PRINCE ALBERT — The Prince Albert Catholic School Division has been pleased with the results of the Mental Health Capacity Building (MHCB) pilot project at St. John Community School and will now see it extend to another school in the division.
The division’s board of education voted in favour of extending the program into St. Francis School at their regular meeting on Monday.
"We've had a busy summer getting some of this information. Sometimes it takes a few months. There will be some discussions around the matter, but sometimes it just takes time to get the final information,” Director of Education Lorel Trumier said.
"It was very timely, some of this information that we received over the summer. We had a sense that we were going to get the mental health capacity building. The service agreement is coming. We just don't have it yet.”
The division still needs to sign a new service agreement before the program expansion is finalized.
Trumier said Monday’s vote was to get the board’s support for continuing, so there would be no delays.
The Saskatchewan Health Authority, Ministry of Education and Catholic division signed the previous agreement. The program is now just a partnership between the Ministry of Education and the division.
The pilot program started at St. John Community School in September 2022. The initiative operates 12 months a year and focuses on community outreach in the summer.
Trumier said the program has been booked full almost since the beginning.
Kara Quirion will be transitioning from the wellness promoter role to the wellness co-ordinator. Previous co-ordinator Regan Jacobson worked with both the Saskatchewan Rivers School Division and Catholic Division. Quirion will be transitioning to a full-time role with Allison Cote becoming the new wellness promoter.
“We had already signed a service agreement for three years at St. John's School to run the program there and now it will be the expansion to St Francis, so we are thrilled about that,” Trumier said.
“We've got some great people. Kara Quirion, who will be our co-ordinator, will oversee our new employee. That's a promoter who will work with the principal and the school teams there at each of those schools to build that capacity.”
The co-ordinator and wellness promoter are responsible for delivering mental health promotion and prevention programming, building capacity in other staff and supporting students by connecting them to community resources. Trumier said the program is wonderful and has already done some excellent work at St. John.
“The teachers and the staff have really bought into some of the strategies on self-regulation and monitoring, how they're feeling and teaching children strategies of managing their feelings and their emotion, so it's great,” Trumier said. “It's very exciting and looking forward to having that expand in another school.”
The student regulation strategy at the school includes five steps: Mindful Moments, classroom check-ins, a reset station, direction to school supports and outside supports for students by administration.
The students are taught to understand their emotions in colour-coded zones. The green zone means everything is well, the blue zone means to begin monitoring, the yellow zone means that there may be a problem and the red zone is the emergency zone.
The reset station is in each classroom and is a regulation bin with tools to help students regulate and reset. If that does not work, they are encouraged to talk to a teacher.
Each classroom is also provided with toolkits. These include emergency numbers, mental health literacy and language, named emotions and strategies. The toolkits have colour-coded pages to match each of the zones and include guidance for each colour.
The goal for the new school year is to successfully launch the program at St. Francis and continue the work at St. John.
