The Northwest Catholic District School Board’s (TNCDSB) recently released annual mental health plan identifies four main areas that will guide the board’s student support going forward, a strategy that begins with establishing calm as its foundation.
“This year we have four focus areas, which we’re calling calm, connection, communication and community,” board Mental Health Lead Deegan Slate told the Times. “The mental health system in Ontario is a tiered approach, and so we just want to make sure that people are getting the right service at the right time.”
Those four areas guide the board and its employees’ approach to mental health, starting with establishing a sense of calm in TNCDSB classrooms and offices, Slate said.
“We know that calm is really important. We work with students who are working towards building their emotional regulation skills, and calm is one of those skills,” Slate said. “We do that through working with teachers and administrators to support emotional regulation in the classroom, and some classroom presentations.”
According to Slate, TNCDSB also wants to act as something of a liaison in facilitating students’ connection to mental health services.
“We really want to connect our students and our communities to the right information, and so we want to support students in accessing the services they need when they need it,” Slate said. “If it’s ours or someone else’s, we want to make sure that we’re supporting that connection.”
TNCDSB also aims to increase communication across the board to make all its staff aware of the availability of mental health programming.
“We are hoping to increase the uptake of our surveys. After we do services, we provide surveys, and it’s voluntary and so we are hoping to get them back. Historically, we haven’t had good uptake, and I think there is work to be done on our end around that,” Slate said.
“We want to ensure that we’re utilising those in the best way possible, to get the communication and the feedback back about our program. Communication with other boards and other mental health agencies in our community will ensure we’re all providing similar services, and we’re communicating with each other effectively.”
The final area of focus for TNCDSB is to foester a sense of community.
“We want to be a part of the school communities we work in. So, we want to ensure that we’re participating as a mental health team in events that we organize,” Slate said. “Across Ontario, we know that when students are experiencing stress, which can look like a variety of different things, like worries or anxiety, mental health difficulties, family stress, that the that is going to it is going to have increased difficulty in in their academic learning and achievement.”
Slate sees the TNCDSB plan as a renewed commitment to addressing mental health issues, which have been an increasing concern in recent years.
Ontario’s elementary and high school students are reporting some of the worst mental‑health indicators ever recorded, according to new data from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. More than half of students (51 per cent) said they experience moderate‑to‑serious psychological distress, a rate that has doubled in the past decade.
The survey, conducted in 2023 and released in 2024, also showed a troubling rise in self‑harm and suicidal thoughts. One in five students said they have intentionally harmed themselves, while one in six reported seriously considering suicide within the past year.
“At the beginning of my, my career, being a fresh-eyed university student, I noticed that mental health was an area that was stigmatised in our work and it had me want to focus my studies on psychotherapy in hopes that I could help support and increase access to mental health services,” Slate said.
“I’ve spent my career mostly working in children’s mental health at school boards and in community settings, hoping to increase access to services, because I think that sometimes access can be a really big issue to folks who are experiencing mental health struggles.”
