Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Student Support Counseling topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Student support team reports growth in counseling, pre-K and mental-health partnerships
Summary
The district's director of student support reviewed program staffing, partnerships with Burrell and Rediscover, the first year of a district pre-K program funded by a Missouri Quality Pre-K grant, and data on counselors, interventionists and 504 plans.
The district's Student Support Department told the Lee's Summit R-VII Board of Education on Monday that counseling, mental-health partnerships and the district-run pre-kindergarten program have expanded and that staff continue to work on targeted interventions for students.
Director Jessie Segan presented an annual program evaluation that listed personnel, program models and enrollment or caseload figures and described several community partnerships. "My name is Jessie Segan. I'm the director of student support," Segan said while introducing the department's team and their programs.
Key figures and programs Segan cited include: 29 focus-room interventionists across the district; 1,315 Section 504 plans districtwide; 93 students enrolled in the district pre-kindergarten program in its first year; a Missouri Quality Pre-K grant of about $1,300,000 that funded free access for families; and a startup grant of $450,000 that helped launch the program. Segan also said the district partners with two school-based health agencies at no cost to the district: Burrell Comprehensive Mental Health (332 families enrolled) and Rediscover (70 families enrolled). Segan told the board that those agencies bill Medicaid and private insurers and keep grant funds for families without coverage.
Segan described staffing: one counselor assigned to each of the 11 elementary schools (with several buildings at 0.5 counselor levels), three full-time middle-school counselors, five at each high school, a counselor for the district's online program, and mental-health therapists assigned across buildings. She noted that some district job titles do not match other districts', which complicates apples-to-apples salary comparisons.
The director highlighted the CASEL-based and district social-emotional learning curricula used at different grade levels and said the department is tracking climate and culture data via DESE's recent standards. Segan said the district's Burrell partnership is fully phased in and that Rediscover was added last year; families choose whether to participate. "We just added Rediscover last year," she said.
Board members asked clarifying questions. Board Member Miller asked whether the Trauma Smart program could be implemented districtwide; Segan said Trauma Smart costs about $50,000 per building and the program depends on future Jackson County Children's Fund grant awards. Board Member Myers asked for detail on how positions were classified for the 'bottom third' salary comparisons; administrators said an outside study is underway and some titles were removed from the bottom-third list when they were found to be misclassified.
On school-counselor duties, Segan said counselors track time across four categories (curriculum, individual planning, responsive services and system support) and that roughly 7-13% of reported counselor time the district logged this year was spent on "non-school counseling task activities," a number the director said she would investigate further and report back.
Segan closed by noting local recognitions: two counselors were named regional Greater Kansas City School Counselors of the Year and staff members were honored as support professionals of the year. The board received the written report and asked staff to return with further detail on some workload and classification questions.
