Nellie Aspelâs career pathâand her passionâcame to her when she was younger than some of the children she now serves.
To keep her bright student occupied, Aspelâs 2nd grade teacher allowed her to help in a classroom for children with disabilities, held in an isolated part of her school building.
âIâve never even seen those kids on the playground before. Why are they off by themselves?â Aspel, 62, remembered asking her grandfather. He replied that they were lucky to even be at school at all.
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In retrospect, he didnât intend to be harsh, Aspel said. School exclusion was simply a fact for many students with disabilities in the 1960s. Nevertheless, âthat had an impact on me,â Aspel said. âI do feel like I had a sense of that didnât make senseâtheyâre kids like me.â
The guiding light of special education is inclusion: ensuring that students with disabilities are provided opportunities to participate in school life to the fullest extent possible.
- Have a plan: Develop a vision and get stakeholder involvement. It also means thinking about how you are going to train new people, and how you are going to assess when changes are needed. Provide the long-term coaching necessary for âa new programâ to become âhow we do business.â
- Build a supportive partnership: You canât lone-wolf it. New initiatives take all the key stakeholders working outside of their silos. To overcome challenges such as turfism, resistance to change, and gatekeeping, people must believe that at the end of the process things will be better and that their contribution made a difference.
- Never give up: Be determined. Be patient. Be focused. There will be challenges, obstacles, and opposition you did not anticipate. Be willing to adjust and negotiate, but never compromise on doing the right thing and doing things right.
But for Aspel, who oversees special education for the 14,100-student , embracing students deemed difficult to teach extends beyond the population of students who have a disability label. Many students in the county need help even if they arenât officially identified with disabilities, particularly children who struggle with mental health.
âIf you can provide mental health supports, itâs going to just impact everything,â said Aspel, officially the executive director of exceptional children. âSometimes we have to stop and teach social-emotional learning skills, before we can provide those academic skills.â
And that support extends to educators as well. Aspel also ensures that school staff are equipped to meet a studentâs needs, or to steer them to a professional provider who can offer deeper assistance.
âPeople get frustrated when they have no options and no tools and no support and no understanding,â Aspel said.
Under Aspelâs leadership, the rural district, located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, has woven a safety net for students with mental health issues from mild to severe. The district has managed to do this through artful braiding of grant money, which supplements the districtâs local, state, and federal funding. That extra financial support is essential in a district where more than half of students come from families eligible for food stamps; the districtâs poverty level allows it to offer free lunch and breakfast to all students. About 60 percent of the student body is white, 27 percent are black, and 7 percent are Hispanic.
Cleveland Countyâs commitment to providing mental health services for its students is also born of necessity, Aspel said. The county is home to dozens of therapeutic foster care providers and group homes that offer residential supports for children with mental health challenges. Last year the district served more than 100 students who lived in one of those placements.
âWe want kids to academically strive, but in reality, to be able to maximize that, we have to be able to meet those other needs as well,â said Superintendent Stephen Fisher. âYou just canât do one thing and not build up the entire scaffold of support for students.â
In Cleveland County, staff in all schools have been trained in recognizing suicide risk in students. All schools also have in place an entry protocol for children who are transferring in from a mental health setting, an alternative school or a correctional settingâa change from previous years, when staff members might have been in the dark about a studentâs emotional or behavioral needs.
The district has also entered into partnerships with community mental health providers, allowing them to provide services to identified students during the school day. More than 4,000 outpatient therapy sessions were provided to students at school during the 2018-19 school year.
Plus, the school district is piloting several other programs, including one that is intended to strengthen the districtâs multitiered systems of support framework. Another district initiative, called the Community Resiliency Model, trains not only school staff and students, but parents and the community at large, on methods to reduce the impact of emotional trauma.
In 2018, Cleveland 69´ŤĂ˝ was one of three North Carolina districts awarded a portion of an $8.8 million grant from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. the money is meant to cut the need for school discipline, reduce dropout rates, and train school staff to recognize and respond to student mental-health needs.
