Like many educators, the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on my mental health. By February of 2021, I had a decision to make: remain in education or leave. I was dismayed with the state of public education and seriously considered leaving it all behind. But it wasn’t just educators. Students were suffering too. And I love my students. I knew that I could still be effective, if only I could get to the heart of the challenges we were facing and change what I could. As a result, I actively began seeking ways to build library programming and resources that would change what I could see was a glaring problem: student mental health needs were not being met.
Our school district was attempting to bridge this gap by hiring social workers for each of our school buildings, a dean of students for each of our elementary schools, implementing a curriculum taught by our counselors in our elementary schools, and contracting outside services to be available in our middle and high schools. But even then, many of our students’ needs were not being met. This is where the library brings it all together.
Every student in our district has access to their school library at least once a week. Therefore, the school library is the perfect “hub” for innovation and programming that mirrors services provided throughout the building. For this project, I curated a list of relevant titles featuring mental health issues that our K-12 students seem to struggle with (per my observation and those of our counseling and social work staff), and from there, we created opportunities for read-alouds to complement our counseling curriculum in our elementary schools, small group book clubs to complement our counseling small groups in both middle and high school, and titles in regular use during our high school one-on-one counseling sessions and registration groups. This project was funded by a 2023 RAILS My Library Is... Grant for School Libraries.
Once these titles were purchased, I created QR codes for each book that linked to additional mental health resources based on the topics related to the book. This included parent resources for our K-5 books, and teen-friendly resources for our students in grades 6-12. Each QR code used our school colors and was labeled “mental health resources,” providing an additional resource for students and families to use for free.
The unintended impact was realizing how many staff wanted information about how to help students. Our district had made an effort to hire more professionals to assist in this area, but all of our staff were seeking ways to provide support, so in addition to supplying materials for students, I also created a district-wide book club for staff to participate in to explore why students were struggling post-pandemic. This turned out to be the one factor I had not considered when working through this project, initially. It turned out to be so successful, that I have since purchased an additional set of books to use for a district-wide staff book club, continuing our quest to provide more support for student mental health needs.
Today's blog post was written by Heather Johnson, Sterling Public Schools District Librarian
