Community Services - Regular Meeting

The article focused on needing to call for assistance, calling the police, or EMTs that came and brought the young person to the ER, where they have a set of protocols that they followed to see if it was a mental health crisis, but that in following those protocols, there's kind of a loss of I'm going to say a kind of a loss of dignity. You're put

in a hospital

gown. Your comfort things are taken from you. And that it was just really a lot of unknown, what to expect and what the next steps and follow-up were going to be. And that it just for somebody who was experiencing a mental health crisis, didn't seem very trauma informed or very patient

centered

with what the person may have needed at the time. That was what I took from it. And then I think the piece, I think and it could have been me reading into it. But then you're just kind of discharged. And what is the follow-up? And how do we ensure that somebody continues to receive the mental health care that they need?

I think one thing that struck me was just the lack of control as a parent. And I know, I mean,

when our

kids were growing up, even when you took them in for physicals, they asked the parents to leave. Well, they asked the kids if they were being abused or what have you. And to me, it was this kind of a loss of control as a parent. And so this child was That's

how you develop patient autonomy, though. So it's kind

of a hard balance. But I can imagine that the child would have felt a little scared and out of control and maybe in a sense violated too. You're put in the hospital gown. You're required to give blood and a urine sample. And your parents aren't there with you. And they're having to deal with all the paperwork, which I think was an issue with the insurance and all that. And then just to have I don't know if it was like police, why cars, and ambulances showing up at their house in the middle of the night or not. But that would be pretty scary

as well. Did somebody have

a comment? This is just sort of an open discussion. What do you think? What can we do about it? Any ideas?

And I think just the additional context, especially for members of the public, this is what we heard in the surveys that were related to the comprehensive health plan. People don't know where to go in an emergency. They don't know particularly a mental health emergency, they don't know what resources are available. It just seemed to tie a lot of the things in we wrote a 50 or 70 page report. And a two page letter to the editor also gets the point across, right, a personal experience. But just, yeah, if there are thoughts about other things that can be done or should be looked at? Is there a,

I can say,

post Oh. This is this is Joe at the health office. Oh. Go ahead. Another another option or resource that is very helpful is the New Mexico Health helpline number.

Anyone can call the helpline number, and it's Monday through Friday, seven in the morning until 8PM or weekends, 10AM to 4PM. And they can ask about any health or mental health need that they have or for one of their family members, friends, and a nurse will help direct them to to any area in New Mexico where they can access that help.

Could you repeat that number, Joan? I'll put it in the chat.

Yes. And I have lots of little cards with the information both in English and in Spanish. And you're welcome to come by and pick some up as well if you want to have those handy. The number is +1 (833) 796-8773.

So this, helpline is a live helpline, Joe?

It is it is a live helpline.

And

we've actually, I think it was about a year ago that I had one of our clients call the line from the clinic to help to help her navigate, you know, her situation. But they help with health care connections, finding primary care doctors, mental health care specialists, anything really, addiction services. They help with health questions, reproductive health questions as well. If you need to report, like, you know, anything, notifiable conditions. It's just a really, really helpful helpful service that the state offers.

So that's the New Mexico helpline. Great.

Thank you.

Thanks, Joe.

So I'm just curious, and really this is for Jessica. Is there an opportunity without causing any challenges, but has anybody asked this young person what would have been more helpful? Mean, kids always have lots of information that they do not share until you ask them. And even if a lot of it, we have nothing to do with. But my guess is there's a fragment of something that what would it take for her to be comfortable doing what she did?

Because obviously, it wasn't comfortable. So how could we do this better? I mean, we're here for them, not vice versa.

So I'm just wondering if this ever came up in schools. Schools. Have you guys I mean, I don't know this particular child. But I mean, do children come to you? Hopefully, would come to you before

They do. But it's also true that crises often happen in the night. So after after hours. And we have this is not a new story. So this is a story we have heard many times, unfortunately.

And it is somewhat a breakdown between the way we'd like to hold compassionate care and the way the system works. I don't know if this is true, but it may be that this person accessed the school tip line, which is a safety net that works. And so despite the unfortunate outcome or process, this could have been a lifesaving mechanism because they can post anonymously or they can post with their name. And then what that does trigger is if it's a lifesaving or a life risk event, a well check is called. And it's usually one police person who comes to the official well check.

And so that is the process and procedure right now. Other communities with more resources or who have gotten further on this progression have figured out how to have mental health crisis responders instead of just having law enforcement. Because you're right, depending on your relationship with police or for any of us, that can be a like, oh my goodness, the police are in my house

Right? In the middle of

And especially for marginalized communities, we actually want to be worried about what it feels like when police show up at the door. Thank you. I think it's a systems challenge. And I would encourage us, we really need to be working with our hospital partners and others to think about how could we make this a more compassionate continuum. So

on and I forgot to introduce Christine Kovlitz and Sylvia Dale. They're the high school prevention specialists. And they're our guest speakers after this discussion. So I apologize. I did not introduce you guys.

Can I add quickly to that? Of course, in general, I think that was an emergency situation. So probably, protocols were followed that are in place. I guess we could look into those protocols. But it's probably not up to I don't know if there's someone there who has that authority to review that.

But then also, like, we have a lot of situations that are luckily not at that point where you are in a life or death situation, but it's leading there now. And I think there, what I've seen from the short time I've lived here, there is a bit of a challenge here to access resources. I think one thing is that we have not as many mental health professionals as we probably want. There's probably reasons for that. And then if you want to access those, because you notice that you're going down that line that could lead to that emergency that we just saw, It's really hard.

And what I've experienced and heard from others is you really have to advocate for yourself to access those resources. And I think as a school, we try to navigate. We refer youth to J CHEP. They're doing an amazing job. I think now they even guide adults sometimes to resources that are available and help them access mental health.

But I think that's a big thing to look at. How can we take that advocacy piece that's there right now that not everyone has and make it more spread even so that everyone can get that care, even if they not able to advocate for themselves and call 20 providers, know that there's change up there and really push in order to prevent those situations at night where police shows up because someone is actually in a life or death situation.

I was

going say, Celeste and then, Taylor, I'll call on you. But

go ahead.

Celeste. As you know, I was an ER doc for thirty years. This situation came up at least once a week. That's my personal shift. And I work all different shifts. And I'm sure if I brought my colleagues in, they'd all say, oh, yeah, this least once a week. So that means if you look at all of us doctors, it's happening in the ER every single day. Now maybe not the Los Alamos ER, but I know Park City, which is a small community, every single day. And I just want to bring up a couple of points. First of all, it's a really tough road to hoe because people are icebergs.

They show you this much. And then they don't show you what's underneath. And children very frequently are afraid to tell their parents anything. And that's one of the major reasons we try to separate the kids from the parents. Because I can't tell you how many times when I got mom out of the room, the child revealed all of these things to me that they would never tell their parents. So you've got to do that. I'm sorry it seems cruel, but you have to. But I think my hugest frustration and I forget who it was was to me, oh, well, we have all these resources, they're available till 08:00 at night. All good stuff happens after eight Yeah. That's really good stuff.

