Teacher mental health training grants at standstill following State Board of Education meeting

A grant program for teacher mental health training is at a standstill after falling short at the State Board of Education on Friday.

Five school districts and two Educational Service Units, which support school districts, applied for the money. A total of almost $200,000 would have been dispersed. The money would have supported schools in receiving training from Mental Health First Aid, a national organization educating people about mental health and substance use challenges.

Several of the districts cited student behavior challenges, lack of staff knowledge on how best to help and a shortage of licensed mental health professionals employed at the schools as reasons for applying.

The four registered Democrats on the board — Kristin Christensen, Maggie Douglas, Liz Renner and Deborah Neary — voted yes for awarding funds. The four registered Republicans — Lisa Schonhoff, Kirk Penner, Sherry Jones and Elizabeth Tegtmeier — voted no.

Jones represents two of the school districts and portions of an Educational Service Unit that applied for the grant money. She said there isn’t enough proof it works.

“The evidence seems to indicate that what we've been doing over the past five years or so is lacking in effectiveness,” Jones said. “This Mental Health First Aid provides more of the same.”

Penner agreed with Jones, saying there needs to be more guardrails for the training.

“We don't have anything on the books here at the State Board, NDE about mental health,” he said. “It's a wide swath, and I think we need to have some guardrails of what's allowed and what's not allowed.”

Penner did not expand on what those guardrails could look like.

Neary, who voted yes, said the training is needed. She asked those against the program several times to further explain their stance.

“You're going to be hurting a lot of students by turning down this funding,” Neary said. “What are you looking for? And please don't use any more political talking points.”

Renner, who also voted yes, said she believes the training can only be a step forward.

“We can always improve, but we're not doing harm,” she said. “In fact, we are doing good.”

Other board members shared concerns about being out of compliance with the legislature if the board rejected awarding the grants. The state legislature required the Nebraska Department of Education to create the grant program in a law passed in 2023, although it doesn’t require the department to actually spend the money.

Four months after its introduction, board members put a vote to the state literacy plan. All but Schonhoff voted yes.

Schonhoff, who had a campaign priority focused on literacy, said she sees areas in the plan that still need more work, including expanding on what high-quality instructional materials means.

“They have to be reading real books at their instruction level,” she said. “They need to be doing a lot of writing at their instructional level.”

The vote on the state literacy plan comes after scores from the Nation’s Report Card, or NAEP, released last week show Nebraska’s reading for fourth and eighth graders declined, mirroring a national trend.

Fourth grade scores went from an average of 219 in 2022 to 212 this year. Eighth grade scores declined from 259 to 256.

Meanwhile, Nebraska students fared better in math on the test than the national average. Eighth grade scores went up a point this year and were eight points higher than national scores. Fourth grade scores declined this year, and were a point higher than the national average.

NDE Commissioner Brian Maher said the department is looking for potential causes that need to be addressed to improve those scores.

“I don’t want to explain them away,” Maher said. I think that’s the worst thing we could do right now.”

Three Nebraskans spoke during public comment about the importance of reading. Two of them focused on the need for the state to focus on helping students with dyslexia.