her charges, the additional stressors of school threats and adult anxiety place them even more in need of help handling their emotions.

Then again, she said, even well-adjusted adults may struggle to keep an even keel lately.

HELP HARD TO FIND

State funding allowed the Cheboygan-Otsego-Presque Isle Educational Service District to secure a full- or part-time mental health worker for every school in the district within the past few years, said district superintendent Jamie Huber.

Another funding stream opened by the state in August promised to help pay the salaries of newly hired psychologists, social workers, counselors, or nurses for schools.

Districts have until March 1 to make such hires to secure state funding.

The trouble, Huber said, comes in finding someone willing to do the job.

Across the country, schools struggle to find people credentialed to provide mental health care, and Northeast Michigan is no exception.

Alpena Public Schools may be able to add full-time behavioral health counselors at Thunder Bay Junior High School, Alpena High School, and ACES Academy, housed at the AHS building, if Alcona Health Center receives a grant for which it applied in conjunction with APS, said Lee Fitzpatrick, director of communications for APS.

If that funding comes through, the schools can't guarantee they will find qualified workers - and, if they hire someone local, that may simply leave a different hole in the mental health care system that's needed now more than ever, Fitzpatrick said.

"The stresses and difficulties and constant changes that we've gone through for the last several years, those affect kids," he said. "It was hard enough before those things happened."

'A LITTLE CLOSER'

Meanwhile, Duthler, as she stays calm to help her kids feel secure, reminds her oldest, a hunter, to not talk about his gun at school.

She tells her children to respect the adult in charge, because they might someday have to follow orders that will save their lives.

She prays over her kids on their drive to school, asking for protection from any harm that could come their way, inside worrying that talking about danger will make them more afraid.

She asks them if they're doing OK.

"When something happens," she said, "everyone holds them a little closer, prays a little more."

Julie Riddle can be reached at 989-358-5693, jriddle@thealpenanews.com or on Twitter @jriddleX.