I'm sorry. And then the other thing is, again, to use my metaphor, we're using the tip of the iceberg. Because we don't see all the other kids. We see the ones that the police or whomever gets called. And they have all their screening things and the stuff that they ask. So for them to actually pull the trigger and take a child and bring them to the ER, the child has told them something that has clicked an alarm bell. And then just from my personal experience in the ER, I've had guns pulled on me. I've had people with weapons. I've discovered pills and all kinds of stuff. I take off with somebody's clothing and they have cut molds.

What you don't know is crazy. And so we're afraid of the people. And why we've done all these protocols is because our biggest thing is we don't want to miss. We don't want to send the prison home and find out we're wrong. And I personally am really fortunate. It's one of the few things I haven't done in the art. But I've had colleagues that have sent people home that late but died. And you will never forget that. And then that puts the whole thing so it's not just resources. Resources. It's got to be a whole retooling. And I just want to bring this up. Sorry, I'm going blab for a long time. And it's quite a different issue. But have you guys heard of the SANE nurses?

I'm sorry?

SANE. S A N E. And I remember, because I went through this whole thing, too, in a year. And I started practicing, a woman got raped or brought ER. And we call it ER poker. A heart attack trumps the suicide. And you've got to go where the time sensitive is. So these poor women who have the worst possible thing possibly that could happen, or one of them are languishing in the ER while we're running around trying These are rapes and trying to And eventually, some really smart person came up with SANE. What SANE Let's see what it

stands for.

Sexual Assault Nurse Response

Examiner. This is Santa Fe.

Is nationwide. Okay. This is nationwide. And what they figured out is a woman gets assaulted, police believe she has other than she has a life threatening or serious injury, they bring her to us first, we clear them medically. Or maybe we don't. They have to go surgery, maybe whatever. But the medical stuff comes first. But as soon as that's cleared, the same nurses come in. And a lot of times, they take them out of the ER completely. And they provide compassion.

They provide counseling. They provide STD prevention and pregnancy prevention. They do the rape exam in a calm, very respectful, wonderful way. They give them clothing because frequently they have to take the clothing and the rape kit. And the response has been hugely positive. So my question is I am getting someplace why can't we do something similar to this for crisis patients? But the whole key is it's got to be 20 fourseven, $3.65.

Someone's going to talk about the cost. Often does a crisis happen? And is someone just going to sit there? I am absolutely playing worst devil's advocate. But

we have a nurse covering Santa Fe. And it works in Park City, Utah. It works in LA. It works in all the places I

So hold that thought. Wait. Tyler, did you want jump in? So hold that thought.

Hey. How's it going? So I've worked in the fire department and the emergency room in Los Alamos and Santa Fe, and we've kind of in Santa Fe talked about some of these same issues, you know, and and a lot about that article. Kind of some of the things that we are looking towards and crisis response unit, obviously, like an ambulance showing up on scene and then clearing them medically to a trained crisis response unit person. We've, you know, discussed potentially having EMS, like, a a you know, especially for sexual assault victims, but for teens, you know, just like fire department trainings if we don't have crisis available.

But alternative transport locations, I know I've talked about this before with some people, but there is a potential that insurances are going to reimburse for transportation to locations other than to emergency rooms, which wasn't the case before. So if we did have the social services hub set up with a crisis response unit that was manned or staffed or, you know, there is a potential that that individual and even sexual assault victims who also can be quite traumatized and, you know, having a bunch of, you know, six or eight men on a fire truck and an ambulance show up, and then he, you know, is typically men. So there are, like, a lot of benefits, I think, to having an alternative transport to a location in a crisis response team is kind of the situation we come up with. Follow-up with teenagers. I apologize.

I'm driving some teenagers to Denver right now, but somebody had mentioned, you know, a lot of times depends some of the problem. So follow-up and, you know, a lot of these kids aren't capable of following up on their own. So I I do think having people assigned to make sure that they are continuing to to look into resources when they're not in crisis is important as well.

I'm going mute. Thanks, Tyler. Be careful, Jeremy. I will just follow-up with a couple of things because we know this conversation comes up a lot. I'm actually going to be at a conference next week in Philadelphia. That is establishing crisis response teams, which I am so excited about going. I was joking because I'm a hand notetaker. I'm going to take six notebooks and just fill them all up. But I've had conversations with some of the police and fire here. And just to echo Tyler's point, we've talked about, if somebody is having a true mental health crisis, could we get them straight to Christa St.

Vincent that has the behavioral health assessment and intake? And we were told the same thing. The ambulances are currently contracted to go to the hospital here first. It's a triage thing. Hang on just a second.

They go to the hospital here first, and then a determination could be made to send them elsewhere. And that may be a policy thing that can change or an insurance thing. But there's a couple of those blocks. And then just, Celeste, to your point, I've been having a series of conversations with a firefighter in Las Cruces, so much bigger than Los Alamos. But for the last eight years, they have developed a mobile it is a mobile crisis, but they call it a mobile health intervention because they try to say it's not just crisis, but they also deliver emergency food boxes and other things.

And it's a three person team, a police officer, an EMT, and a social worker. They have two teams of three, and it is staffed eight to eight with no coverage. It's three twelve hour shifts, three twelve hour shifts, then one day of no coverage. Right? So even in Las Cruces, it goes until 8PM and no coverage, I think, on Sundays.

But the police secure the scene safety, guns, loose animals, whatever it may be. EMTs do the emergency if it's an overdose, heart attack, unattended death. And then the social worker does the mental health, the counseling, if there were bystanders, because it can be traumatic to see CPR or Narcan or an overdose. In addition to those six people, they also have one full time case manager at the office who does all of the follow-up. So we revived you with Narcan last week.

Our mobile health unit came out. Were you able to get connected to a PCP? Oh, you don't have insurance. Well, let me get you in, and let's see if you are eligible for Medicaid. And so they have a full time Jordan or Denny who does all of the follow-up then, because you can't just leave a card and say, need to follow-up with your primary care. Best of luck. Goodbye. But they've been doing this for eight years, and they have a lot of funding for it. And it's just a really interesting model.

Is it federal funding or

It is just embedded in their county council's They've had enough good outcomes that it's now just an embedded thing.

Do they have a dedicated vehicle?

I think they just take the emergency vehicles out, Yes. So anyways, all of this is part of it, right, over and over. Joyce, I saw your hand was up, and then I'll come back

to Celeste.

Yeah. Thanks. I just wanted to talk a little bit from the hospital perspective. And, no, sorry. This isn't the perspective, I guess, but just because I do represent the hospital.

And I I talked to the physician involved with this as well as our leadership team. Everybody's, yeah, aware, you know, of this this situation. And, I mean, just first of all, because we're bound by law not to share information about patients and families, What I can't share might change perspectives on this because it you know, we all don't know the whole picture. So and maybe change the way you feel on this as well. But, the challenge with ERs, and I'm sure, Celeste, you've been this is your firsthand experience.

