A newly launched virtual platform is aimed at helping teachers provide better mental health support to students.
The Illinois State Board of Education and the Center for Childhood Resilience at Lurie Children’s Hospital announced Thursday the launch of Resilience-Supportive Schools Illinois — a free online program that gives schools tools to support mental health and resilience of students and educators.
The initiative was created after health experts and educators noticed a need for mental health support in children, said Dr. Colleen Cicchetti, pediatric psychologist and executive director at the Center for Childhood Resilience at Lurie Children’s Hospital.
“Only about 25% of kids who need mental health services are getting those services, so we’re trying to figure out a better mechanism to increase access to mental health services in our country,” Cicchetti said.
For many children, the only mental health professional they’ll ever see is at school, Cicchetti said. The program will help educators recognize students facing mental health challenges and give them basic tools to support those students or connect them with additional services.
“Resilience is sort of the capacity to bounce back from challenges, and so what we really stress when we talk about resilience is that resilience is like a muscle. It is not something that you either have or don’t have, but rather it’s a skill that you can develop,” Cicchetti said. “So when we talk about resilience in [schools], what we’re talking about is schools that are aligning resources to help students develop these skills so that they can be able to function, and focus, and cope with challenges that come their way.”
The platform grew out of a program launched during the COVID-19 pandemic, when ISBE and mental health professionals saw that educators were struggling to support their students.
Cicchetti said data from the Resilience Education to Advance Community Healing Initiative received a lot of positive feedback. Over three years, the data showed it reduced chronic absenteeism, improved teacher retention, decreased suspensions and improved trauma-responsiveness in participating schools.
The program will require principals to complete a 15-minute survey and then give them access to a dashboard showing their school’s performance in four areas: social-emotional learning, trauma-informed practices, mental health services and cultural awareness.
“That survey gives us some information about how the school is doing meeting kids’ mental health support, providing social-emotional learning and supporting the educators in their building to do this work,” said Cicchetti.
Survey results will be combined with data from ISBE to develop an action plan tailored to each educator’s goals. The platform will also include free online resources to help them to meet those goals, said Cicchetti.
The survey is available in ISBE’s Web Application Security system.
A pilot phase of RSSI already took place in more than 300 school across Illinois during this past school year to test and refine the program before its statewide rollout.
“This is exciting for us because this enhanced program that we just released today has all of the refinements that were suggested to us by the educators who were part of our pilot,” said Cicchetti. “But we’re really excited about what we’ve seen in terms of educators’ interest in making these kinds of investments in their professional development and in their resources to help students.”
Cicchetti said REACH and RSSI were created with federal funding that ISBE received to help with the impact of the pandemic.
“I feel really proud that we use these resources in Illinois,” she said. “That the State Board of Ed directed them to create a tool that not only was available during the pandemic and right after the pandemic, but will really feed a need for the state going forward as we help educators to really support students.”