Mental Health Services
We're Here to Help
We believe that mentally healthy children are more successful in school and life. While, nowadays, there's a growing need for mental and behavioral health services for children and youth, schools are an ideal place to provide cognitive and behavioral health services.
Hence, we have partnered with Coastal Horizons as a school-based mental health provider and aim to help students.
Rapid Assessment for Adolescent Prevention Services (RAAPS)
Youth don't always share, but they will RAAP.
The NC General Assembly made funds available to address students' mental health in response to increasing school shootings. Pender County received funds and partner with PATH to help address the psychological challenges our children face. However, to better understand the needs, we decided to ask the students themselves.
The Survey
In collaboration with Pender County Schools and Coastal Horizons, PATH sets out to get real-time data on our student's mental health. We utilized the RAAPS Survey in the Spring of 2019 for all 3rd through 12th-grade students.
Approximately 5,000 students took the survey, and we discovered some concerning things about children's mental health. The survey covers the leading risk factors for injury or death in youth ages 9 - 19. The most concerning data showed that 30% of all those surveyed answered positively for depression.
In 2019, PATH and Coastal Horizons brought in additional therapists to help meet our students' mental health needs. Also, we conduct programs to prevent anxiety and depression using a learning-to-breath curriculum within Cape Fear MS, W Pender MS and Topsail MS, and Cape Fear Elementary School.