Our role here is to evaluate and check for an immediate crisis and handle that. And if we can't provide after that, then we depend on resources. We all know resources everywhere for mental health especially, and especially for children, are so limited. And in our state, we're even more so. So, you know, of course, yeah, we have a couple of telehealth situations.

We have a telecardiologist. We have a teleneurologist. We have a telepsych. You know? So because that's how we can provide, you know, resources that will at least help us get to a point where, you know, we can feel like we're we're offering some care for people and their families.

And, you know, the other piece of this is always a challenge with all the you know, in health care, I think anybody who's done health care lately, you know, we've seen the amount of checks and double checks and lists and protocols and all that just gets increased, you know? And it and it drives, you know, the staff crazy as well because you feel like you're you're prioritizing getting those checklists and documentation done over patient care. And if you look, know, part of the reason we've come to that is, you know, because if a mistake is made, you know, the health care worker and anybody involved is is gonna be, you know, looked at for what did they do wrong. You know? And, yeah, things happen, and it's you know, we're human and things mistakes are gonna be made.

You know? So but, unfortunately, you know, we are limited in our state now, especially on providers of any kind. You know? Nobody wants to come practice here because of the situation, you know, that we are in. So, you know, really, it's a huge I think there's a lot of challenges in this, and, you know, just hoping we can get some pieces of it together so that, yeah, this can, you know, maybe have a little bit of resolution.

And

I think, yeah, that's probably

that's probably it.

Thanks. Those

are actually really good points. And I had talked to Sophia Syeda, who's on the, board, and I guess this came up at the Medical Center Board meeting as well. So thank you for that additional insight.

Yeah. The other thing is when you try to make a one size fits all, you get a one size fits all. And, again, it's just like every person is different. Every case is different. I mean, it's a I don't even know what you call it.

It's a horrible problem. And there's so many like I said in that letter, problem number one is what happened if this poor child had to go into crisis? Differently to stop it before it starts? Because once that ball starts rolling, it's terrible. And then the other thing is, as to your idea about having them go directly to mental health facilities, one of the things the mental health facility the reason why we do all those labs is because the mental health facility will not take them until they have a pregnancy test, till they have a drug screen, till they have all these over their blood work.

And then if their tox screen is positive, they have to hold on. We call it drunk as idle.

It's exactly what seems like, well, why can't you just do this? It's because there are protocols to keep everyone safe.

Everybody knows it. And then the very last thing I want to say is the part that killed me the most in this letter, the part that just really made me want to cry because I've been there, It's okay. You've decided she's safe to go home. Who are gonna follow-up with? And you give them a a paper. Oh, here. Call these numbers. Here. Here's a prescription for whatever. You know, bye. Have a nice life. Yeah.

They can't even get in to see

the Exactly.

Because they're supposed to go see.

Numbers don't work. Or, oh, you know, my insurance, oh, we're booked until August. Oh, we're, you know and it's just oh, it's a great issue.

So I'm not a health care professional, first and foremost. But this is a systems issue. And I think from a social services standpoint, maybe step one is just truly understanding you could have done something different. Let's point. This young person did not get where they got, waking up that morning going, here's where I'm going.

Here's the issue. So maybe if nothing else, if we could, a social services is a system, is a traffic cop. Say, if you're here, you go here. If you're here, you go here. And before we can even figure out what's missing, we need to figure out where we could have intervened or overtly so that the logjam doesn't happen very often as opposed to we're trying to fix the log jam. Maybe we figure out some best practices, if you will. What a segue. I just have

one comment about that. And I totally agree with what everyone has said here, Jill. And I think we don't know whether this was a well check or some sort of an emergency. But my understanding is that once the hotline got triggered, that's when the cops came. So maybe somebody can explain that system, how that happened. You guys know. You know, Jessica?

I don't know. And I don't

know which system was activated, but I can tell you about the school system that the students can report anonymously. And in there, they can write who they are. They can list demographics. And it has saved a number of lives even when they don't disclose who they are because it's amazing how brilliant people are when they put their brains together. We had a situation recently where from keywords in the report, they were able to get on to the GoGuardian system of the schools and search those same keywords that were put in there and found that the student was doing research.

And then that's how they found out who the student was and did a well check. And that student has been hospitalized now for a while. So it was an intervention. So if it is that app, when they report something could be anything from graffiti, drug use, to suicidal ideation, self harm it's answered 20 by a crisis line professional who vets it and decides, is this life threatening or not life threatening? If it's not, it goes right to school officials.

And the school counselor, admin nurse will check on the person or try to figure out the situation. If it's life threatening, then it goes straight to EMF, straight to our police. And that's happened, and that sends out. And if it's a student that doesn't live in county, we have relationships with the neighboring counties where their emergency department will be sent out. And I will just tell people, it is scary, and the outcomes can feel unfortunate and traumatic. And this has saved lives. I mean, is a stop gap. It's an unfortunate end of the road stop gap. But it is one of the very, very evidence based critical pieces of a continuum of care.

Sometimes the parents are absolutely astounded. Have no idea what's boiling in their kid. When it gets revealed, it's I don't even have a word for it.

It's hard. It's really hard.

I don't have children. I can't even imagine. I I I just can't even imagine. And I'm not blaming. I'm just saying it's just like, oh my gosh. How did this happen? Why does it happen?

So is there a role in all of this for social services? I

think it's probably helping to bring social workers and then work with the police and EMT to set up what

I would a look at this community and social work y response look like. And so I started doing a little volunteer at the high school, just because I'm nosy and I want to know what's going on and whatever. What I'm hearing so much is they want to hear good news. Feels like every time they turn around, there's something wrong politically, economically, climate wise. I mean, it's like, where am I going in all

of this? I was about the cancer

hospital. Okay. Yeah. That's Us Us two.

Yeah, but

I mean kids. Yeah, well,

I mean, but we have a little more tools than a 15 year old. And then the other thing is a lot of the kids here have no extended family. They have mom and dad. Maybe it's just one or the other. Grandparents are on other sides of the planet, aunts and uncles, so forth.

So I do think from a social services standpoint, it is important that we figure out if there's some roles we could play to add to the extended family of our children up here. Because we have amazing senior facilities here. We have a lot of people that are always looking for ways to engage, crazy people like me that had learned how to get herself into the high school because I didn't know we were in such a high security moment because it's been a while since I've been to a high school. But to me, that's the role, is the dot connection and then the could there be other people that these kids could reach out to before they reach that place? Because I'm going to tell you, I did raise a teenager.

And we lived with one word sentences for probably five years.

So that's the advocacy piece of it. So let's add that. We need to move on so that you guys get to speak. And Counselor Brady, we did want to get your update. So could we do that real quick and then move Christine Well, and

I mean, the update's pretty short because we approved the

We approved the budget.

And not just what I have on my list for the update.

