Sign up for Chalkbeat Tennessee’s free newsletter to keep up with statewide education policy and Memphis-Shelby County Schools.On a Monday night in December, around 20 Memphis and Shelby County students sat in a conference room illuminated by a big screen projecting policy recommendations. The group discussion sounded nearly identical to a local government meeting, aside from the occasional “6-7” joke. One at a time, the high schoolers that make up the Shelby County Youth Council suggested tweaks and changes to the policies they’ve been brainstorming since August to improve local life and especially mental health for young people. “I feel like we’re coming in very strong about the things that we want to do,” said Maura Young, a senior at Collierville High School. “Maybe we need to take smaller steps.”That comment was met with grumbles of disapproval from some. To be fair, a few of the goals sound lofty, like completely eliminating AI use in local government or spending $1 million to create an online hub for local mental health resources. But with budget season just around the corner, the student leaders are trying to convince county and city leaders to fund even one of their youth-centered solutions. They’ve been making their case at county commission and school board meetings since last fall. This school year, the group is focused on addressing youth mental health issues, which have increased in Shelby County and nationwide since the pandemic.“I live in South Memphis, where you see a lot of stuff,” Marc Williams, a sophomore at Hollis F. Price Middle College High School, said. “It could be violence or going to broken homes, dysfunctional homes. It could be that [students] may not have food for a night.”Tennessee ranks as one of the worst states in the country for youth mental health, with high rates of mental health conditions and low access to care. In 2021, for example, more than half of 12-to-17-year-olds struggling with depression in Tennessee did not receive help. Nearly a quarter of Shelby County high schoolers reported seriously considering suicide that year, according to the Centers for Disease and Prevention.The mental health resource hub, one of the group’s top policy recommendations, would include a website and an in-person team to answer phone calls from Shelby County teens.“Resources here are very scattered, and you have to do so much manual research before you can even find services,” Williams said. “It’s very based on like, tell a friend, tell a friend, instead of it being like, ‘Hey, if you need help, come here and you have all the resources.’”Collecting data for the hub would also help identify gaps in local resources, said SCYC member Madison Thomas.“A lot of people are duplicating efforts that don’t need to be duplicated,” Thomas, a junior at Lausanne Collegiate School in East Memphis, said. “Right now we’re very saturated in awareness efforts, but it distracts from concrete resources that could help.”SCYC is also pushing for more school social workers and counselors, wellness rooms for decompression during the school day, and a student advisory board that would regularly meet with county and city leaders to direct mental health initiatives. The student group, also called SCYC, is run by local nonprofit Bridges USA and has been fully funded by the Shelby County government since 2019. Around 25 student members receive $15 per hour wages for their work each year.Zachary Harris, a junior at Lakeland Preparatory School, has been on the council for three years. He said his goal is to get just one of the group’s priorities written into the county, city, or school system budget. In September, the county commission approved a resolution to consider the group’s recommendations for budget spending but haven’t adopted one yet.“Knowing that we can touch the budget even a little bit is all that we need to get started,” Harris told Chalkbeat. “Because if we can do it once, we can do it again.”Youth council trains Memphis students to be public advocatesEach spring, SCYC hosts the Youth Voices Summit to train fellow peers on how to advocate for their own causes. On Feb. 28, more than 130 students showed up at the Bridges building downtown to practice giving public comments that typically happen in local government meetings to a crowd of almost 80 community leaders and 15 elected officials. Dorian Allert, a senior at White Station High School, advocated for hiring more school mental health professionals. Her school, which holds almost 2,000 students, has only one social worker and one psychologist on staff.“School counselors and social workers are overwhelmed, overworked, and underpaid,” Allert said. “Students looking for mental health support have to wait days or even weeks to get an appointment.”It was MSCS Board Chair Natalie McKinney’s second time attending the summit. This year, she was drawn to SCYC’s proposal to create a youth mental health advisory board. “That has been an ongoing and persistent ask from our youth since the pandemic,” McKinney said. “What I always stress is this has to be a collaborative effort because we are a school system. We are not the mental health system. So we need to figure out how to align our systems and resources.”McKinney said she plans to continue working with student leaders to figure out how to best implement their vision. “I firmly believe in, ‘don’t do it to us, do it with us,’” she said, referencing a phrase echoed by SCYC leaders.Harris, the three-year SCYC veteran, said the group knows its work isn’t a short-term project. He hopes that county and city leaders like McKinney advocate for SCYC recommendations in upcoming budget creation and approval meetings.“This is going to take years and years of work,” he said. “But the satisfaction of knowing that I at least helped one person out there through just talking to somebody, that’s perfect for me.”Bri Hatch covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach Bri at bhatch@chalkbeat.org.
