TIFTON — Amid community struggles to properly care for mental health, the staff and faculty behind student wellness at Tift County Schools assured the Board of Education that they were doing all they could to support their students.

Beth Sellars, director of academic support for the school system, came before the board during its Feb. 11 meeting to provide them an update on the status of each school’s success in supporting the mental health needs of their students.

Sellars reported that, starting from the beginning of the school year in August to Jan. 31, the school system had employed around 180 safety plans, policies used for students experiencing suicidal or homicidal ideations or other crises related to poor mental health.

She noted the most dense months for these cases appeared to be September and October. The plans were employed more often with the male student body, and were most needed in the schools for grades 6-12. However, Sellars stated that Charles Spencer Elementary had seen a greater need for safety plans than Annie Belle Clark, despite supporting a student body half the size, and was a feeder school for Northeast Middle School, which had reported the same number of safety plans as Tift County High School at half the student body size.

Out of the reasons for these plans being implemented, suicidal ideation and homicidal threats were among the most common at around 50% and 29%, Sellars reported.

The academic support director further stated that students with reentry plans, programs employed when they are given medical treatment or hospitalization away from school for their mental health, were most commonly brought back to school during January. Middle and high school students were once again the highest rates of use for this program, with suicidal ideation with a plan and self-injury among the most common reasons for hospitalization.

Sellars asserted her department was working to better care for their students, including maintaining information for students with mental health issues for on-campus counselors to access and more effectively care for those students — while maintaining the confidentiality of their situation — as they progressed through their education, providing additional training to school counselors and social workers, and sharing mental health resources with the families of students with mental health issues to help care for them outside of the classroom.

However, she admitted that her team was facing a few obstacles in those pursuits, reporting that schools were struggling to meet the recommended ratio of school counselors to students and that they were having to provide families with information on telehealth resources and mental health care in Valdosta due to a severe lack of resources.

Sellars particularly stressed that the entire community was facing issues with properly caring for mental health needs, noting that practically every facility in the area capable of offering care for mental health was experiencing massive wait times. She assured the members of the board of education that she and her department were making a major effort to support their students and their families in caring for their mental health needs to the best of their ability.