Illustration by Sophie Kallis
Just over five years ago, the world went into shutdown as the result of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent quarantining guidelines. Schools all over the country, including in Greater Cincinnati, abandoned in-person instruction for virtual classrooms. In the months and years following, students’ bedrooms and dining tables took the place of classrooms—where classwork was completed in place of school desks, where folders and notebooks were stored in place of lockers, where lunch was eaten in place of cafeterias. Students received instruction through laptop screens in place of in-person lectures and virtual chatrooms took the place of lively classroom discussion. There was no replacement for between-class hallway chatter nor were there alternative playgrounds for games and catching up with friends.
Upon the return to in-person instruction in 2021 and 2022, schools in the U.S. reported fundamental changes in student behavior and attitude, from rampant misconduct to social isolation, presenting a fresh set of challenges for faculty, teachers, and families.
The comeback was worrisome to Brianca Gay, a counselor for 11 years at Woodward Technical and Career High School and a district lead counselor for Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS). She noticed that students were having problems communicating their thoughts and feelings with their peers and teachers and had trouble figuring out how to regulate their emotions and resolve conflict in stressful situations.
“During that time, they missed a year of being able to be around their peers and learn this stuff, so they’re having to play catch up,” she says. “We’re already dealing with middle school and high schoolers dealing with puberty, so in addition to that, having then to also get them motivated to be in the building and to learn.”
The caseload on Gay and other CPS counselors increased significantly as she says they worked with students on how to regulate their emotions and have honest conversations—but they needed additional support to meet the demand for help. In their time of need, Gay accepted the helping hand of MindPeace, a local nonprofit organization that works to close the accessibility gap between students and mental health resources.
Woodward is just one of a network of more than 240 schools in Greater Cincinnati that utilize a partnership with MindPeace. CPS as a whole has maintained a steady relationship with the organization for about 20 years to provide for its students’ mental well-being.
The nonprofit has crafted a network of local school districts and professional mental health organizations to provide students and educators with on-site programs and resources, helping families find affordable mental healthcare for their children.
Currently, 29 Greater Cincinnati school districts are involved in MindPeace’s network. The organization acts as a liaison between the schools and agencies, assessing each institution’s student mental health needs and pinpointing the appropriate agencies to be able to provide the services needed—from placing counselors and psychologists in schools to providing professional development to educators to working directly with families to curate the best care for their children’s needs.
Through a collaboration with MindPeace and its partner organization, Best Point Education & Behavioral Health, Woodward is provided a school therapist and case coordinator for students, among other things. In the wake of the pandemic and school counselors’ strained capacity to treat students, MindPeace and Best Point reached out to families to provide additional resources to care for students’ mental well-being, ensuring that all students had the opportunity to talk to a professional or trusted adult when needed. Teachers received professional development to learn how to reduce the stigma around mental health conversations and develop strategies to advocate for their students. They even transformed the Woodward teachers’ lounge into a mental health space to avoid burnout, featuring massage chairs, exercise and yoga stations, and other amenities.
“It was very helpful, the increase of social-emotional support for our district,” says Gay. “We wouldn’t have been able to do it just by ourselves.”
MindPeace’s origins date back to 2002 as a project created in response to the need for an improved system of mental healthcare for children by the Junior League of Cincinnati (JLC)—a local nonprofit composed of women using civic leadership skills to serve the community.
“We really had no system [for mental healthcare] at the time,” says MindPeace executive director Susan Shelton, a JLC volunteer at the time who helped to found the organization. “Children’s Hospital had just made the decision to go all-in on mental health, which was very unusual for pediatric hospitals…and at the same time, the JLC made the decision to go all-in on helping solve the issue of mental health systems.”
In tandem with the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and other community partners, hundreds of volunteers at the JLC worked to establish a system that would address children’s mental health needs by creating partnerships between local schools and mental health providers. The partnership would offer the school a direct contact to communicate the resources its students and families needed. CPS was the sole district to agree to be involved in a partnership at the time, opening the door for more than 60 schools to access the resources offered by mental health provider partners.
“It took us four or five years to connect 65 schools with partners, but all of a sudden we had the beginnings of a connected infrastructure with access to care,” says Shelton. At schools such as Woodward and across the district, it proved to be effective.
By 2007, the JLC decided to develop the project into its own nonprofit, now known as MindPeace. Today, the organization partners with 24 behavioral health agencies to serve more than 160,000 students. Each agency is consulted on its ability and means to operate in a busy academic environment, from the capacity of therapists and psychologists that can serve students on a regular basis to the financial means to maintain those staff over time. When a school requests to partner with a mental health provider, MindPeace facilitates the conversation between the two organizations, ensuring that the agency chosen to partner with the school will be able to adequately meet its needs, and remaining present throughout the transition.
