What is the most significant mental health challenge that is contributing to truancy right now in the state?

I mean, I think some of what happened during the pandemic and kids being away from school for so long contributed to that.

We also have a lot of families that we work with single parent homes where there's not a lot of structure in the home, and that makes it difficult to reinforce the kids going to school.

But we do have a program, youth assistance program, and multiple nonprofits in Wayne County have this program where we focus on kids when there are issues like truancy or other at risk factors and try to make sure that they're attending regularly and follow up with their families and provide all kinds of other supportive services.

So we believe children need to be in school and they need to be able to and ready to learn.

And of course, so does the superintendent.

And you're doing some work within the district.

Dr. Vitti, how are you thinking about and addressing the mental health challenges that we're seeing that are just contributing to students simply not showing up to school?

Yeah, well, when you think of when when I think about some of the greatest challenges that we have as a school district, it's chronic absenteeism, certainly toward the top.

I mean, it's sort of cliché if you're not in school, you can't learn when you just look at our students and in the data, when students have missed 18 or fewer days of school, there are 3 to 5 times more likely to be at above grade level than reading math or to be college ready.

So we know that we're doing the right things in the classroom and it's been a journey and improving systems, processes, recruiting, retaining teachers.

But we're doing all that much better.

We just have to have the kids show up more.

So one of the main reasons, as you've already indicated, is mental health.

So as the district, we've done a lot and I think we're really leading in a lot of different ways across Michigan and what we're doing with our screening.

All of our students are looking at risk adverse survey at the beginning of the year, 3rd to 12th graders and that survey is research-based to determine, you know, what challenges our students face from anxiety to fear to depression based on the trauma they've experienced.

From there, you can identify the students and then we have mental health support now in all of our schools, contracted.

So when students take that survey and and a red flag is raised you can connect them to one on one or small group therapy as long as the parent signs off on that.

And I think that's gone a long way to providing direct for them.

And we've developed Help Hub now across the city.

Free access to mental health support for families and students.

Free dental, medical and vision screening aside from mental health.

But those are just some of the ways we're starting to attack the issue.

And I think it is making a difference.

When we look at chronic absenteeism, we've got a lot of work to do.

But finally at the end of this school year, we're finally going to get put back to at least pre-pandemic levels with average yearly attendance and chronic absenteeism.

But I think we're moving in the right direction.

We often say that kids are our future.

Kids are our right now, so we need to make sure we do everything we possibly can to give them access to resources.

One of the programs that I'm most proud of is our School Success Initiative, where we're in the schools, we're working with our teachers, we're working with our counselors.

A number of our providers are on board with that, just really servicing the whole child.

You know, head to toe.

Dr. Beatty talked about, you know, access to dental, access to health services, but more importantly, access.

And so we're using our mobile crisis vehicles.

We have a mobile clinic that we're rolling out to our community to destigmatize this notion of mental health and making them feel okay about access.

Right.

Just coming in and having a conversation.