CONSULTATION FIELD EXPERIENCE PROJECT 2

Consultation Field Experience Project:

Covering School Crisis Intervention Program at Cheney High School

Courtney Traxson

Kansas State University

Consultation Field Experience Project:

Covering School Crisis Intervention Program at Cheney High School

The consultee that has presented a problem in her school is D.H., the high school counselor at Cheney High School in Cheney, Kansas. D.H. is the only school counselor to serve the high school in Cheney which consists of around 250 students. D.H. is involved in many aspects of the school, by being the STUCO sponsor, and community, as she has grown up and graduated from Cheney High School herself. D.H. has found herself in a position to find outside resources to help her access and fix the current crisis intervention plan at the school. Though Cheney is a smaller community of around 2,500 people there have been accidents and deaths of students/staff that occur tragically and have brought the entire school to a standstill. D. H. sees that it is necessary to put in place a better crisis intervention plan so that when those deaths do occur her school is prepared on how to handle the situation.

The current program in place that is an issue to the school is the crisis intervention program concerning the death of a student or staff member. With smaller communities comes the lower percentage of accidents happening and number of student’s accidental deaths occurring but when they do occur they often times affect the entire community and severely affect the students in the school. The crisis intervention program currently in place at the school has one individual who is in charge of implementing the plan at the time of a student or staff member’s death. Based on the last incident of a student death the person in charge of implementing the plan felt they were too affected by the death and could not perform their duties, leaving no one in charge to follow through with the crisis intervention plan. D.H., the school counselor, then had to fill unfamiliar roles and had to remain emotionally unaffected so that she could perform her duties, which she felt a tremendous amount of stress from. Finally, the crisis intervention plan does have a plan of action in order but the school is looking to expand their ideas and create a better, more organized atmosphere for their kids after the death of a student or staff member.

In the case of this school, the crisis intervention plan is not often thought about or updated because it is used so infrequently, but when it rains it storms and when a student death occurs in a small community, such as Cheney, the school sees that it is a priority to have a well-organized plan in place to help with the aftermath of it. It was after the last death of a student that counselor, D.H., decided a change needed to be made because there were things she wishes she could have gone back and done differently but cannot now, she can only try to fix those items and better prepare for another event. It is necessary for this problem to be addressed so that D.H. and her high school can respond more appropriately to those situations.

The type of consultation process to be used for Cheney High School would be the Systems- Level consultation. System-Level consultation has to do with description of a problem, address some problems that might hinder resolving the problem, focus on how to resolve the problem and its obstacles, design a plan of action, and then establish a procedure for follow-up and review. Other items that come with this type of consultation would be to successfully make the change with all members of the school aware and on board with the process as well as implement strategies to sustain this reform in the school.

To initially begin the stages of consultation I first explained what all was involved with the consultation process and how I could go about using my expertise to help D.H. and her problematic program she would like to address at the high school. I felt it was important to answer any initial questions and gain her trust that I am there for her and her school to help with this problem. This initial stage consisted of getting to know D.H., her school, and the problem she feels needs to be addressed. For D.H. it was easy to know specifically the issues that needed to be addressed as she had a student death 3-4 years ago and because of that she wished her and her school had done some things differently. She explained each person’s role currently within the program if a student or staff member death occurs and because the current plan only included administration and herself it was easy to see there wasn’t much to the plan. The biggest issue her school ran into with the last death of a student was the main person who was assigned to lead in implementing the program felt that the student’s death affected them too much and they were unable to perform their duties. Having the one person in charge in that situation step down created a huge problem for D.H. as she had to step into an unfamiliar role in a crisis situation.

The next stage was to collect data from the CHS staff and student body. The purpose of this stage was to get the information necessary to understand how much the staff knew about the current crisis intervention plan in place as well as get their input on how it could improve. The data collected from the students was to get an understanding on their overall wellbeing. The two assessments used were the Crisis Intervention Plan and the Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale. The roles of the teachers in the crisis intervention plan is huge so getting their feedback on what they like and dislike would only beneficial. The teachers are the ones who are around the students the most and they are the ones who will need to try and maintain a normal class period after a death occurs. The students taking this assessment are going to give information necessary to understand how they are psychologically feeling on certain things. If you have a number of students who aren’t happy with themselves, this assessment will expose that. I worked with D.H. to administer the assessments because all of her students now have an email address so it was easy access for her to just send everyone the link and have them access it. After collecting the data it is important to properly analyze it so that I could present all relevant and important information to the school counselor about her program and students. Based on percentages and open-ended questions received back from the assessments I was able to formulate a solution focused plan.

When next stage of addressing solutions came I made sure to inform D.H. all of the information is data driven so I created the solutions based off of the present needs of her school and also that she can like and dislike any of the solutions I suggest. This is a partnership to try and fix the problem so she knows what would be great and not so great in her school and I am there to help work around that. I began this stage by giving her all information and percentages that stood out to me from the assessments and got her thoughts on what she feels those mean and how she felt on them overall. I then started to explain the solutions I created for her schools crisis intervention plan based on the information from the data of her staff and student body. Solutions included how information on the crisis plan will be delivered to the staff, how the staff overwhelmingly agreed that a school crisis team would be better and then also a good majority of them would like to be a part of that team, also prevention items in place could improve in the eyes of the staff as well as them being able to recognize when a student is attempting or might attempt to hurt themselves so addressing those issues in the appropriate manner I suggested. It is important to go as in depth as the consultee wants for a specific solution because if this is something they are truly going to implement then it needs to be something well thought out and a good match for their school. With each solution it was important to focus on who would be involved and in what way so for the explanation of what a school based crisis intervention team would look like I explained how it consists of around 8 people, the school counselor would probably head it by organizing and scheduling training days as well as meetings. Every member would have different roles and those roles could include coordinating communication and controlling rumors, individual and group supportive counseling, and someone who is in charge of calling outside sources such as surrounding area school counselors or the ministerial alliance. All solutions were discussed with D.H. and either she agreed and made her little tweaks to them or the idea was thrown out, the only job of the consultant is to present these ideas with the schools best interest in mind and allow the school counselor to determine which of those will best suit their problem.