In addition, MindPeace provides schools with everything from suicide prevention and education to counseling and crisis support for staff, medical professionals, and families to professional development sessions, and hosts community events to spread awareness of and reduce stigma around mental illness. In recent years, MindPeace has begun installing “MindPeace Rooms” at local schools—social-emotional learning environments where students can learn to de-escalate during times of stress and self-regulate their bodies and emotions. Its website provides easy-to-access resources on all of the above for students, school and medical professionals, and families.
As a result of the organization’s work, 75 percent of students at MindPeace-partnered schools were connected to mental health treatment during the 2023–2024 school year.
According to Shelton, it’s more important than ever to acquaint students with the mental health resources they need, stating that children are experiencing feelings of isolation and loneliness, disconnection from the world, and anxiety and depression. Many children are sleep-deprived—teenagers require eight hours of sleep a night to be adequately rested, and less than 6.5 hours of sleep classifies them as being medically compromised—which can affect brain development and long-term memory.
“Kids are facing pressure from themselves. Feelings of anxiety, depression, hopelessness, which is always really concerning to me,” says Shelton. “The hopelessness is across the socio-economic, cultural divide—it could be for different reasons, but the result is the same.”
For 17 years, Jami Luggen has worked as the resource coordinator for Lower Price Hill’s Oyler School—the largest Community Learning Center (CLC) in the region. As a CLC, Oyler works not just to educate its students (preschool through 12th grade), but to revitalize the neighborhood community.
At Oyler, recreational, educational, social, health, civic, and cultural opportunities include everything from after-school programs and nutrition classes to career and college services to youth development activities and mentorin, to arts programming and recreational activities. “Oyler itself is considered a national model for Community Learning Centers because of how much we have inside our building,” says Luggen.
In her job as resource coordinator, Luggen establishes, manages, and maintains partnerships with local organizations to continue offering those opportunities. Always assessing the needs of Oyler students and the community at large, Luggen is there with families through it all, and the need for improved mental health care has persisted throughout the duration of her career.
“When I first started here, we had one mental health therapist, and we had a school where a psychiatrist was telling us that 98 percent of our kiddos were suffering from some type of PTSD from all ranges of things, and loosely attributed to poverty,” she says. “At that time, 35 percent of our student population was homeless, doubled up living on the streets or in a shelter.”
While having a therapist at the school was beneficial for the students who were able to meet with them, Oyler’s behavioral health agency didn’t have the means to provide any additional therapists, meaning that students often had to wait their turn to receive the care they needed. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, Luggen observed student need increase dramatically. The waitlist to meet with the school therapist was at least 40 names long at all times, and Oyler’s partner agency couldn’t meet the school’s capacity for mental health assistance. Luggen knew it was time for a change, and called MindPeace to explain Oyler’s situation and request a new partner that could fulfill their substantial need.
The first step MindPeace takes in partnering a school with a behavioral health agency is conducting a needs assessment. MindPeace works with the school to facilitate a survey of its stakeholders—students, teachers, and families—to understand their needs and identify the gaps in mental health support and services.
MindPeace room added to school
Photograph courtesy MindPeace Cincinnati
“A lot of times, what we’re finding from schools is that there is a lot more of a need for all-hands-on-deck support,” says MindPeace Senior Vice President Nicole Pfirman. “When 70 percent of parents say their kids need mental health counseling, they don’t have that capacity [in their] system. Our needs assessments are trying to get at whether kids are struggling with high-achieving perfectionism, adverse childhood experiences, depression and anxiety, bullying and relationship problems. We’re trying to figure out what the root causes are.”
Using data from the needs assessment, Luggen brought their findings before Oyler’s decision-making committee to determine which of MindPeace’s behavioral health partners could fulfill the “job description” requested from the community.
Ultimately, Oyler decided to partner with Best Point. MindPeace facilitated the transition, working closely with teachers and faculty and reaching out to families to reassess what services they and their children need. “I just cannot tell you how important having a MindPeace in your back pocket is. Having that as a ready-needed tool in your tool belt is so necessary,” Luggen says. “No one wants to end their partnership in a divorce. [MindPeace] can be that sounding board for both sides, to be the marriage mediator to help us work through some of the issues that might come about, [pinpointing] what the school wants and what the partner can provide.”
