ELPS Hosting Mental Health and Wellness Summit

A Mental Health and Wellness Summit will be held at East Lansing High School on Wednesday, April 24, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. 

The event is the brainchild of District Mental Health Coordinator Heather Findley. Findley was hired last summer to support and create mental health programming for students. 

“We’re going to have about 12 different local agencies being represented that’ll have information about the services they provide,” Findley said. “Most of these are mental health professionals, as well, and can give some feedback or support, as well, if people have some questions.”

The evening will also feature therapy dogs, basketball games, hula-hooping, introductory information on mindfulness and meditation, and healthy eating empowerment.

Findley herself is an alumna of the district.

“East Lansing Public Schools (ELPS) continues to be a huge advocate for mental health services,” she said. “We have a student body of 3,803 students this year, plus an additional several hundred staff members. That’s a lot of folks who are impacted and certainly the pandemic has not made things easier for folks and we know that the impact of the pandemic will reverberate for many years to come, likely many generations.

“One of the things I really admire about ELPS is that they’ve kind of been on the forefront of acknowledging the need for mental health support for several years, clearly by the creation of the mental health advisory committee which is putting on this summit. I came back into the district this year [and] this felt like a unique opportunity to say to the entire East Lansing community that every person matters. We want to bring people together to access resources, create some community, and really understand that wellness is not just mental health, it’s not just physical health, it’s a combination of many things.”

When Findley returned to the district, she found a Mental Health Advisory Committee already in action. High School Math Teacher Mark Foster has been a member since its founding.

“We meet once a month and hash out anything in the district with regard to mental health, concerns we have, or things we need to fix or things that are going well,” he said. “It’s been a real great committee. I [usually] don’t like meetings, but this group has been a do-er group and not a meet-and-talk-about-it group and I’ve been real proud of it.”

The committee is composed of school staff, students and mental health practitioners from the community. Formed just five years ago, it’s one of many ways the district has evolved to address student mental health.

“At the beginning of the year,” Foster said, “we learned that one of every two students will deal with a mental health problem or will be closely associated with someone experiencing a mental health problem.

“The mental health data of course is startling and takes you back. When I first started teaching in 1994, mental health wasn’t anything we talked about. It wasn’t anything we got professional development about, no word about mental health issues from principals and so forth. But now, especially since the pandemic, we just have a growing number of students that are dealing with or coping with mental health issues. It’s become prominent and part of our teaching day to kind of keep your eyes peeled for students that may be struggling.”

Findley wants the whole community to know it’s welcome at the summit, not just students.

“We want adults to come, we want the whole community to feel that connection to East Lansing,” she said. “We want everyone to feel involved. We certainly are mindful of making sure we have things that are exciting and fun for our younger folks. We’re offering arts and crafts, making your own sensory slime, we’re making little coloring books about mental health. So we do have activities we’re gearing towards younger folks because we know that mental wellness or mental health issues do not just arise in middle school. They can arise much younger. And we want younger folks to get into the habit of talking about these things and can feel that supporting their own wellness in these areas is really important.

“We want this to become an annual event.”