WEST SALEM, Wis. (WKBT) -- The West Salem School District will receive a $300,000 grant to support student mental health.
The funding comes from Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction Stronger Connections Grant Program, an offshoot of the federal Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that was signed into law in 2022.
Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction was allocated $12.5 million to distribute to the state's school districts through the grant program. The Stronger Connections grants are meant to help districts establish safe, supportive learning opportunities for students.
West Salem School District administrators applied for the grant after noticing students were seeking extra mental health support from staff following the COVID-19 pandemic.Â
"Especially since COVID we've had increasing student mental health needs, including things related to characteristics of depression, anxiety, self-harm," said Heidi Horton, the district's director of pupil services.Â
Administrators pored over the data, looking at the number of student service and office discipline referrals and the school's Youth Risk Behavior Survey results.
"One of the things we found coming out of the COVID and the pandemic is that some of those mental health needs were greater than maybe we even realized on campus," said West Salem's Superintendent Ryan Rieber.
The district applied for the Stronger Connections grant program, hoping to find some extra help for their students. At the end of March, West Salem was announced as one of the 40 grant recipients.
The district will use the grant to hire a district-wide social worker, something West Salem currently doesn't have.
"The role of a school social worker tends to be absorbed by many other people and what we would like is to have it done really well by someone who is an expert in the area," Horton said.
She's hopeful the role will reach beyond just the students' needs.
"That role will allow us to not only work with individual students, providing intervention and counseling, but also to work with families and to help families access what they need."Â
The district is in the hiring process for the social worker role, which they hope to have filled for the 2024-25 school year. Rieber said the grant will fund the social worker position for two years. After that, the district will assess the position and decide whether to continue the position.
A number of other regional schools were Stronger Connections grantees. You can find the full list of grant recipients here.
​COPYRIGHT 2024 BY NEWS 8 NOW/NEWS 8000. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED.
