On this monthly radio program, The Children’s Foundation President and CEO Larry Burns talks to community, government and business leaders about issues related to children’s health and wellness.
Guests for this discussion were Dr. Robert Shaner, Superintendent, Rochester Community School District; Shenadoah Chefalo, Mental Health Advocate, Author of Garbage Bag Suitcase and faculty member, Center for Trauma Resilient Communities; and Dr. Elizabeth Koschmann, Program Director, TRAILS Program, The University of Michigan.
The hour-long show typically airs at 7 p.m. the fourth Tuesday of each month on WJR 760AM. Here’s a summary of the show that aired May 26, 2020; listen to the entire episode, and archived episodes, at yourchildrensfoundation.org/caring-for-kids.
Larry Burns: Are you seeing more mental health and behavioral health issues with students?
Dr. Robert Shaner: We certainly are and some of them are severe. We’ve not been immune to tragedy. We have lost middle school and high school students to suicide as well as addiction. Depression, anxiety, addiction and suicidal ideation are all on the rise. It is a crisis.
Burns: What have you seen as leading us to this crisis?
Shaner: I think the true cause remains to be seen. Some say it’s social media or what’s going on in movies and entertainment in general. There are likely factors in many areas that contribute.
Burns: Are districts trying to educate teachers on how to handle behavioral issues in the classroom?
Shaner: We have a team of behaviorists who work together with our teachers to help them with behavior management. We’re also working with our PTA on things like mindfulness and teaching kids how to handle their stress and anxiety before it becomes unmanageable. We’re working on removing the stigma to make sure that kids know they can ask for help when they need it.
Burns: Are you seeing kids more willing to talk about what’s going on in their lives?
Shaner: I do see more openness around that. I still think there’s a stigma attached to mental health issues, particularly with addiction, and that’s something we’re working on. When I think about the future, I don’t despair. When I visit schools, I have a tremendous amount of hope. I see a lot of love and cooperation. The challenge I see is that we adults have to figure out how to channel that and get them in the right place if they do need intervention. That’s something that we’re working diligently to make sure that we can accomplish.
Burns: If a parent thinks their child is having issues, what’s your advice?
Shaner: The most important thing when a child appears to be struggling is that we don’t panic, that we assure them that things are going to be okay and then get them some assistance. The challenge is people asking for help or identifying that there is a problem. If we see the need for an intervention, let’s go ahead and do it and not act like it’s an uncommon event. Let’s act like it’s just what it is—something we do on a daily basis to make sure that the well-being of our kids is taken care of.
If we really believe that mental illness and addiction are diseases and not conditions of poor judgment, we need to put our money where our mouth is and act like that—don’t cast a stigma and reach out a helping hand. Handling it needs to be more routine, just like it would be if a child had a literacy issue—we would offer intervention. The community needs to address it like that.
Larry Burns: Tell us about your early childhood and how it shaped your future.
Shenadoah Chefalo: I was born in California. We were homeless often and moved over 50 times. Plagued by family members who suffered from severe addictions and mental health issues, I self-reported myself to foster care before I turned 13. I was lucky enough to have a teacher who took interest in me in high school, because I aged out of foster care halfway through my senior year. With the help of that teacher I ended up getting into Michigan State. That became a difficult transition for me.
My first year at MSU I was dealing with quite a few things and I attempted suicide for the first time. I was depressed, and playing into that was financial need. I was hired as a part-time receptionist in a law office and eventually worked my way up to office administrator. I hired a law clerk who eventually became my husband and we moved to Traverse City in 1999 to start a law office, with this idea of doing criminal law differently.
In that work, I started to realize that our clients’ issues weren’t merely the crime that brought them to us. A lot of our clients had tumultuous childhoods and spent time in foster care. I started researching foster care statistics, trying to understand what was going on with our clients, and was floored by the statistic that approximately 70 percent of incarcerated inmates spent time in the child welfare system. At that time I hadn’t disclosed my time in the foster care system but I made it my mission to let out this secret. I wrote Garbage Bag Suitcase with the hope that we could reinvent child welfare and heal trauma in order to help people make better decisions.
Burns: Tell us about your book.
Chefalo: Most of us have a story to tell, and that story affects the way in which we see the entire world, especially for people who have lived through severe trauma. For me, the purpose of sharing my story, after keeping it secret so long, was to get people past the story to where we can talk about solutions in our community.
Burns: You’re a faculty member at the Center for Trauma Resilient Communities. Tell us about the center and the “resiliency factor.”
Chefalo: The Center started because people involved in trauma-informed implementation theory were interested in how that reaches beyond the walls of foster care and into communities. Why is it that some people, like myself, go against all odds and seem to have great resiliency, while other people don’t? There are some pretty core things we can do to help people; retrain their brains so that they can bounce back better. A lot of those things are based in connections in communities. The Center is focused on training and helping communities develop models that work in their specific group.
Larry Burns: Tell us about TRAILS.
Dr. Elizabeth Koschmann: TRAILS stands for Transforming Research into Action to Improve the Lives of Students. It was developed after we had started our partnership with high schools in Washtenaw County. Those high schools had come to the Depression Center at U of M to request our help after they had experienced a particularly difficult year. The school staff felt they were not able to respond adequately, both due to the complexity of the students’ needs and the volume of kids.
Burns: What do you do as the program director?
Koschmann: My role is to help guide the vision and direction of the TRAILS program. I make sure the work we’re doing is grounded in empirically-based treatments and supports kids impacted by mental illness.
Burns: Can you tell us about cognitive behavioral therapy and why it’s so effective for treating mental illness?
Koschmann: We’re aware that school administrators, principals and superintendents don’t want to be in the business of providing therapy to kids. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), even though it has the word therapy in it, is really a set of skills. When we look at what causes kids difficulty, it’s not the way they think, and it’s not the way they feel—it’s their behavior. Kids get in trouble when they’re impulsive, reactionary, shut down, when their mood causes them to stay in bed, or when they’re not able to interact with their peers in a way that’s developmentally appropriate. CBT is a set of skills that has kids slow down and examine their cognition, feelings and behaviors, and the relationship between those three components. CBT is really just a set of effective strategies for dealing with everyday stressors and challenges.
Burns: Why is TRAILS a school-based program?
Koschmann: Every day we have kids who are bringing emotional well-being challenges to school professionals. TRAILS is designed to improve care by training the people who kids access already; that’s why we picked the school setting.
Burns: Tell us about The Children’s Foundation’s partnership and other partners’ support for the mission of TRAILS.
Koschmann: We were fortunate to partner with the Ethel & James Flinn Foundation, where we work to embed the TRAILS program to provide suicide risk identification and reduction programming in our middle and high schools. The Children’s Foundation helped us connect with the Detroit Public Schools Community District and we are in our first year of a partnership to assist with a behavioral healthcare program. TRAILS wants to design a full array of services that would help students arrive at school emotionally and behaviorally ready to benefit from their academic program.
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