Not a grilling

I know. I teased, Counselor Reidy, I was so prepared because we had a budget option for a new staff person at social services, a program specialist completely tied to the comprehensive health plan who will be doing the outreach, the trainings, the events, every time we hear social services, I didn't even know we had social services, and it was approved by counsel. There was a lot of conversation about some other positions, but I had a folder full of data, and nobody even called me up to ask about the data. They just approved it. And so I was teasing counselor Reidy afterwards, and he said, we can still call you up. There's still a third day. And I was like, no, no, no. I'm fine. Don't actually call me up. Well, they

didn't have you answer questions.

I did. I had to answer questions. But yeah, our position got approved, which was really, really exciting.

This is a really good discussion. Obviously, we've had discussions about very similar problems ongoing, lack of resources, just trying to have that more. Part of it is just the fact of how many people we have here creates some problems, obstacles.

Then you heard about

kind of the statewide issues. I just fully understand the frustration and feeling. But I think you can take say it wasn't a mental health crisis, some other kind of crisis. It could be similar gaps when somebody's

trying

to discharge them for anything right now. And that's the unfortunate situation. And I also just want to know what more specifically great to hear about Las Cruces. Of they have, I think, 5x the people. And they've x the border. So they probably have all kinds of other issues there that we don't have. But we have issues here. And I'd like to see what because we have the budget option. And hopefully, we have also the action center.

Action center?

It's coming.

How's that? And we are working

just to tie all of this together and then jump in, last thing is last year's budget, we were given some extra funding to complete part of the health plan. And with some of that excess funds, we are trying to partner with NMSU to bring a social work student into social services. So a calendar academic year, September to June, third or fourth year undergrad or first or second year master's level, who would then be able to help us do all of this, which is really, really exciting.

I just remember I questioned the police coming when people were having issues and just calling the police. I was told, well, the police are really great here, But they are still the police.

Exactly. And they're still great.

I think it's kind of like I so I don't know. So I guess it's without knowing all the specifics of what would have been better and how this actually happened, you can't understand that you have access to some confidential information. Somebody has it. And that could be helpful to making some changes and figuring out how we can do better. But I feel like I can't do better without having that information.

Well, thank you for that. And I will just say the working group for the Community Health Action Center is looking at physical space to support those kind of resources as well. So we'll continue with our group.

As well as web based space. Yeah.

Yeah. As well as virtual.

What else do you have? The field trip

to social services that you're going to have? Yeah. Mean, we

is a We are doing a prison. No, no. We're not Victor.

On. Hang on.

We are taking a field trip to Espanola. Sorry. There we go. I don't want subtitles. No, thanks.

Folks online,

can somebody unmute? Can you see the slides?

Yep, I can see them.

And like they advance now to the next one?

Try clicking the next one. No. No.

See, this is Oh, no.

I just see the New Mexico Youth Risk and Resilience Survey.

Okay. What about now? Does it say what is the NMYRRS?

Nope. You're still on the default one. Is it possible to to put the slideshow and present and see if that works? Oh. It's my suggestion. This

is why you need a full time cut.

I see it says agenda now. And now I'm back to the New Mexico Youth Risk and Resilience Survey 2023.

Slow when we click and wait.

So does it have, like, three different colors?

Is it scrolling?

No. It's it's on Wait.

My screen at least.

So are you sharing your screen?

Is that what you did? What

if we share it as a PDF?

What if we just present like this? Because everyone has it

in the sheet.

Okay. Can you see the PDF version, folks online?

Yep. I can.

And if I scroll down

And like it.

All right. Well, that's why I brought both versions plus a printout. Wow. Earning six times. I'll finally learn.

Thank you. Thank you.

So we just wanted to see there's a that we're setting up a field trip real quick, and then we'll turn it over to you guys for social to visit social services. So is everyone here invited to that?

It might be a large group. We might not take everybody, but if you're interested in going on May 14, it's a Wednesday, we're going down to Espanola.

Was talking about yours, to yours

Oh, on that one too, sure. But we're going to Espanola to look at a couple of examples there, and then Friday the sixteenth at 2PM? You're welcome to come to the social service office and get a sense of what all we do there. I know I've shared PowerPoints, but it might be kind of fun to come to the office and see what all we do as a five person team in our space. Send me an email or send Lisa an email.

After that, we're going try to arrange visits to the health commons and Las Clinicas, which we share a wall but not the same physical space. So you can see what they do over there, because I think part of this has to be incorporated into the Action Center. And so to get a sense of what we're currently working with, part of this came up because public works is this is on their agenda, and they were asking some questions about, do you actually need individual offices, or would some cubicles work? And I was like, oh, no, we definitely need offices with doors. But they don't quite know the level of confidentiality. So we just figured, we'll invite everyone over and you can check out the space.

So we'll be reaching out to you, Joe, and to Leticia to see if we can come visit you guys, if that's okay.

Cool.

I'm going to turn it over to our speakers. I'm so sorry.

Great. Well, thank you so much for having us come and talk about, first of all, the youth risk and resiliency survey that's conducted every second here in New Mexico. But also then, how does that inform what we as schools do in prevention to hopefully not get to the point of what we're just discussing. If you go to the gender slide so what we're going to talk about today, first, like a brief introduction about what is the youth risk and resilience youth survey. Then we are going to look at some key findings there, talk about the risk and protective factors that they found.

And then we're going to look at what do we do in prevention, also like how do we collaborate with different entities in the community. And then we are open to your questions. Questions. If you would move to the next slide, please.

Yes. And I could absolutely share this as a PDF after

the meeting.

Is everyone able to see the slides in some sort right now? Okay, great. I will try to look at the camera, so please don't take any insult. I'm like, I do. Was like,

too much.

Too much. Okay.

So what is the New Mexico Youth Risk and Resiliency Survey? It's a survey that's conducted every second year. And a team of surveyors go to different high schools and middle school all across New Mexico. And they survey the students on different risk behavior, resiliency factors, demographics. And what's unique of this survey is to actually sample rural populations, native American students and some other populations in order to get a more accurate picture there.

So it actually gives us a really good representative picture of what's going on across New Mexico, but for us also in our county report, what's going on in Los Alamos. Next slide, please. So I already started to talk about what they collect. So they look at different risk behaviors like injury, mental health struggles, sexual activity, driving, drug use, and all those things. Then they look at resiliency factors, protective factors like connectedness.

And they look at health outcomes like obesity, movement, things like that, and demographic characteristics so that you can drill down later a little bit into different groups. Next. There are some things this survey cannot tell us just by the pure nature that it's like a question. Here they fill out. So it's just giving us a point of time. So it cannot do any predictions. It's not a magic crystal ball. It also cannot tell us about root causes.

We're going

to just see correlations in the data, which are not causation. So we really have to be mindful of that when we look at things. We cannot say why. We can see that there is something there. But we really have to be mindful. Because our minds try to jump to conclusion. And like, oh, this must be related, so it must be causing it. That's a really dangerous step to take, looking at that data. Next slide, please. So what the data can tell us, on the other hand, is what has been going on at that point of time almost two years ago by now when they did that survey.

And what associations are there? So you can take that as a starting point. If there's a correlation there, you have to just go and look into it. Like, why is it? And we're going to look at one particular correlation in a little bit that you will see. Next slide, please. Before we jump into looking at data, we will have a quick intro to arrow bars again. You will see them, like, in the two reports. We will have the QR code later. And if you need a hard code, like, reach out to us.