North Carolina chose Cleveland County as a pilot district because the district has already shown success with other programs it uses to improve student behavior.
âThe uniqueness of this grant is thereâs not a scripted approach,â said Sherry Thomas, North Carolinaâs state director of special education and an undergraduate classmate of Aspelâs. Cleveland County is âable to take the tools, a little bit of funding, and theyâre creating that support based on that need,â she said.
With all of these initiatives, the overarching goal is for student mental health issues to be addressed early and efficiently, instead of school staff just bouncing from crisis to crisis.
And thatâs a change from when Aspel became the special education director more than 10 years ago.
âWe were reactive, and I felt like I was a fire chief. I just ran around trying to put out these horrible fires. And I thought, âwe cannot maintain this. We are not in front of anything. We are a day late and a dollar short all the time,â â she said.
She recalled that when she started as director, a number of students were on homebound instructionââout of sight, out of mindââbecause of behavioral issues. She brought them back into regular school with supports. A visit to a âchaoticâ day treatment program for students with mental health needs led to her work to create a research-based therapy model alternative for students at their own schools.
Teri Putnam, the districtâs lead mental health liaison, pointed to a single âport of entryâ for students entering school as a particularly successful initiative spearheaded by Aspel. The process allows all relevant district staff to quickly be brought up to speed on that childâs needsâand ensures that a student has the help he or she needs to remain in school.
âAny child that comes into our county from a residential facility, a group home or a foster home, they come through a single portal,â Putnam said. That means extra work tracking down records, which may be housed in more than one previous district.
But âyou donât just throw a kid who needs multiple supports in a school,â Putnam said. âWe feel really good about not just dumping kids and setting them up to fail.â
With multiple programs underway, Aspelâs goal is to build a sturdy and sustainable culture that isnât dependent on one leader.
âNellie will not let you move forward until you have this very well-thought-out implementation plan. What is the best thing for these people at this location?â said Ryan Etheridge, who is the districtâs Project ACTIVATE evaluator and coach. âIf you donât have a place to support [these programs] itâs not worth implementing.â
But the work also goes deeper than just making sure programs are properly launched, Etheridge said.
âI remember being in [Aspelâs] office one time, and she said, âYou know what? I can deal with working with ignorant people. I can teach them to be better. But I canât deal with people who arenât kind to kids. Thatâs where these things come from, when you start with caring for kids first.â â
People get frustrated when they have no options and no tools and no support and no understanding.
While the district has revamped its mental health supports for students and training for teachers, it has also made it clear that teachers are not to take on the job of mental health professionals.
Chris Bennett, the principal of the 730-student Burns Middle, is piloting some of the expanded work on building student emotional resilience.
âTeachers have been supportive,â Bennett said. âWe went in with the understanding that if we can remove the social and emotional barriers that are getting in the way of core instruction, they will be more successful in their classes.â
With that said, teachers are also told that there are trained counselors available to grapple with problems that are too serious for an educator to handle.
âWe donât want teachers having deep conversations with kids about suicide,â Bennett said. âWe want them to refer out.â
Thomas, the state special education director, said Aspel and her colleagues are always willing to share with other districts what they have learned, and the federal grant will help the county share its knowledge.
An important part of her job, Aspel said, is helping district staff understand that mental health needs mean students need continuous support. That can help steer administrators away from a punitive approach.
âPrincipals are more willing to show a little bit of restraint if they understand that at the end of the day they are not going to be left holding the bag by themselves. There are mechanisms for support. There are options,â she said.
Aspelâs work isnât just focused on Cleveland County. She is continually tapped by the state to share what sheâs learned with other districts.
âOne of the things we are trying to a much better job of is connecting all the mental health support work, so that we do have a unified system,â said Thomas. Cleveland County is âabout three and a half hours away, but we keep tagging her to come in.â
Aspel doesnât mind hitting the road. But, she said, âitâs not that what weâre doing is so magical. Itâs the way that everyone works together to make it happen.â