CHEYENNE — Laramie County School District 1 saw the largest decline in hiring of mental health staff last year, a trend that is spreading to school districts across Wyoming.
Members of the state Legislature’s Joint Education Committee heard testimony from stakeholders about the state of mental health care in public schools during a meeting Thursday in Laramie. Matt Wilmarth, senior school finance analyst for the Legislative Services Office, told lawmakers that the current K-12 school funding model is reducing the number of mental health care professionals employed by school districts.
The school funding model is a block grant provided by the state to fund all 48 public school districts. The nature of the block grant allows school districts to use state funds as they see fit.
Wilmarth said that for the past 13 years, school districts have hired fewer mental health positions than were allocated in the K-12 funding model. In 2013-2014, the district hired 15.5 fewer mental health positions than were allocated, and by 2023-2024, that gap has widened to 83.2.
The LSO report found that some districts are moving some of their paid school nurse costs from the K-12 Funding Model fund to the special education fund for the 2023-24 school year, with the state paying the full amount back — a shift that frees up more money from the K-12 model for other expenses, like teacher salaries.
“So, are they playing games?” asked Sen. Charles Scott (R-Casper), co-chair of the Education Committee.
“Chairman, I think they’re just maximizing the use of special education reimbursements and block grant funding,” Wilmarth said. “It could be a reporting error. I don’t know.”
In LCSD1, the number of mental health positions outside of special education has “dropped dramatically,” said Wilmarth, who said he believes the district is one of the districts that has moved nurses into the special education budget.
“I don’t know if that’s right or wrong,” Wilmarth said, “but that’s the observation.”
Some school nurses split their time between helping both special education students and non-special education students. They fill out a work log to record the time they spend helping special education students and receive a portion of their pay from the state, Wilmarth said.
Lawmakers immediately raised concerns about school nurses’ hours being split between students with special needs and those without.
“What we’re seeing here is a tendency for everything to get out of whack very quickly,” said Rep. Landon Brown, a Republican from Cheyenne.
Brown said this is apparently the result of the Legislature’s failure to fully adopt a five-yearly recalibration of the school funding model in 2020. The last recalibration adopted by the Legislature was in 2010.
“There are a lot of people involved in K-12 mental health, but they’re not putting the money into the model,” Brown said. “We’ve moved away from the priorities of what the 2005 realignment would have looked like, and districts are being forced to make adjustments as they see fit.”
The failure to adopt an updated school funding model is also the subject of an ongoing lawsuit in state district court here in Cheyenne, brought against the state by the Wyoming Education Association.
Mental health improves learning
Park County School District 1 Superintendent Jay Curtis said there is a strong connection between improved access to mental health services and students’ academic success: His district has seen a significant increase in high school graduation rates since implementing Project AWARE (Advancing Health and Resilience in Education).
The AWARE project is funded by a grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). According to the Wyoming Department of Education, the grant supplements existing mental health services in the community and removes barriers to mental health services. These barriers include transportation to appointments, stigma surrounding mental health and the cost of treatment.
Powell High School has seen its highest ever five-year average graduation rate since implementing Project AWARE services, Curtis said, and students report in surveys that the program has given them a better understanding of how to treat and find help for mental health issues.
“We can’t expect students to learn if they’re struggling with depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts,” Curtis said. “These are real issues that kids are facing at unprecedented levels.”
He added that more and more businesses are realizing that mental health treatment is a community issue, not a school issue. Partnerships formed within communities are helping to improve access to mental health services, he said.
WDE was awarded a SAMHSA grant in August 2020 and allocated grant funds to three school districts in Wyoming, including PCSD1, and the program has since expanded to 13 districts with two additional grants and American Rescue Plan funding.
Dustin Brown of Project AWARE said students who faced life challenges or social situations were in the 30th, 40th or 50th percentile when they entered the program, but after four to four-and-a-half months in the program, those same students’ performance jumped to the 80th or 90th percentile.
“We know that Wyoming’s AWARE project is successful,” Brown said.
Today’s students are different
Both teachers and students are facing increased burnout in the classroom, said Sen. Chris Rothfuss, D-Laramie. The rise in mental health issues is making it harder for students to participate in class and harder for teachers to lead the classroom, he added. The new reality is that both teachers and students “are not enjoying being in school.”
“They feel like it’s a waste of time,” Rothfuss said. “Their morale is low, their behavior is negative. That’s what we’re hearing.”
He added that as states adopt bills that increase pressure on academic performance, there has been a surge in teachers leaving the profession due to burnout.
“That leads to stress, but it also leads to grades,” Rothfuss said, “so test scores went up, but students and teachers got angrier.”
Lawmakers asked officials what the underlying causes of the rise in mental health issues among students are.
“What is the root cause of all of this?,” asked Republican Sen. Sheri Steinmetz of Lingle, “I mean, we’re seeing this at epidemic levels in our schools and in our community.”
Curtis believes there is a direct correlation between advances in technology and the rise of social media, and if he could go back in time he wouldn’t give his children mobile phones “until they were ready to go out into the world.”
“If I had a magic wand, I would wipe it off the face of the earth,” Curtis said. “I’ve read that technology use is creating different neural pathways that didn’t exist for my generation. It’s changing the way our brains work. It’s changing our attention spans.”
Unfortunately, he added, states and school districts have little recourse to restrict cellphone use in the classroom because it could violate federal law.