You will see arrow bars in there and just so what they mean. If you look at the length of the error bars, kind of like the precision measure, it's like a very small error bar. It's telling us that the data has less uncertainty. It's less spread. And so it's like more precise. If it's a really big one, it's less precise. Data has more spread. Then we are looking at two different groups side by side and comparing those aerobars for each group with each other. If they overlap, it's an indicator that those two groups might not be statistically different from each other. But we need to run further tests to really be able to tell that.

So we cannot conclude anything from looking at that report. Same if they don't overlap, but gives us an indicator that those two groups might be different. But we need to also, like, investigate that further. So just, like, it's really we can take some first steps here of things that we see, but we really have to look into things. For a bit more data, the focus groups, with all different kind of things and really use our own good judgment. Next slide, please. So if we look at surveys, the participation rate is always a big thing in telling us actually what we see there is reliable. If we have like 10%

of

people that should be surveyed filling out the survey, it's not going to help much tell us about the population that we survey. With our reports here, we actually have really good response rates, both above the 70% mark, which is actually really excellent. It gives us then later a high degree of confidence in the data that we got from those surveys. Next slide, please. Can I ask

a quick question? Sure. So students take this in middle school and in high school. It's every two So here

Yeah, sorry. I wasn't very clear on that. So we have two separate reports. We have one for high school. And then we have one for middle school.

And middle school is sixth through eighth grade. So we do sample a couple of elementary schools. Because in many communities, six Yes, friend.

But then it's every second year that they come and do

that.

And it's a sample size of about 30% of the population. It's randomly selected to participate in the survey. So we

do not survey the whole population. Because then it wouldn't be a survey. Would be a good sample. Okay. Next, main findings. So what did the survey find? It's actually really helpful, hope giving, to see what's happening. We see almost all the measures decreasing for alcohol. The usage both in high school and middle school decreased. But also then if we still look at dots at the bottom, how many students are still using alcohol, It's still in high school.

Six students are currently, like, as in the last thirty days, I think, yeah, use alcohol. And in middle school, it's one student in one of the classrooms. So it's 30 students. But that's a high number. And if you think particularly if alcohol is like a gateway drug, it prompts your brain to actually be more susceptible if you later try drugs because it establishes that pathway. So that's a really big number still. Twenty percent. Yeah. So for tobacco use, the same thing. The usage decreased, which is good also for e cigarettes.

But still, if we look at the e vape usage, we still have four students in our high school classroom and two students in the middle school that are currently using those. Which then, when they start young, it's really hard for them that older they get to get out of that habit.

One thing we did strategically here was convert Sylvia's idea of converting the percentages to trying to represent what does this look like in a group of 30. Because sometimes the percentages can seem really abstract. Or we're saying, oh, yay, it's such a small percentage. And we're like, but that's still two middle school students in their class and trying to think of it in a more human way of how do we

get these.

So I

see you calculating if there's a way of sharing speakers just looking at the percentages. If you can share speaker notes, the percentages are in the speaker notes. For sure. So for truck usage, it's also encouraging that we see the truck use across different trucks decline. And still, if you look at Mariana usage, it's four students in a classroom of 30 at the high school level and two in the middle school class.

They're currently using Arianna as a truck. And then also, again, that primes their brain to be more susceptible if they throw them on the side to try other trucks. Then if we look at the mental health measures, they also decreased actually for the first time in ten years, which is good. But then if we look at the symptoms of anxiety, depression, or students that actually experience both anxiety and depression. It's ten 30 students that highlighted that they had those symptoms in the last thirty days.

Now I wanna highlight here that it's not like that all of them are clinically depressed. That other measure is like measuring that. That's not bad. It's just that they had anxiety, depression, or both within the last thirty days.

And you'll see, when you look at the more full report, which we're happy to review with people, it shows percentages by the school, but then also percentages by grade, which you'll see it increases naturally as students get older, have more access, and then also percentages by gender. And then you can see the New Mexico data alongside Los Alamos County data, where we urge caution because it's easy to say, oh, we're not as bad as other people or just so that. And sometimes the error bars don't really say that. And sometimes that's not the best frame of mind to me celebrating our thinking.

Yeah, you don't want to do that compared

to did you?

Because you don't have mental health.

I put in middle school because I couldn't from the data that I have access to data for this. We have it split, but then we don't know how much the overlap is, so we couldn't calculate those numbers. That's

why you don't

see middle school numbers for that.

And they don't ask the same questions. So sometimes we have trouble doing equitable or the same similar statistics.

And the questions are different. Yeah. And if you are interested in drilling deeper into, like, the results, like, we are happy to discuss. We also have contact information for the actual people that do this, and we can ask them to run comparisons and things like that. Next slide, please.

Oh, it's too fast. So

now we're going to dive a bit deeper into the data. Before I go there, I want to highlight everything we see here. This is a community challenge to solve those, like mental health, drug usage, alcohol usage. The school is not going to solve it. The county is not gonna solve it by itself. Like, parents are not gonna solve it. We all have to work together. So the reason we chose the following question about the relationship and connectedness at school is just because we are the school, so it's natural than using other measures. But it's not saying that teachers or schools are to blame at all. And also not saying that if we were more connected, it would solve all this.

Just saying. Because all could jump too. So what we did was for the question, my relationship with my teacher or other adult at school are satisfying and supportive. And based on how the students responded to that question, they were creeped into either a low, which were when they were strongly disagreeing or just disagreeing, a medium section, which when they just agreed or neither disagreed or disagreed, and then a high section when they strongly agreed to that question.

And then, please, the next slide.

So based on how they ranked either as low, medium, or high, we can look at their truck usage then for current Mariana usage, heavy Mariana usage, synthetic Mariana usage, or heroin usage. And then what we see there is the more supported or more connected the students, the less likely they are to have that drug usage there, which I feel is

synthetic marijuana. Is that the vape?

No. So synthetic marijuana is different. It's a chemical they can make. Some people call it spice. It's a different way to make a chemical that has similar effects. It's not from the plant itself.

Yeah. My understanding is that it is actually more potent than getting into your system and sometimes has

more I don't want

to say severe. The effects are more it

could be delivered through

a vape. Good question.

So this is legal in New Mexico, though, right? Is it legal?

I don't know much about synthetic

I don't think the synthetic is. My daughter used to work at a dispensary. No. And they actually are very strict about in the dispensary. So it's probably off market kind of stuff. But that's

a good thing

to judge and breast. I haven't

thought about if it's actually legal.

So it's not something that the teenagers are making.

No. It's

not. No, they kill it. It's a product. Telling

what's in it. Thank you for asking.

That's a good question.

I think the

general message there is that actually connectedness decreases the risk behavior of using drugs. I

just want say, I love this slide. The correlation is really interesting, because it just points to those protective factors.

Yeah. And then again, as you say, it's a correlation, so we have to look deeper. But studies in prevention science actually really

I really caught myself. I was like, don't say causation. Correlation.

