Bibb Schools bolster mental health services

The Bibb County School District plans to offer telehealth and bilingual counseling services to students using a recent grant from the U.S. Department of Education. 

The five-year grant project, which launched in January and runs through 2029, will help bolster the district’s existing mental health resources, according to mental health services director Tajalyn Woodruff, who has worked with the district since 2018. 

The district’s previous initiative, Project AWARE (Advancing Wellness and Resilience in Education), included mental health training for several thousand school counselors and faculty and established a  counselor referral program and partnership with roughly a dozen community mental health providers. 

The new grant will help students who don’t have transportation or insurance coverage receive mental health assistance. 

“This is taking it to another level,” Woodruff said of the district’s newest federal grant program, which will expand on existing services developed under Project AWARE.

Offering telehealth opens opportunities for counseling to students who lack transportation to in-person meetings, Woodruff said. It also allows the district to access bilingual mental health providers who are able to offer counseling to students’ who speak English as a second language. 

The new grant comes as a previous five-year grant from 2020 sunsets in September. 

The core of the program still works the same way: school counselors submit referrals to the district, which then sets up an initial consultation with the student. Students are referred to agencies such as River Edge or the Pace Center for Girls.

Earlier this year, the district launched a telehealth pilot program for about 25 students. Woodruff said she hopes telehealth will provide continuity for students in need of long term counseling services. 

The district plans to hire more counselors for the upcoming school year. Under Project AWARE, district counselors provide temporary support to students before the students are matched with a provider.

The district also plans to use the new grant money to create a centralized data management system to track the status of students’ progress.

“You don’t have many school districts across the state who are actually doing school-based mental health,” Woodruff said. “They have partners that do those things for them.”

The grant will also be used to gain more training materials for school counselors and “build capacity across the school district,” she said. 

Positive change can begin with one student, Woodruff said, and impact an entire family. 

“I think Bibb students are just like students anywhere, in that they want to be loved and supported and be in a place where they can feel good,” she said.