The Anglophone East School District is putting a framework in place to ensure sustained progress in addressing mental health, mental fitness and resiliency for students and staff.
Superintendent Gregg Ingersoll says they focus mostly on academics, but they’re finding when it comes to mental health and fitness, you can actually teach children.
“There’s skills that you can actually teach, so we’re trying to be intentional and think about what are those things we can teach kids, to actually teach them the skills they need so they can have better overall mental health, and therefore be more resilient,” says Ingersoll.
He says they see the symptoms of poor mental health all over the place, for example, truancy.
“If students start missing school, now you’re not only having issues with your mental health, you’re starting to fall behind in your academics so that does affect your resiliency and your mental health,” says Ingersoll. “So it’s all compounding.”
Ingersoll says in the survey data, they are finding different districts and communities score differently so they’ve adjusted the measures to fit.
“Things aren’t the same everywhere in New Brunswick, it’s very different across the province,” says Ingersoll. “So we’ve decided looking at our data that there’s certain areas we need to focus on, and that’s why we’ve chosen the ones we have because we’ve realized those are the ones we have to start moving.”
The four areas of focus are:
1: Sense of Belonging: Students who feel accepted and valued by their peers and by others in the school.
2: Value Learning: Students who believe that education will benefit them personally and economically in the future.
3: Interested and Motivated: Students who are interested and motivated in their learning.
4: Advocacy at School: Students who feel they have someone at school who consistently provides encouragement and advice.
Ingersoll says most of this data they are collecting already exists in some form, but this is formalizing the system.