There are studies where we see that really as a protective factor. So we use other sources that study that more in-depth. That protection is happening through being connected to schools, to parents, to other community members.

I think that's what Joe was talking about, too, your volunteer efforts.

And thank you for coming to the schools and being one other

person all day. Outside of your work, it's also just to talk from the county's perspective, it's why we have Hawk Hangouts. It's why we have the Teen Center. It's why the librarians are so involved in having Saturday game days. The more of those connected adults it may not be your parent if that's a cause of significant anxiety and stress, but it may be another trusted adult in your community.

And youth support, youth sports and other activities. So

sorry, I jumped up.

Oh, no worries at all. For the next slide, we ask them to do that correlation again. And you see the error bars are huge just because that's how the data is. It's very widespread. But we can still see that trend line for alcohol usage, tobacco usage, medicine usage as well, which points us to that protective factor of connectedness within schools.

Next slide, please. It's less pronounced, but we can also see the same trend for different health measures, like depression and suicidality. So I think in sum, we can really see the protective factor that we know from research that connection actually helps all those different risk behaviors to not engage. And then that also increases the mental health well-being of an individual. Next slide, please.

So for the risk behaviors, as I said, it's really encouraging to see those decreasing trends across the different risk behaviors. But still, as you saw, the numbers are still high. And each of those dots really represents a student if you have them sitting in front of you. So yeah, we will probably never go to a siro, but that's the goal, I guess. We don't want anyone to be that dear.

Next slide, please. And what we saw from the data is that those strong supportive relationships in school, that's what we looked at, but also at home in the community and with their peers, really helps to buffer and helps to keep them from those groups. Or if they start engaging in them, like, help them to get away from them again. And another thing is also the personal resiliency, which we, through different things that the school principal will talk about in a second, try to increase increase as as well well in in the the school school environment. Environment.

I think that's what we're

going now to what do

we do about all this? What do

we do? So we have

the survey team come in the winter to present to the community and to present to students at the high school. And really, we all left kind of with that question, well, what next? Well, what do we do? So we thought we would add that to our presentation. And we really in the schools have shifted in the last eight or ten years toward a very upstream prevention model.

So that's what our little visual here from the wonderful Desmond Tutu. There comes a point when we need to stop just pulling each other out of the river, which was the example we discussed today. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in. So that has been our foundational principle and that we're trying to follow strategically, which is hard because it's much easier to do kind of flashy big things and have a sense of urgency. People are not with upstream prevention, but we are patient and that is where we're staying and trying to work along with interventions all along the spectrum of support.

So the next slide shows exactly what we've been discussing, that we use a wraparound model designed to increase protective factors around students, recognizing that their parents and caregivers are the first buffer of support with high expectations, clear expectations, healthy communication and support. Safety. But not all students have that. And so then we really have this next level of we work very closely with teachers. We do training.

We go into classrooms and trying to provide that next level of support, the school environment, and then finally also the community. We're all it's the whole school, whole child model or many health models have this wraparound idea of as many or also the Swiss cheese model, as many buffers that you can do, the more resilience there will be. So keep going. So from the school side, we have a number of we've groomed this with initiatives, curriculum, and structures that we have in place. Some of these are older things we've been focusing on.

Some are new. And they really tie into our district's strategic plan with the strong belief that social emotional well-being and civic responsibility are the foundations for learning. So if we have those in place, we'll be able to be productive, engaged, successful academically. So I'm proud of that strategic plan and really putting it to action. This is not comprehensive, but we wanted you to have some examples.

Initiatives, we have a newer program at the high school called Sources of Strength, which I love. It is a refresh. If you know the Natural Helpers which is a twenty year beloved program, it's a refresh of that. So it's a little bit more modern philosophy with the dimensions of health, teaching students about their sources of strength, a real resilient social emotional learning model where peers help each other identify, who are my positive friends? How do healthy activities support me? Who are my mentors? Spirituality, if that's part of your life. So there are these eight domains. And then students lead their own public health campaigns on these different ideas. And it's been beautiful to watch.

Going off your remark, they don't want to hear what's wrong with them. They want to have the positive. And it really focuses on that. It still says what you need to know about gifts that help aspect and how to build up those factors around it more.

And for a long time, have been very trauma focused in our prevention efforts. And students have told us and this model shows us when we got ready to do the mental health sector this year, they just said, we're so tired of hearing about the risk signs and the warning signs and the crisis lines. And we said, what do you want to do? So they came up with a Dare to Care campaign with a flower logo of all the sectors of the community. So community care, creature care, campus care.

It was so beautiful. Then each flower had one. And they did the cutest video on daring their peers to care about themselves and their community. And so that was them flipping the script on kind of a trauma and a risk model to a model of hope and strength. And it is so beautiful to watch. And it's so hard to be patient. Because if you've worked with teenagers, we set out seven weeks to plan this. And we got it done the day before the deadline. Because every week, there's something. It's like, none of us can come. And then the next week, what? We're filming today? It's like, yes. Oh, let's write the script now. And and literally, we came right up against our deadline, but we let it and I'm kind of a control person. We let it be theirs. Their logo, their thing, their process.

Is that film available in here?

It is. Oh my gosh. We can share

it with you.

I'm glad that.

If you send it to me, I'll package all of this with the speaker notes and the send it to me, I'll I'll make sure everyone gets it.

It has a logo with it, has a poster on how to do care, like different ideas for care.

It was so great. So we had the natural helpers last year and that was a great presentation.

Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of these students carried on and then we wrapped in new students. And one difference in this model is it's not solely peer nominated, which was a peer helper tenant that they had to be nominated by their peers. So now we have a hybrid peer model because we honestly ran the demographics of our program, and they weren't representative of our school population. Because if you just do the math, the more people you know, the more likely you're or the more people who are in your in group, the more likely you're going to get nominated. So that immediately It's about people who may need the help. And the other thing with sources is you can join any time during the year. Instead of if you miss the beginning orientation and retreat, then you don't get to join is the natural health. So it's a little bit different, a little more modern and equitable.

So another thing we weave into that, we are trying to implement restorative practices throughout the school from a tier one to tier three basis. So at the very beginning, not talking about conflict or harm, but talking about building community in classrooms. So we do community building circles. And then once schools or classrooms have established that connection, we use this model in our sources of strength group too. Then when the harm happens, you have connected relationships that you can lean on to try to heal that harm and come back into relationships.

So we're trying to shift from a more traditional model of discipline to this more community based. So as far as curriculum, we have a newer SEL curriculum, K through 12, and we're working to help support implementation of that so students can learn skills. What's SEL? SEL is social emotional learning. And thank you for asking.

And so that helps them develop those skills of self regulation, interpersonal skills, wise decision making. So we have that woven in all grades. One of the biggest wins for us this year, for years, we've been trying to adopt a new puberty curriculum, an updated and modern one. And Sylvia has taken the lead on that. And we have that rolling in all five elementary schools. And it is an evidence based comprehensive

do you push this into the parents?