The next stage would be to implement the solutions that were decided upon. Although I cannot be a part of this stage, if I were it would be important to allow the school counselor to do this stage and then address you for any further needs or questions that arise. The final stage would then just be to create a follow up to assess its effectiveness in the school.

The two inventories administered at Cheney High School were the Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (MSLSS) and a survey made for this consultation the Crisis Intervention Assessment. The MSLSS was administered to only the students of Cheney High School and the Crisis Intervention Assessment was only administered to the staff. The purpose of the MSLSS assessment is to understand the student’s thoughts on their life within the last several weeks. The purpose of the Crisis Intervention Assessment is to get an overall understanding of how much the staff currently knows about their schools crisis intervention plan, as well as find out how they feel about it, and what they think should be changed.

The MSLSS results were able to give back a summary of how the students at CHS feel about school, their parents, where they live, their friends, and themselves. There was a total of 148 students who took the MSLSS assessment. It was important, for the purpose of this consultation, to focus in more on the questions concerning how a student is feeling about their personal life, as it is important for a school counselor to be aware of students who aren’t in a happy psychological state. There were some points of interest I drew from the scales and then relayed to D.H. so that she would know points of concern as well as the positive points found. For the MSLSS assessment the percentages that I mostly focused on looking at included items that would maybe raise a red flag for a number of students who aren’t happy in life right now and who could become a potential victim to hurting themselves or even attempting to commit suicide. On trend that was noticeable from the very beginning of questions is either the students at CHS are very humble in their responses or they have a good portion of students who have a lower self-esteem. Students would only moderately agree with the statement “I think I am good looking.” There were some students who disagreed with that and some who strongly agreed with that statement but 40% of the students who took the assessment only moderately agreed, which is only one position away from moderately disagreeing. One statement that raised a red flag, especially for D.H., was that 19% of the students involved in the assessment moderately to strongly disagreed with the statement “I like myself.” Out of 148 students taking the assessment that is 28 kids who are implying they do not like themselves. Though this number is small in comparison to the school body it is a number that cannot be overlooked, for those are the students you need to be most worried about trying to seriously hurt themselves. Since the assessment is anonymous then you obviously cannot track down those kids who aren’t happy with themselves but you can hope they will come into see the school counselor for their problems. The only type of thing to do is to work to create that positive environment for kids as well as make sure your staff knows the warning signs of a student potentially hurting themselves or planning to. Referring back to the Crisis Intervention Assessment given to the staff, one of the questions asks how confident that person feels at being able to recognize when a student has hurt themselves or plans to, and the results were split right at 50%, so half of the staff can recognize and the other half cannot. Once again, D.H. and I discussed what could be done to increase that number so that students who are attempting this do not go unnoticed by teachers and the solution was to begin presenting that information at the beginning of the year or throughout the year to the teachers was agreed upon as the best D.H. could do to increase that awareness. Just by providing the information on what signs to look for can help kids to get noticed who are in need of help.

The Crisis Intervention Assessment given to the teachers included both a scale of answers to choose from as well as a few open ended questions for the teachers to answer to any extent they liked. D.H. was a little put-off to find out only 16 of her staff did the assessment when she expressed the need for everyone to do it. Since the crisis intervention program at CHS is the problem we are addressing, the Crisis Intervention Assessment becomes a key to understanding what exactly those issues are in the current program as well as ideas from the people who will be a part of implementing it, as to how it can improve. For the Crisis Intervention Assessment some of the responses that stood out include some positive information for D.H. that 81% of her staff is familiar with the current plan set in place for the death of a student. The number that then got away from D.H. was that only 60% of her staff agrees that the crisis plan covers everything necessary. Some wonderful news that was able to come to the surface because of collecting this data is that 94% of her staff agrees that having a school based crisis team would be more beneficial than one person in charge, which is currently their situation. With that said, 69% of the staff that responded to the assessment then marked that they would be interested in being a part of a school crisis team. These numbers open the doors for wonderful changes to be made to this program because it is hard data that the staff members in your school are looking for and wanting a change and that they would like to be a part of that change. Also, through some of the open-ended questions the teachers expressed concern of not fully understanding the crisis plan because they are handed a pamphlet and told to read it. Further discussion with D.H. allowed us to bring up the option that at the beginning of every school year it is necessary to have the information in that pamphlet addressed on an in-service day or some point in which D.H. could interactively present the information in a PowerPoint. By doing that it is ensured that all teachers and staff are present and paying attention rather than receiving a pamphlet and becoming too busy to go over it. Some of the other various percentages I pointed out to D.H., but did not fully connect to a solution include: the staff was split 50/50 on agreeing and disagreeing with whether they would want entire staff training on how to deal with students after a death, 56% of staff feels they can maintain a normal class period after a student death, and 100% of the staff feels comfortable going to D.H. to express any concerns they have for a student. For the MSLSS assessment some percentages I pointed out to D.H. in our interview include: 89% of students disagree with the statement ‘I have a bad time with my friends’, 23% of students disagree with the statement ‘I like spending time with my parents’, for the statement ‘my family gets along well together’ 28% of students disagree, 61% of students disagreed with the statement ‘I look forward to going to school’, and finally 41% of kids agreed with the statement ‘I wish I lived somewhere else’.