SEATTLE — It’s third period at Tumwater Middle School, and the sixth graders in Ms. Cruickshank’s health class is getting a lesson in nutrition, with a side of mental health education.
“Our mental health isn’t just knowing, say, what are mental illnesses?” Renee Cruickshank said. “It’s learning about your own emotions and learning about how you feel, and it’s about learning how to regulate your own emotions.”
Cruickshank folds mental health into all her lessons. It’s not easy to find the teaching materials and design the lessons.
“There’s a lot of materials out there,” Cruickshank said. “But some of it’s just kind of hodgepodge, so I do see a need for something that the teachers can find it and say, here’s how this works.”
Now, there’s help for teachers on a mission like Cruickshank.
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Todd Crooks and his wife Laura lost their son Chad to suicide. They created Chad’s Legacy Project and are working relentlessly to amp up mental health education in schools.
Those efforts helped launch MentalHealthInstruction.org, a vetted site with free resources for teachers.
“The vision on our part is to create something where teachers are confident in knowing that when they go to a particular space to look for this curriculum, it has been looked at by experts,” Crooks said. “It has a quick reference way of determining whether or not the particular learning standards you’re looking for are even there, and choosing the right thing quickly, easily and rolling forward.”
Crooks said the experts’ review was conducted at the University of Washington School Mental Health Assessment, Research and Training Center.
Even before its official launch, teachers across the country and around the world have accessed the site, showing the hunger for mental health curriculum.
And there are plans to continue growing and expanding the site so teachers can continue expanding their lesson plans.
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“We’ll be adding three other existing categories,” Crooks said. “We’ll be adding substance use disorder. We’ll be using suicide prevention as another category. And we’ll be adding curriculum for social, emotional learning, which is kind of a piece of mental health literacy in those early stages. They really kind of co-exist on a couple different timelines. So with those four categories, it’ll become a more comprehensive mental health education resource.
“Once this brave new world of social media and mental health starts getting developed, and we start looking at curriculum for that, we’ll add a fifth category to the website.”
And teachers in Washington state could soon get another boost in providing mental health education.
Crooks is working with the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction and said there’s a budget request this year to fund a full-time employee to help districts statewide implement a more robust mental health curriculum.
“One for the state isn’t going to be enough,” Cruickshank said. “But it’s one more than we have. I’d take it.”
This story is part of a year long KOMO News initiative to raise awareness about youth behavioral health needs, and solutions.