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Ocean City School District presents action plan on mental health awareness

The Ocean City Gazette - 8/30/2016

OCEAN CITY - "We are a survivor school."

Matt Carey repeated those words several times when presenting Ocean City School District's new action plan on mental health awareness to the school district's Board of Education Wednesday night, Aug. 24.

Carey, the district's director of student services, said Wednesday that the plan involves establishing new programs and resources that will offer help and support for students who are having thoughts of suicide, particularly in the resort's high school.

"The numbers for teens and college-age suicide are staggering," Carey said. "Suicide is completely preventable, but if you don't know, you can't stop it."

Thoughts became action for two Ocean City High School students who committed suicide in the last two years. High school senior Maliha Chowdhury committed suicide in December of 2014, and sophomore John Delgrande took his own life in October 2015. Both deeply shocked the school and the community, and triggered calls for the district to do more about bullying and mental health awareness.

"We are still in survival mode," Carey said. "We're talking about two students that we've lost in two years to suicide. This is such a serious topic."

Following the October suicide, the district established an ad hoc committee of board members, administrators, teachers, district parents, community members, and officials from the city's administration and fire and police departments to develop a comprehensive mental health curriculum to educate students and create a district-wide support system for students.

With goals of establishing communication, collaboration and consistency in addressing student mental health awareness in the district, the committee met four times from December to February in order to formulate the new curriculum. Representatives from the New Jersey School Boards Association helped the committee come up with the plan, which Carey said will be a model for other New Jersey school districts moving forward.

"We wanted to present it today so that parents and students know we have an action plan," Superintendent Kathleen Taylor said at the meeting.

Under a section headed communication, the action plan states that the district will create, maintain, update and publish a database of local and community-based resources and contact information for students who need help.

Carey said the district plans to add a section on the district's home webpage that will include links to resources and information about the program and the school's mental health initiatives. The school's website includes information on bullying, suicide prevention and other similar topics under its student conduct/pupil services page, which can be accessed through the staff resources tab on the district's homepage.

The plan includes implementing a set of programs that will provide a coordinated roadmap for parents, students and the school community, according to the plan.

The plans also call for implementing "The Lifelines Trilogy," a program established by the Society for Teen Suicide Prevention. According to the organization's website, the program implements procedures to identify at-risk students and get them help.

Other actions include developing an outreach system for parents and guardians, as well as developing a district-wide schedule of health and wellness activities for the school and community members.

The district already runs several such activities, but many are held by different clubs or organizations within the school and are not listed on one master schedule available for parents, students and the community, Carey said.

"What we're now doing ? is developing a schedule of all of the events so parents would always know what's going on with health and wellness activities," he said.

The district will continue to hold informational workshops on mental health with school, local, county and state agencies, something the district has done for the last several years.

"We will have a schedule of those once all the staff comes back in September," Carey told the board. "We anticipate holding three of those workshops, if not more."

The plan also lists establishing and utilizing a common language concerning mental health awareness in order to tackle the "uncertainty and stigma often associated with its complex issues."

"Stigma" often came up in ad hoc meetings, Carey said.

"The word 'crazy' came up a lot, how it's thrown around so readily in our language," he said. "We're talking about real health issues."

Carey said the district will train its student services employees on the Lifelines program. The first session will be held Friday, Sept. 2, and training will be held throughout the year, he said.

After Chowdhury's death, several members of the community, including her mother, called for the district to do more about bullying and promoting mental health awareness. Chowdhury's mother has said her daughter suffered from depression and bullying throughout her time in the district.

The district does have in place a bullying policy that states harassment, intimidation and bullying of any kind is prohibited, and that potential consequences include temporary removal from the classroom, detention, suspension and expulsion.

It also adheres to the state's Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights Act signed into law by Gov. Chris Christie in 2010, as well as the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program.

Andrew Parent can be reached at aparent@catamaranmedia.com or 609-365-6173.