Cedar Rapids school district launches free mental health initiative with Hannah Stuelke
The Cedar Rapids Community School District (CRCSD) is launching a new program that will provide free telehealth services for mental health. The service is for all students in the district.
A panel at Washington High School on Wednesday afternoon launched the initiative.
According to district officials, the telehealth service is needed because the services currently in place are just not cutting it.
”It’s just not enough to meet some of the needs that we are seeing among our students,” said CRCSD Superintendent Dr. Tawana Grover.
Larry Johnson is an employee of Tanager Place, and he’s the school-based psychotherapist at Washington High School. He sees kids in the building five days a week.
”I usually do back-to-backs most days. So that’s why I wake up at 5:30 a.m.—so I can exercise, because otherwise I am in the chair quite a bit,” said Johnson.
He agreed the telehealth program will do a lot to expand the reach of the district’s mental health services.
“This gives, you know, a completely different group and population of students access to something that they haven’t been able to access before,” he said.
Johnson recognized the irony in relying on technology to fight against the anxiety and depression that everyone on Wednesday’s panel agreed largely came from technology in the first place.
“Kids feel disconnected. They don’t feel like they belong. And I think that our devices, the technology that we were talking about, is part of the problem,” said Johnson.
He added addressing mental health is a complicated task, but ultimately for him there’s a very clear guiding principle.
“Anything that we could access that would be our other tools on our tool belt, I say use them. I say use them. Whatever helps the kids,” said Johnson.
One of the panelists Wednesday was Iowa Basketball star Hannah Stuelke. Stuelke is serving as the face of Hazel Health, the company with which CRCSD is partnering to provide these services.
She said she would have used something similar if it had been available when she was a student at Washington.
“I think it’s really hard, especially as a young person, because some people just say, ‘Oh, you’re young. You shouldn’t have—you haven’t been through so much. Yes, we have. We’ve been through enough to need somebody to talk to,” she said.
The program was made possible by a $1.5 million grant from United Healthcare. The money will fund the program for a year, after which the district will look for funding sources to continue the program.
