F-M considers additional mental health initiatives

FAYETTEVILLE-MANLIUS SCHOOL DISTRICT – Fayetteville-Manlius schools are considering a variety of new initiatives focused on student mental health.
On Monday night, the board heard from a series of students and parents who felt that the mental health services the district provides are either inadequate or are not effectively publicized to the student body. Many spoke about the pressure of maintaining high grades in a very competitive academic environment.
The meeting came just weeks after the suicide death of student Jay Lu, who many of the student speakers mourned in their comments to the board.
Michael OuYang, a standout senior at F-M who will be attending Brown University in the fall, detailed for the board his own bouts with depression and suicidal thoughts. OuYang recently conducted a survey of F-M students, to which 700 responded.
According to OuYang, 62% of F-M students reported that they had had suicidal thoughts and 87% reported they had some form of anxiety, depression or severe emptiness.
“Look around this room and let it sink in that more than every other student in this room has wanted to kill themselves,” OuYang told the board. “Any percentage above zero should have an urgent call to action.”
His survey also showed that the vast majority of the students at the high school are unaware of the mental health resources available to student, including a whopping 98% who were unaware that the district offers free therapy sessions to students in need.
OuYang’s comments were echoed by several classmates.
“Very few students know where these resources are located and how to access them,” said Anna Manta. “F-M has the funding and the resources, but due to a lack of organization and commitment to serving mental health in the community, we are falling short.”
Manta said that students whose families don’t want or can’t afford to provide mental health services for their kids are particularly vulnerable.
During his report, Superintendent Dr. Craig Tice outlined several mental health initiatives the district is considering moving forward with, after consulting with Dr. Melissa Carman, a Manlius-based therapist with CNY Mental Health Counseling, PLLC.
Among those initiatives are incorporating mental health into the curriculum for every student at the high school, facilitating focus groups with students to provide feedback to the board and administration and working with other community groups to sponsor a Mental Health Awareness Day.
“Dr. Carman has offered to help train the teachers and facilitators to implement this curriculum,” Tice said.
The district is also planning to hire two additional home school liaisons for the next school year and is considering hiring a mental health coordinator to oversee mental health services throughout the district.
The district has received some parental criticism for turning down some of the mental health services that Onondaga County has offered every county district. Those criticisms were repeated by multiple parents at Monday’s board meeting.
Tice has previously articulated that the district had turned down the county funding because, in some cases, it was duplicative of the services the district already provides.
The county had also offered limited funding to establish mental health clinics in the schools, which the district also declined, citing both space and programmatic concerns. The county-funded clinics would have employed providers that would not be hired by the district and would be unable to share patient information with district counselors because of doctor/patient confidentiality. In addition, their services would have been billed to the individual students’ insurance.
“Kids aren’t aware of the services we have, and we have to do a better job of communicating those services to them,” said school board President Marissa Mims. “It’s going to have to be a variety of ways that we reach out to kids.”
At the suggestion of board member Dan Seidberg, the board decided to have a mental health update as a standing agenda item at future board meetings to alert the community and student body to the progress made on its new initiatives. That update will replace the Covid update, which has been on the agenda each meeting since the pandemic began.