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Program for mentally ill students in Hernando schools has faced delays

 
State Sen. Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, helped secure the state grant for Project StarFISH.
State Sen. Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, helped secure the state grant for Project StarFISH.
Published Jan. 11, 2017

BROOKSVILLE — The Hernando County School District received $500,000 from the state last year to create a program to identify and help young students with serious mental health conditions.

Project StarFISH got off to a slow start.

None of the three originally planned classrooms were operating at the start of the 2016-17 school year. Only two of them are now, one without a full-time, accredited teacher. And neither of them was up and running until November.

State Sen. Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, who helped secure the state grant for the program, said last month that he was "not happy" about the situation. But he also said he would not comment further without more information from the district — information he had not received earlier this week, his office said.

District staffers said the delay was unavoidable because of difficulties securing the money and hiring teachers to teach exceptional students as well as other subjects.

"We've struggled to find highly qualified people," said Judy Everett, the district's supervisor of exceptional student support services. Everett and Cathy Dofka, director of exceptional student support services, also said they had not heard from Simpson's office and would be glad to share information.

Everett, who has several years of experience in applying for grants from the state Department of Education, said she did not realize the allocation would be treated as a DOE grant and was surprised by its complexity.

"It's a long, arduous process," she said. "Even we didn't understand the steps involved with this."

By the time the district received permission to spend the money in late September, most qualified teachers had already started working at other jobs.

Attracting teachers certified for exceptional student education is always difficult, Everett said, and finding an instructor for the middle school class at West Hernando Middle School is harder still because StarFISH students stay in one classroom throughout the day, meaning the teacher must also be qualified to teach all academic subjects.

Recognizing that the program will not be able to find such a teacher at this late date, Everett said, the district is now seeking permission to hire a long-term substitute to finish the year at West Hernando.

That classroom is now staffed by a substitute, with regular help from the StarFISH coordinator, Kelly Downey.

A full-time ESE teacher is leading one of the elementary-level classrooms at Pine Grove Elementary School. The class planned for Eastside Elementary School has not yet started because of the inability to attract a full-time teacher.

Though Simpson said the slow start might hamper his ability to secure the $250,000 needed to continue the program, it shouldn't, Everett said.

The district will only receive the amount of the original grant that it spends, and future operating costs will be defrayed by Medicaid. And whatever the cost, the program will be cheaper than the long-term alternatives for troubled young people who might otherwise end up in prison or long-term care.

Money for StarFISH, the last four letters of which stand for Facilitating Individual Success and Hope, pays for counselors and clinical therapists from BayCare Behavioral Health to help troubled children, including those with severe emotional problems, before behavior patterns become deeply ingrained.

The idea is that early intervention is the best way to deal with mental illness, just as it is with other diseases, such as cancer. The approach has been proven to improve behavior so students can return to standard classrooms.

The therapy is incorporated into academic lessons in classrooms where all the children have learned the same methods of addressing destructive actions, so, for example, "the teacher can say, 'This is a time when we can try a deep-breathing technique or visualization,' " Everett said.

At an open house Tuesday evening, she said, parents were less concerned about the slow start and more grateful the services were being provided.

"We had parents who were practically in tears because someone is finally doing something for their kids," she said.

Contact Dan DeWitt at ddewitt@tampabay.com; follow @ddewitttimes.

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