So we have parent consent, obviously, because otherwise we would not be teaching.

Well, don't want me to teach parents to do this. Give it a parent child.

So the cool thing is, with the puberty curriculum specifically, there are family

homeworks that go

home and has a lot of great information. As far as the social emotional learning, we do a lot of and we'll talk about collaborations next. We do a lot of collaborations on the community side to try to also build the adult SEL skills. That's hard because it's not as much in our sphere of influence, and we do like to partner with other partners like FSN or Family Strengths Network, JJAP, and try to sort of divide up the work. But we do do some outreach events to try to mirror that we're doing the same thing at home that we're doing. That's a challenge, but it is part of our

Gotta have it, though.

Yeah. And then finally, structures, we have established we got a grant last year to establish a calm room at the high school where students can come. I know if they're activated or nervous or anxious or just stressed out, they can come. It's beautiful seating, tea, art materials, fidgets, places where they can sit by themselves. They check-in with us. They see for about fifteen minutes. And if they're not able to re regulate, then they go on to the counseling department. We take them to the counseling department. But it's to help them advocate for themselves. So they choose to come there and then learn skills to how do I get myself back online. And then if they're really panicking, they might be panicking about a grade. We can connect them to their teacher or to

their counselor.

It's really awesome. It's a little quiet. We haven't done a full public opening. But yes, they do use it. And we've seen this quarter the increase, really. We're tracking now numbers. The students who know about it. Yes. Cool. So we do training for teachers to help build this structure. And then we do follow a safe and civil schools framework, which so much

of this is

so much to tell you about. But essentially, it's a model of setting very clear expectations for adults and children and keeping structures in the school that are positive, welcoming, consistent, clear. And anyway, that's a whole. This is structural. So we are trying to look on all these levels, like our personal skills, our colleagues' skills, student skills. I think of it as a three legged stool. That students need the skills, whether it's personal or academic or executive functioning. They need positive structured environments, consistent environments. And they need connections to each other and to trusted adults. So that's sort of always our strategy is how are we building these three supports so they can be successful.

So we to we added to this presentation, how do we tie into your county health plan? And how are we really trying to amplify the work that you've set out for all of us with this vision for a healthier community? And where we really work is strengthening these networks of support, I would say. So we picked a couple of items. One directly from your plan was expanding peer support in community based training. So we do offer I am now a QPR trainer. So that's one, suicide prevention training. I also collaborate with JJAP for youth mental health first aid training. So we do that, gosh, about every quarter. I, along with many of my community colleagues, can offer overdose recognition and response training.

So I just trained 18 bus drivers in the public schools. That was awesome. And I can also this is another quiet offering that we tell students. If you are worried about someone in your family or your friendship group, we can do so we do Narcan training in our office space and give them Narcan.

But Christine, means Nar Narcan's in all of the school buses. All of the drivers have been trained. Wow.

That's amazing.

So it expands that county partnership.

Yeah. And

they go to sports events. They go off-site, of course, to field trips. And when you talk about peer support, that really is our Sources of strength program, which we hope to expand to the middle school next year. So we'll have peer leaders in both schools. And they tell us that. They need help. How do I help a friend when they disclose this to me? What do I say? How do I not keep this terrible secret? Which is common in their culture. One reason they don't tell is they're afraid of getting in trouble. They're afraid of being sent to a hospital. And they don't know what might happen. We are tasked with expanding outreach and resources. So we do have outreach events for parents.

And we had great attendance this year. The best attendance we've ever had, maybe because we called it Drug, Sex, and Phones. No longer to say, come to this parenting place to learn how to parent better. We decided to call it Drug, Sex, and phones. We did not distribute any, but we didn't talk about these are the vectors on our phones. This is where this traffic is happening. And so we had police there, we had counselors there, we had wonderful librarians there to talk about all the different ways we

I'm not sure. Oh,

the community conversation where there was the art community.

Yes, yes,

yes. So that is another partnership. So we do some just within the schools with school staff and community partners. But we also participate in community conversations. And one of the last ones we had were on really tough topic areas for the families to come and talk about self harm or pornography or different things they're dealing with. And then we had artist representation. So we pulled art from students around the district who had expressed through their creativity these struggles and these challenges. And we had that set. Thank you for remembering that. That was

a really

nice question.

I just love that.

What else? Oh my goodness. There's so many things on here. We try to public the Narcan location sites. We partner with J Job. And I just want to do a huge shout out to social services because they are we receive county funding for this prevention work. Of course, J Job FSN. They are the hub that distributes the monies that we can do the on the ground work. And I don't want to say too much because it's not my news to share. But one of our community partners did just receive notice of a big grant that will fill in exactly the situation we were talking about earlier.

So you will hear about it soon. But there, it will increase mental health support, increase this continuum, what happens when people leave ER. It's going to really and JJEP has been beautifully filling in. We try to stay on this end of the spectrum toward prevention. We dip into intervention a little bit. And then J Job really supports us in that warm handoff of, now school's over. What do we do? And how do we connect them to the community? So thank you, social services and all of our partners. Because FSN does a lot of the family outreach and family education, the resource center, the firstborn program we're hoping is paving the way from very, very young babies and the baby network.

So we are, I think in this community, we're at a higher level of collaboration than we've ever been. Really each trying to find our piece and fitting together in a mosaic. Instead of competing or overlapping, we're really trying hard to not replicate.

Kudos, though, to you all, too. But it really is a very exciting time to be in this space because the collaborations happen all the time.

And we're in good communication. We support one another. If we have a gap, we call going to do this gap? So that's the final slide is how are we collaborating. Mentioned.

A really cool one this last year, students who violate the drug and alcohol tobacco policy, we're required to do a little education and support component. But it's often not enough, especially if they're already dealing with addiction or this is already a behavior. So we now partner with J Job that if we determine they need a higher level of care, that community resource support plan is managed by J Job instead of in the schools. That also gives a neutral advocate rights beside the schools to support them. And they don't always want to tell us what's going on. And so that

feels really successful.

Christine, you guys had wonderful handouts at the youth Risk and Resiliency presentation. Can you share some of those with us or tell us where we could order them? Because I think they would be excellent to have at the tables when we do tabling events with social services and the health council. Yeah. And I even grabbed a couple myself about nutrition or sleep.

I think it was the sleep.

Yeah. And I can I can definitely share the resources that we use? So we have them both. We take them to all events, which brochures seem so outdated sort of, but parents pick them up. Oh, love them. Adults pick them up. And we also sometimes use them with youth like deconstruct this brochure, so we try to use it in a learning way. We recently took our brochure rack. It wasn't being very well used, and we had it, mounted in the high school library in a discreet location right by tech where they could go get a charging cord and then walk by and pick up a brochure. So that was another strategic thing we've done with that.

Anyway, we work, like I said, on this spectrum of care with especially with JJ but many other teen center other partners to fill in all the little pieces. And then we serve on the DWI council. Sylvia attends community educators meeting. We help with leadership Los Alamos every year. And that's a lot. These are the QR codes for the reports. And then we'll have just a couple of minutes to have questions.

