A grant valued at more than $2 million over its five-year lifespan is coming to Park County School District No. 1.

The grant, said Superintendent Jay Curtis, will help provide mental health services to students in the district and was written in collaboration with the Wyoming Department of Education. 

“We tried for similar grants three years ago,” Curtis said. “But this partnership with the department helped secure it.”

The program will create a liaison between the district and community mental health organizations, including Powell Valley Healthcare and Yellowstone Behavioral Health, funding a new coordinator position. The coordinator will administer the grant, which pays for mental health providers and medical coding.

Curtis said if the grant is rescinded or in some other way disappears, the coordinator position will also be eliminated.

Similar grants were awarded to Campbell County schools and Fremont County School District No. 1. Curtis said Park 1 will share medical coding services with Campbell County because that district already has someone who handles coding for an in-house medical clinic.

The grant will also fund another licensed counselor in the Powell schools. That will probably come in a contract agreement with Heritage Health, Curtis said, because of record keeping requirements to comply with HIPPA (medical record privacy) matters.

The need for mental health services is increasing and Wyoming’s rural landscape is recognized as one of the states where those services are most difficult to find. A 2018 Wyoming Prevention Needs Assessment survey taken in Park County schools asked how often in the past 30 days that students had felt so depressed that nothing could cheer them up. Of the responding students, 3.69% said all the time, 9.85% said most of the time and 16% said they felt that way sometimes. The lion’s share of responses indicated they felt that way a little of the time (31%) or none of the time (39%).

According to the Association for Children’s Mental Health, up to 80% of children with mental health issues do not get the care they need. Providing that help is paramount because even though mental health problems often develop during childhood or adolescence, they are treatable and early detection and intervention work — teaching the child and family abilities to cope with issues and achieve success in school and community.

Students who have emotional, mental or behavioral health problems, the association indicates, have some of the worst school completion rates, as low as 40% nationally and with up to a 50% drop out rate among high school students.

The grant, intended to help stem the tide of untreated problems, will be issued at $412,500 per year for the next five years.