Grant will help United Way, College of St. Elizabeth help public school students with mental health, post-Sandy

United Way of Northern New Jersey on Monday announced an $800,000, three-year grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to address the ongoing mental health needs of public school students in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which inflicted devastating social and physical damage when it hit New Jersey on Oct. 29, 2012.This grant makes possible the expansion of the School Culture and Climate Initiative, a collaboration between United Way and the College of Saint Elizabeth now in its third year. It will help the initiative reach public schools in more than a dozen additional northern New Jersey communities repeatedly hit hard by natural disasters. The initiative will tackle the Sandy post-traumatic stress still being experienced by students, and build resilience for future events.

United Way and College of Saint Elizabeth are offering schools a three-year process for assessing and improving school climates and cultures that will serve as this project’s foundation. The program already reaches 25,000 students in 12 Morris County public school districts that embraced it in response to the state’s anti-bullying mandates calling for schools to focus on their culture.

The grant will enable the program to be implemented in 17 more schools, including schools in Morris and Somerset counties, with a focus on post-Sandy mental health issues.

Through the initiative, NewBridge Services Inc. will be engaged to provide targeted, school-based mental health assistance to both students and staff to address current needs stemming from Hurricane Sandy and provide training on prevention techniques for the future.

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“Hurricane Sandy opened many eyes about the vulnerability of our state’s infrastructure and the communities involved with us are ones continually at risk,” said United Way of Northern New Jersey Chief Executive John Franklin. “Children feel the stress that rolls off the adults in their lives during emergencies and that affects them all throughout the day — at home, at school and in the community. Thanks to this generous grant, we are able to bring the best professional resources to these students and the adults in their lives so they can recover and gain resilience.”

RWJF said it decided to fund United Way’s initiative because of its comprehensive approach for equipping the entire school community — administrators, teachers, staff, students and parents — with tools needed to respond to stress and trauma in healthier ways, in order to succeed at school and in life. This grant is part of RWJF’s commitment to addressing the long-term mental health repercussions of Sandy.

“United Way’s approach is special, in that it establishes a common framework that engages everyone within a school,” said Wendy Yallowitz, program officer at RWJF. “We believe this approach can achieve long-term, sustainable results and help build a ‘culture of health’ in participating schools and their communities.”

The grants will enable United Way to provide the schools with mental health services. By partnering with NewBridge, trained clinicians will provide school-based mental health counseling for any student identified as having chronic mental health issues as well as those affected by Hurricane Sandy. All students will receive training in how to cope with traumatic stress. Also, select staff will receive mental health first aid training.

“It can take many months after an event for issues such as depression, post-traumatic stress and anxiety to emerge,” said NewBridge Services Chief Executive Robert L. Parker. “Through this work, we will help students and staff develop positive coping skills to help them get through tough times.”

Parker said the program seeks to improve the resiliency of a population that has faced repeated disasters. He said communities impacted by Sandy “feel the tension even today, two years later. So it is timely and critical to respond to people and build the resiliency to get through what is almost an annual event in these communities.”

Yallowitz, of RWJF, said the Princeton-based foundation pledged $5 million to New Jersey following the disaster two years ago. A portion of the money went to help rebuild emergency social and health services in New Jersey. The United Way grant is part of the foundation’s long-term commitment to mental health needs in the state in the wake of Sandy.

“This is something that happened in our backyard and we wanted to make sure we were there.” She said the new grant to United Way is aimed at providing long-term sustainable help for the mental health impacts of Sandy.

She said the experience of New Orleans after Katrina showed that “Mental health issues can occur right away, but they really persist 18 months, three years, five years. We knew that we wanted to work on mental health, and one of the best places to reach children is in the schools.”

She said the program will fund training of teachers and staff to have a long-term impact and “make sure that when the grants are over the resources stay in the schools” because of initiative’s work to improve the school climate.

The initiative is based on the research and work of experts in the field who include Rutgers University Professor Maurice Elias. The School Culture and Climate Initiative was awarded a 2014 national promising Practice award by the Washington, D.C.-based Character Education Partnership.

“The research is clear — students who feel connected to school, who are in schools with positive cultures and climates and an intentional focus on developing social-emotional skills and character, are more likely to have better academic achievement, fewer behavioral issues and thereby are prepared to be successful in life,” said Patricia Heindel, College of Saint Elizabeth dean of human and social development

United Way of Northern New Jersey is a nonprofit organization that works to strengthen communities by focusing on the issues of education, income, and health. It service territory covers Morris, Somerset, Sussex, and Warren counties and portions of suburban Essex County.

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