Post & Courier Article: Charleston schools could see increased mental health services thanks to a local nonprofit

Kristen Robinson (left), program director for Charleston Hope, sings to Skyla Wright to encourage her to finish a journal entry on being grateful during an after school program at Julian Mitchell Elementary School, Monday, Sept. 23, 2024, in Charleston. Charleston Hope’s Step-In program provides a safe environment for girls to grow and make an impact.

By Valerie Nava vnava@postandcourier.com Sep 24, 2024

What began as a conversation between two sisters more than a decade ago now has turned into a full-fledged initiative to provide mental health services to youths in need.

Charleston Hope, a local nonprofit increasing access to mental and behavioral health programs in Title I schools, started as an initiative to provide support to teachers and students. Emily Kerr, executive director and founder, was inspired to make a change after speaking with her sister who taught at a high-poverty school about how students needed more support than they were receiving.

Kerr created Thrive, a program that aims to enhance mental health, emotional well-being and quality of life for families and teachers at high poverty schools, according to the organization's website.

In its pilot year, the program was able to provide 650 hours of one-on-one clinical therapy for students at Hunley Park, Mitchell and Pepperhill elementary schools, which are part of the Charleston County School District.

The new initiative has been simmering for a while. After years of working with these schools, Kerr decided to switch the organization's focus in 2023, prioritizing mental health. The decision came after the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated an ongoing youth mental health crisis nationwide, and after meeting with parents in the community to figure out how best to help vulnerable students.

While the organization currently partners with only three elementary schools in Charleston, its ultimate goal is to ensure there is a mental health program at every Title I school in the tri-county area, Kerr said. To reach this goal, the nonprofit is holding a fundraiser through Sept. 28 to raise $100,000.

Kerr said the cost to pair a student with a licensed mental health clinician for 12 weeks is approximately $2,000.

"That is what we are fundraising for — to be able to hire more clinicians to serve more students, not only in the schools we're currently partnering with, but to expand to multiple schools," she said.

In a 2022 review, the South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services reported a ratio of one school counselor to 1,300 students — more than twice the state's goal. In 2023, the ratio improved to 1 to 653.

Gov. Henry McMaster announced earlier this year that significant progress had been made to increase the number of school mental health counselors available to serve children in the state, but Kerr said work remains to be done.

The American School Counselor Association recommends a 1 to 250 ratio of school counselors to students, with the national average being 1 to 385, according to recent data for the 2022–23 school year.

"We are obviously a far cry from that," Kerr said, adding that the situation is especially urgent since the most accessible way for children to access mental health treatment is through their school.

The South Carolina Behavioral Health Academy has reported that children in the state are 21 times more likely to access mental health services at their schools than any other setting.

Sheena Lewis, the mother of a student benefitting from Thrive, said the program has been critical in helping her daughter deal with the anger and grief stemming from the death of her father. 

Lewis said her daughter has opened up in ways she had never seen before, by attending one-on-one and group therapy sessions at her school, where she can interact with other students going through similar experiences.

"At the beginning, I was a little frustrated because I thought, who would be a better counselor to my daughter than me? But they helped me understand this is helping her deal with her emotions in a healthy way, and even made me understand I might also need to get counseling because it’s also a loss I experienced," she said.

Henrietta Gantt, a Charleston Hope mental health clinician at Pepperhill Elementary, said most of the organization's success can be attributed to the strong relationships it has forged with schools.

The nonprofit also is careful to ensure that clinicians have manageable case loads, and that a care coordinator at each school is doing liaison work, collaborating with staff, school-based counselors and parents, Gantt said.

"Having other professionals there to support (student's) mental health, even if they are not the ones doing the actual therapy, is wonderful," she said. "I have worked in schools in the past and there is a lot more kids needing help than people able to provide it."

Prior to the pandemic, the nonprofit had been successful in implementing a program called Step In, which was designed to give young girls a space to learn social emotional skills and help them discover who they wanted to be, Kerr said.

"We were equipping girls to identify their emotions and process them," she said. But these students needed another layer of support due to their experiences growing up in poverty, coping with hunger, gun violence or domestic violence, which also inspired the creation of Thrive.

Gantt said trauma as a result of exposure to violence, abandonment and loss is the most prevalent issue impacting mental health and well-being of the students she treats.

For Kerr, community support is critical if Charleston Hope is to reach its goal of expanding mental health care to Title I schools, and fundraisers like Match Hope connects people to that mission.

"That's what drives change: when we rally together to unveil the needs of our community and to meet them," she said