CRAIG
HOCKENBERRY: Mental Health Services in Schools
The early days of my career as a school leader in
Cincinnati Public were filled with some extreme behaviors of students that
pretty much took over my entire day and in many cases my evenings. When I was principal at Oyler School in Lower Price
Hill from the time we turned the lights on until the time we turned them off,
most of the time we were handling behaviors that were totally out of our
control. We had situations that called
for hours of physical restrain, attempted suicides, bizarre sexual behaviors, schizophrenia,
and many others.
As you can imagine we spent countless hours away from instruction
trying to solve these behaviors and protecting other kids. The amount of loss instructional times was
overwhelming and it played a critical role in our early days of poor student
performance, however after many sleepless nights we came up with a way to treat
these mental health issues and became one of the first schools in the region to
develop a mental health
partnership that had a huge positive impact on our school.
I was introduced to several people at St. Al’s Orphanage
who has a 190 plus year history of working with students in the Cincinnati
area. The introduction quickly turned into
a tour of Oyler and then almost immediately turned into them placing a mental health
therapist inside our school. His name
was Bob Ryan and within weeks he had a FULL case load. I remember him coming to me and saying, “Craig
Hockenberry, we need another therapist and you are going to need additional
office space”.
The weeks that followed turned into St. Al’s putting
yet another full time therapist inside our school. The two of them worked together shared some
office space, worked out a schedule, and were very flexible in supporting our
mental health needs. (CRAIG
HOCKENBERRY)
After six months are caseloads at Oyler continue to
grow and grow and within two years of our partnership with St. Al’s we had added
four full time therapist. Before I left to become superintendent of Manchester
Local in Adams County we had added a psychiatrist and a doctor 3 days a week. We had many amazing partnerships at Oyler and
St. Al’s was right up there as being one of the most impactful. They had a very efficient way of dealing with
mental health issues that our students were experiencing by using therapy,
medical, and adjusting placements.
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