Students to lawmakers: Mental health needs attention

Youth leaders want the Nevada Legislature to dedicate more mental health professionals to schools.

The Nevada Youth Legislature, a leadership and policy program for high schoolers to give state lawmakers insights on what’s important to young adults, pitched about 20 potential bills last week before choosing seven semifinalists for further development. The idea is to get state senators to sponsor one of the proposals at the next session, which convenes in February in Carson City.

Several of the potential bills the teens pitched focused on mental health, noting Nevada’s dismal rankings for youth mental health care and the psychological effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

Introduced by Samantha Lyle of Las Vegas, a proposal calls for a ratio of one psychologist for every 1,000 students.

The current rate is one psychologist for every 1,977 students, according to the National Association of School Psychologists. The association recommends one psychologist for every 500 students.

Another proposal — pitched by Nicole Miller of Henderson — calls for students who commit infractions at school to be referred to counselors to determine if they’re in a mental health crisis before meting out punishment.

Miller said many teens don’t know who their counselor is.

The American School Counselor Association says Nevada had one counselor per 445 students as of 2020-21, which is above the national average of one counselor per 415 students. The group recommends one counselor per 250 students.

Mental Health America ranked Nevada 51st this year in overall youth mental health, indicating a high prevalence of mental illness and low rates of access to care. In nine months of closures to in-person learning during the pandemic, 18 Clark County School District students committed suicide.

“Teachers are not mental health professionals,” Miller said. “Students in school are not able to have access to enough mental health professionals to get the care they require.”

Since the Nevada Youth Legislature

was created in 2007, members have submitted several bills to the Legislature, and two have been passed: exempting underage drinkers from criminal liability if they request medical assistance because of their alcohol consumption, and requiring the Nevada State Board of Education to develop a model curriculum for English language arts and mathematics.

Other topics explored Wednesday by the group included: offering community college credit for youths in juvenile detention centers, making phone calls between children and their incarcerated parents free, and making sexual education opt-out instead of opt-in.

Bus report

Bus driver absences and the number of buses out of service were up, and on-time service was down last year.

A transportation department report said the driver absence rate reached 11% in 2021-22, an increase of 6% from the previous year. The out-of-service bus rate climbed from 11% in 2021 to 14% in 2022. Meanwhile, on-time service fell from 97% to 94%.

The district set targets of a 10% driver absence rate, 12% outof-service rate and 92% on-time service.

Staffing was a continual struggle last year as schools returned to full-time in-person learning.

Students, including special education students for whom busing can be mandated and federally protected, reported missing significant classroom time because of late arrivals. Some sports teams lost transportation to competitions and practices.

To combat the shortage, CCSD cut routes for several urban high schools and partnered with the Regional Transportation Commission to offer free city bus service for students, standardized school start and end bell times for operational efficiency, and gave drivers raises up to $29 per hour — raises of up to 40%.

This school year started with 94% of driver positions filled, the district said.

Scientific triumph

A seventh-grader at the Challenger School in Silverado Ranch is being honored for an environmental engineering experiment studying mangrove reforestation.

Luka Nguyen’s project made him a top-30 finalist out of about 1,800 entrants in the Broadcom Masters, a national program that encourages middle-schoolers to pursue science and engineering.

The finalists will head to Washington, D.C. in late October for an in-person competition.

For the experiment that landed him in the top 30, Nguyen colonized three saltwater aquariums with bacteria that produce nitrates and regularly added fish food to the water.

Mangroves, which are trees that live along tropical coastlines, naturally remove nitrates from saltwater, so Nguyen used the tanks’ nitrate levels to gauge the survival prospects for his mangroves.

He found that the tank with the seedlings had the largest drop in nitrate levels and plant survival over two weeks, leading him to conclude that seedlings, which could be scattered by drone, would be best for recovering damaged ecosystems.

Nguyen took his inspiration from learning how mangroves protected some parts of Bali after an earthquake and related tsunami hammered Indonesia several years ago.

National recognition

The U.S. Department of Education has named Linda Rankin Givens Elementary School a National Blue Ribbon School.

It was one of 297 nationwide to receive the honor, which recognizes overall academic performance on state tests or progress in closing achievement gaps among student groups.

Nevada had two Blue Ribbon Schools this year. The other is Florence Drake Elementary School in Sparks, part of the Washoe County School District.

In addition, Greatschools.org honored 11 local high schools with the College Success Award for preparing students to attend and succeed in college based on alumni enrollment, retention and the need for remedial courses.

Advanced Technologies Academy, College of Southern Nevada High School’s East South and West campuses, Las Vegas Academy of the Performing Arts, Northwest Career and Technical Academy, Palo Verde High School, Southeast Career and Technical Academy, Southwest Career and Technical Academy, Veterans Tribute Career and Technical Academy and West Career and Technical Academy were among Nevada’s 25 schools to get the honor.