OKTIBBEHA COUNTY — First responders arrive at a traumatic situation involving a child. By class time the next morning, the child’s teacher has a message from the school district with the child’s name and three words: “Handle With Care.”
Starkville-Oktibbeha County Consolidated School District psychologist Kayla Turner and Mississippi State University Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology Arazais Oliveros presented this idea as a memorandum of understanding to the board of supervisors on Monday morning. The board approved the memorandum unanimously.
“Usually if there’s a first responder coming, there’s a chance that something scary is happening, at least from the perception of a child,” Oliveros said. “… When something happens that shakes your reality, it’s hard … for a kid to come back to class, pay attention and follow the rules. And if the teacher is not prepared, they may not know how to work around it.”
In the Handle With Care program, the Oktibbeha County Sheriff’s Office, Fire Services, Youth Court and OCH Regional Medical Center would collect the name, age and the school of any child involved in a traumatic incident.
This information would be sent to three “point people” at SOCSD, who will be responsible for contacting the school the child attends.
From there, the school counselor and the child’s teacher will be notified that something potentially traumatic has happened with that student.
“By the school getting that notification, they’re not getting anything confidential or problematic in terms of legal privacy,” Oliveros said. “They don’t get to know what the situation was. They just get to know that something happened last night.”
Turner said the notifications will not be displayed in a public place or added to a child’s school records.
“It’s going to be very confidential,” Turner said. “Nothing’s going in our record. We don’t want anything at the school. It’s going to go to that email and then we’re going to go to that teacher.”
Oliveros said teachers will be trained by MSU Handle With Care coordinators in how to respond to a notification so they can provide extra support and accommodations to the affected child throughout the day. Teachers will be instructed not to initiate a conversation with the child, but they will be prepared to listen if the child needs to talk.
Oliveros said this model has been used in 60% of states across the country, but Oktibbeha County would be the first in Mississippi to adopt this program.
District 1 Supervisor John Montgomery asked if the program will also include schools outside of the SOCSD public school system, like Starkville Academy or Starkville Christian School, since the agreement currently only includes public schools.
Oliveros said the agreement could easily expand to private schools, if they choose to participate.
“We are making those connections and those conversations, because we know there are lots of kids in lots of different places,” Oliveros said. “But like I said, this is a system intervention, so any part of the system we can get working smoothly will make it easier to add other schools.”
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