{"id":96,"date":"2016-05-04T17:59:59","date_gmt":"2016-05-04T17:59:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/826boston.org\/redesign\/?p=96"},"modified":"2017-03-23T16:18:04","modified_gmt":"2017-03-23T16:18:04","slug":"julisa-curet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/826boston.org\/redesign\/julisa-curet\/","title":{"rendered":"Julisa Curet"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Julisa Curet<\/strong><\/p>\n

He had his first psychotic episode at sixteen, but mental illness does not happen overnight. His family and teachers didn\u2019t see the warning signs: as a kid, he fought with other students and didn\u2019t complete his schoolwork. He was suspended continuously and ended up held back twice. After his breakdown he was forced to leave the Boston Public Schools. His only alternative was homeschooling.<\/p>\n

You can have all the resources in the world but it doesn’t matter if they are not being used, and part of this is because we do not know they exist.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/div>\n

This student is an example of how BPS fails their students with mental health issues because they do not have the systems in place to deal with these kinds of fragile students and often mistake mental illness for behavioral problems. This is not unique to schools because even families are clueless about what it means to be emotionally unstable. Boston Public Schools can play a central role in helping this vulnerable population. Karla Estrada, deputy superintendent of student support services for Boston Public Schools, says that BPS has a renewed focus on the social-emotional needs of students because they are aware that their social-emotional aspect is critical to student success. BPS currently has resources available such as BPS Behavior Health Services, however, Karla worries that students do not know what they are or how to access them.[1]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup><\/p>\n

You can have all the resources in the world but it doesn’t matter if they are not being used, and part of this is because we do not know they exist. BPS needs to do a better job of informing students and their families about these resources. But in order to do this our school communities first need to fight stigmatization and acknowledge that there is actually a huge problem that has been going on for generations.<\/p>\n

Mental health issues do exist and can range from feeling anxious to schizophrenia. Why is it so important to help students who are struggling with mental illnesses? The National Alliance on Mental Health shows that one in five youth from ages 13 to 18 experience a severe mental disorder at one point in their life, and 37 percent of students 14 to 21 with mental health conditions being served by special education programs dropout. They are the highest dropout rate of any disability group.[2]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup><\/p>\n

In a school setting, mental health issues are often misconstrued as \u201cbad behavior,\u201d leading to disciplinary actions like detention, suspension, and expulsion. Out of school, it is well documented that a significant portion of our prison population has mental health issues.[3]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup> If our schools, and justice system, for that matter, treated mental illness as a health issue instead of a behavioral or criminal issue, Boston Public Schools could interrupt the school to prison pipeline. According to Alison Mollman, a staff attorney in Bryan Stevenson\u2019s Equal Justice Initiative, \u201cSchools should invest more in their counselors, invest more in training their teachers on mental health, or even having sessions for students where they talk about mental illness sensitivity.\u201d[4]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup><\/p>\n

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