Calvert County advisory committee flags gaps in staffing, training, bullying, vaping and student supports

The Calvert County Student Safety and Well-Being Advisory Committee met in August for a working session and identified several gaps it says are hampering school safety and student well-being, including mental-health staffing shortages, uneven training, inconsistent application of the student code of conduct, a reported rise in vaping and limited, hard-to-navigate family resources.

The committee — which was preparing to brief the county commissioners “on the 20th,” a date members referenced during the meeting — spent the session reviewing subcommittee findings and asking staff for follow-up data and implementation details. The meeting emphasized short-term “quick wins” and longer-term policy recommendations meant to improve consistency across schools.

Committee members said the most urgent, recurring concerns center on three areas: staffing and training for staff who respond to student crises; inconsistent handling of conduct, bullying and vaping incidents across schools; and lack of an accessible, centralized resource and navigator capacity to connect families to services.

“Out of 15 psychologist positions, 9 of them are vacant,” Dr. Newsom, the interim superintendent, told the committee, identifying staffing shortages in student mental-health roles as a constraint on the system’s ability to respond to student needs. He urged the group to consider staffing, social media’s role in student behavior and how to target supports for families with chronic needs.

Subcommittee reports and committee discussion

Support-for-staff members and educators pushed for wider access to de‑escalation and crisis-intervention training. Kadesha, a committee member and school educator, described Life Space Crisis Intervention (LSCI) training as “vital” and said, “After taking that training, I feel like I had a better grasp on finding out the root cause,” but that only a small number of trainers can teach the course countywide.

The safe-and-supportive-environments subgroup reported bullying and vaping as top concerns. The committee heard that a county staff presentation earlier in the year showed a roughly “20% increase in vaping” midyear; that figure was raised from the system’s midyear report and members asked staff for updated data covering the second half of the prior school year.

Members said bullying incidents are currently handled by a mix of student-submitted bullying forms and administrator judgment calls, and that the process is inconsistently applied across buildings. A subcommittee member noted an “Alveus” program listed on the county site that may not be used uniformly and asked whether all schools are employing the same investigative steps and documentation practices.

Family and community engagement and the proposed resource hub

Several members pressed for a single, searchable inventory of county and community supports — a centralized hub the school system would host — so teachers, counselors and parents could quickly find mental-health providers, navigators, mentoring programs, food resources and other services. Linda and others said existing resources are often unknown or difficult to access, and recommended building a countywide index that staff or a navigator could use to generate tailored resource lists for families.

Committee members described navigator roles as “hand-holding” that follow families through appointments and eligibility steps; members said navigators with lived experience can be effective at building trust. The committee requested utilization data for recently launched navigator and grant-funded family-support efforts to assess reach and sustainability.

Attendance and discipline

Committee members asked for updates on a tiered absenteeism protocol rolled out across the district in recent years, described in the meeting as part of a five-year implementation plan. Members requested school-level information about whether the tiered steps are being followed, and whether the approach has affected chronic absenteeism in schools with higher percentages of economically disadvantaged students.

On discipline, multiple members — including school-based educators — said the student code of conduct exists but is not uniformly applied. Members argued the code needs to be accessible and include graduated supports between initial interventions and exclusionary discipline, so students receive educational or restorative services rather than only suspensions.

Food access and other community concerns

Several speakers raised food insecurity as a driver of behavior and poor engagement. One committee member said a local hunger program served roughly 640 households in a recent period and described examples where providing food immediately improved a student’s receptivity to support. Members discussed summer meal access, weekend backpack programs and partnerships with pantries or grocery-donation programs as possible avenues to reduce hunger-related school disruptions.

Next steps and requests to staff

Members voted by voice to approve the meeting agenda at the start of the session and later adjourned by voice; no roll-call tallies were recorded in the transcript. Committee chair Pastor Jones and staff asked members to send three outstanding data questions before the end of the week so ex‑officio staff could route them to the appropriate contacts. The committee planned to convene a student focus group (members said middle and high school students would be priorities) and to gather the requested data for a September meeting and the planned county-commissioners update.

The committee left the session with a list of follow-ups for staff: updated vaping figures, school-level staffing and training rosters (including who has received LSCI and restorative-practices training), school-level attendance and tiered-implementation reports, utilization metrics for navigator and family-support grants, and a plan for building a centralized resource inventory and potential navigator model.