As a result of the new partnership, Luggen says that Oyler now offers three full-time therapists (including one who specializes in early childhood), a full-time care coordinator, monthly visits from a nurse practitioner of psychiatry from MedSalem Services for students who need medication, and a MindPeace Room. It also offers counseling for caregivers, “because mental health doesn’t just affect the student who’s been diagnosed,” but the families as well.
Luggen says that she’s noticed true gains in students’ mental health since then. “Before, kids would get signed up for services and they would be there forever, which doesn’t make sense. Now, kiddos are able to successfully complete their treatment plan and be able to move forward and be successful in the classroom.”
Cincinnati Public Schools aren’t the only ones to cite increased mental health concerns among students in recent years, particularly following the pandemic. Schools around the country cite issues with students’ self-confidence and connectedness to their peers.
In helping schools such as Woodward reemerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, MindPeace has worked to emphasize the role that adults in schools can play in the well-being of students, providing professional development opportunities, resources for teachers’ well-being such as improved lounge spaces and counseling, and additional capacity for mental health resources.
With 20 years of experience working in public education, Pfirman works closely with schools to refine their policies on discipline, homelessness, attendance, and other contributing factors to mental health. “I do a ton of professional learning with teachers on behavior regulation, de-escalation, how to respond to a crisis. It’s important to pull teachers into these conversations, how they play a role in their students’ mental health and what they are able to provide to them.”
This guidance is what attracted Forest Hills School District to pursue a partnership with MindPeace in fall 2023. Like other districts, Forest Hills was experiencing a spike in students’ experiences with executive function issues, anxiety, and self-pressure. Additionally, the school district has tragically experienced at least nine student deaths, including suicides, within the last decade alone.
“We were taking a look at what other school districts were doing, and I think all of us, regardless of school district, are seeing a change in mental health needs for our students. We wanted to look at where we are and the continuum of services we offer,” says Kim Tinsley, assistant superintendent of the Forest Hills School District.
Knowing that the transition to establishing a partnership through MindPeace would take close to a year, Tinsley jumped straight into working on the needs assessment. “It gave us a glimpse into the things that are creating stress and anxiety for students. It wasn’t necessarily social media and some of the things that we as adults think they are, but just some of the pressures around what it is just to be a teenager these days,” says Tinsley. “For our kids, there’s a lot of feeling of competition and keeping up with each other as far as academics, athletics, and knowing that we have scholarships they’re competing for.… We learned that when there’s a lot of opportunities for students to engage with the schools, sometimes their eyes are bigger than their stomachs.”
Under its new partnership with ChildFocus, Forest Hills has expanded therapy-based resources for families. Even before the partnership, the district maintained a team that develops a student wellness curriculum, and while the schools have offered school-based therapy for students, the district now has a list of other community partners to recommend and connect families with outside of school. Forest Hills faculty and staff receive training and learn trauma-informed strategies to support a variety of needs in the classroom, and the district has taken advantage of increased support and grief counseling for students experiencing loss.
As a result, Tinsley reports seeing young students improve their executive functioning skills—knowing how to keep themselves calm in stressful situations, while teachers have a new understanding of strategies to encourage positive behaviors and learned how to partner with families to reinforce the same strategies at home.
“Their communication and their follow-up has been exceptional, as far as regular check-ins to see how we’re doing, even if nothing is going on, just knowing that they’re there just to make sure that we’re doing well,” says Tinsley. “In instances where we have needed additional support, whether it’s been because a parent or a student has passed away or a staff member, they will pick up the phone and call and say, ‘What support do you need?’ ”
MindPeace room added to school
Photograph courtesy MindPeace Cincinnati
For schools and parents alike, Shelton acknowledges that it can be difficult to have conversations about children’s mental health, but emphasizes that it’s better to be proactive and begin having them sooner than later.
“[It’s important] to not be afraid to talk about feelings with kids. If they’re feeling really sad, why is that? Have they ever thought about hurting themselves? The myth is that that will put ideas in their heads, but that’s not true at all. In fact, people who are feeling really sad or isolated and feeling like they want to harm themselves, they’re often waiting for someone to ask them what’s happening so that they can ask for help,” says Shelton.
And having involved students as stakeholders in conversations regarding mental health services from the start, Shelton knows better than anyone that there’s no better place to start finding answers to solving youth mental health crises than with children themselves.
“They’re very open to seeking help. They’re very open to looking out for their friends. They’re very open about how they want services delivered. They want to learn as much as they can about mental illness, they want to talk about preventing suicide,” she says. “Youth are the solution.”
