May 28, 2024 – Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools celebrate both National School Nurses Day and Mental Health Awareness Month in May, meaning now is the perfect time to take a step back and appreciate the people and practices that maximize student wellbeing throughout the district.
WS/FCS employes vast teams of school nurses and psychological service providers to help students cope with both physical and mental health concerns, and each team has their own specialties. However, there’s more overlap in their work than one might expect, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Director of School Nursing Katie Key says that school nurses are observing more and more physical symptoms in students who visit their offices that are actually brought on by mental health struggles. Now more than ever, an important aspect of a school nurse’s job is to talk with students about how they’re doing emotionally to see if something external is weighing them down.
“Since COVID, there have been many more students who are coming to the nurse,” Key said.
“It may present as a physical symptom, but after we kind of get into why they’re there, it ends up being a mental health issue, whether it be anxiety or depression or something else.”
Mental Health Services Program Coordinator Wanda Kellyman says that physical health can affect mental health as well. School-based mental health services emphasize the importance of physical selfcare to maintaining a positive state of mind, whether that means empowering yourself with a healthy diet or improving your mood with cardio exercises that help with proper blood flow. Getting a good night’s sleep is one of the simplest things you can do for your health, and it can make a world of difference in how you feel both physically and mentally the next day.
“I think that all of it ties together,” Kellyman said. “When you’re looking at mental health, physical health, emotional health, I think that it’s all in common across the board.”
WS/FCS health professionals recognize this overlap and work together to provide students with comprehensive information on how to take ownership of their personal wellbeing. That mission was perhaps most evident in this year’s Health and Wellness Institute, in which hundreds of middle and high school students visited the Education Building for a day of workshops centered on various physical, mental, emotional, and social health initiatives. From learning stress-relieving techniques to spending time in one-on-one peer counseling, students appreciated the time to think about their wellness and how it could be improved. Not only that, but they had plenty of ideas about what future iterations of the program could look like.
“They’re really thinking about it… they want to hear more about substance use and vaping, and they want to know what to do when they notice a friend in need,” Kellyman said. “We’re collecting a lot of data and making sure we get student input.”
Partnership will be essential to the future of holistic health programming in WS/FCS. Nurses are working with community care providers to make sure that families know about physicals and immunizations in a timely manner during the shortened summer, and Psychological Services has a long list of service providers they contract with to get students specialized help when they need it. The root of it all is communication and awareness of what students need, and as long as the district’s teams display a willingness to work together, wellbeing should only continue to improve.
“We’re just really trying to collaborate more and build better communication systems,” Kellyman said. “If we can get the information flowing from the district office to the schools to the community partners, I think we as a district can function better."