So do you capture the data? This is a community that loves data. Before we did this, we had this. Now we're doing this, and now we have those kinds of successes because it does a couple of things. First, it empowers everybody.

And you

can see that, in fact, these things are effective. Secondarily, it always helps around budget time to be able to see these things collect. The saves that happen.

That's what that youth risk and resiliency report have is. The So whole report too I can share

with you. So we have different data sources that we use within the schools. So we used a panorama survey that we administer twice a year to look at things. We have PowerSchool where we track incidences of bullying. So if we see that the spot behind a gym or something is like a hotspot, then we have to have more monitoring. So we have those things. With prevention, the challenge always is it's very upstream. It's very hard to pinpoint at all. We can only say correlations in data like this at all. We cannot say we caused this. But even to move that, it's really hard to see in that data.

So we track It seems like you could see a little, though, with the

end Well, but we collect quarterly reports from every social services contract. Really, the three of us and Aloysa have had this conversation, filling out the number of presentations on prevention, the number of students, etcetera, etcetera. If that presentation's at the middle school, in five years, are we going to see the YRRS use data go down? Sure. Yes, of course, right? We just don't know, right? And saying we collect the data from the senior center number of meals provided, does it mean then that Jordan has fewer seniors experiencing food instability? Sure. But we don't know. Prevention

is

just

so We see

that there's so many variables. Sure.

Going to have more and

more families and students who have experienced trauma. And so everything we do to shore all this up, if that goes unaddressed, there are already risk factors in place that will predispose someone to many things. One thing we do in the short term is after almost every event and presentation, we do take some feedback data on impact. And we do take feedback, especially from youth and adults, I guess, too, on what would you like like you asked, what would you like to see different? What could we do better? And then we adapt our presentations to try to meet some of those.

But at a federal level, when HUD funding is getting cut and causing trauma, or SNAP benefits are getting cut and causing trauma, it's like so we are already so far downriver that figuring out the prevention piece all the way back up just doesn't make it we want to fund all the prevention efforts regardless of what the outcome may or may not be. Yes, and then Brandy also wanted to make a comment. Go ahead, Celeste.

I think you can sometimes get into trouble with data collection. Because if you have a successful program, and all of a sudden you have all these kids reporting that they have mental anxiety and suicidal ideation, is that a failure or a success? Because maybe it's a success because She's

now there. She's able to Yeah.

I get it. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a

good point.

It's data.

Brandi, I saw you put a comment in the chat.

By the way, I can wait if we don't have enough time because I know it's 01:30.

I just need one minute to go over the opening, Zach. But go ahead, Brandi.

So I was just going to mention, I know Jessica knew this about me. So during graduate school, I was I graduated from the high school in 2019. So I took this survey as both a middle schooler and a high schooler. And so because of that, I wanted to do an entire thesis on using the data. And I have a completely different, but also slightly similar results report of ten years of the youth risk survey in which it shows there is more of a correlation between not too risky behaviors that we were able to solidify.

And so rather based off of my data and my results from the youth risk survey, we see that alcohol use doesn't have a strong of a tie with other suicidal tendencies, but rather suicidal tendencies or at risk behavior is more connected with healthy behavior, kind of revealing that students may be behavioral masking as a result of the data I had messed around with. And so I didn't know if it was something that both the prevention specialists would like to see as a way to also maybe do these reports in more detail further to do some of this separate testing.

Do you

mind sending it?

Yeah. Absolutely. Sorry. I I love the youth risk survey. It was it's been a huge part of my life for the last couple of years because I've been doing so much research. So as soon as you started to talk about it, I was really excited. Thanks. I'll send it to Jessica, and then I'll send it to you all as well.

Thanks, Franny.

And thank you, Steve. So

is there time for more questions?

Not right now.

But we

can make

sure you get the contact information to make sure

Or after we adjourn the meeting, if you guys have a few more minutes. But we need to adjourn this.

I just Quick thing.

Yeah. I just need to go over. I sent to all the members of the health council a copy of the page in our boards and commissions manual about open meeting acts. What I do need to say about that is that because we're a state that has to comply with the Open Meetings Act and all our government agencies as well as our boards and commissions, we have to be careful not to create a forum making decisions, formulating policy, developing rules or regulations, or discussing any public business without having an open meeting, which is why we created a working group with less than a core. And we only have four board members on our working group.

We can't have more than that or we'd have to have open meetings. We'd have to have public agenda. We'd have to have meeting minutes kept and so forth. So I just wanna caution you all. We have some new members on the board. And then just for other people, in case they weren't aware of this, when we send out an email to the whole board, like, just to notify them of actually the open meetings act or to tell them about upcoming agendas, events, and everything. That's information sharing. But if you respond to all and you start getting into policy or setting rules or just doing Or

can the health council do this?

Could we do public that? Business, you're close to violating the Open Meetings Act by developing a rolling quorum that the public is not privy to. So just be careful.

Which is a great segue because Katie Twates from County Legal will be doing this training next month at the June meeting so that everyone gets the information.

I just have a question. Yeah? Well, like, if I email you about it's single email. Single

emails are totally

As long as you don't have reply

If to

you have five people on it, you have a quorum because we have nine on the house. Thank you.

Bye, Brandy. Okay.

We're adjourned. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

I appreciate

I'm going close the Zoom room. Take care, everyone.

I

have. We

Yep. Oh, that's

what I was gonna ask. I have

a total brain spot. I'm sorry. I disappeared at Yeah.

I present the data regularly or eight, I'm a whole

person. Who joined

us about it, like, January?

I volunteered last Friday for their first summit. And it was a lot of fun. They invited students ran everything. And they invited four or five other regional schools. And four schools came. And there's about 50 kids. It was awesome. Yeah. Was really awesome. And this all reminds me that were I will not find ourselves.

This that to

And I'm sorry. I misread that.

That's okay. I will send

them out here tomorrow

and say, put this I'll send it out as a

obvious to join from it.

Well, can't you?

Do you want me to reach out to Leticia

I'm just Right. Asking about the Okay.

Good. I

almost ran

off your race.

Thank you

so much.

Especially because we're kids We know the difference.

That's why I'm not Okay.

So we just chose one. Exactly.

Okay. I guess if I was gonna

do something that suggests if you stain it.

Okay. Jeremy? Okay.

Can see if I can

get you that

information from her. I'm sure

they're not. I

can get you in touch with her.

Her name How

long it drives? Same. It's huge. And today, we're gonna talk about

it this afternoon.

And you're welcome to do any of our It's gamified, and it looks

I think she's on staff, so that doesn't count.

I am

I would I would let her I would let her go.

I today, though I'm going to the

resource center here. How many?

I'm gonna go look at the new

resource center. Are opening it today.

Okay. Oh

my god. That's amazing.

That's my thing. I

am working with somebody. Really tough boss. I probably So these

are when our health center meetings are. Okay. So I'll give you this. And this is just kind

of your information because what

we did was initially, we

went through I mean, it's just it's just

clueless that they developed in 2018 of all the people that they interacted

with.

And then