At the moment at Kapiti College all teachers are told to refer students who they think are at risk or need a bit of guidance to the counsellor. Although they are trained to deal with students problems and mental health issues, the counsellors at Kapiti College are extremely over worked and it must be extremely hard for them to put 110% into every student when they have so much to deal with and they also teach classes at college. We also have a Professional development group here at Kapiti College which is a group of teachers who work together to try and teach emotional resilience in students at Kapiti College. When looking into this policy, it is the first time I discovered/heard about this professional development group, which I think is an awesome idea.

As a part of our social action there are some things we could do at Kapiti College. We could try get more teachers, students and parents involved with the professional development group to try and benefit as many students at Kapiti College as possible. I also looked on the mental health foundation website and found some guidelines to make New Zealand schools more equip to deal with mental illness efficiently and ethically. There is many steps and guidelines within this resource that I think will be effective in increasing mental health awareness within our school and out ability to deal with it and help as many people as we can.

The reason behind this petition is to get as many people on board as possible and by showing this to Mr Kane we can hopefully implement more stratergies and resources like the ones on the Mental Health foundation website to help deal with mental health within Kapiti College.   

https://www.mentalhealth.org nz/assets/ResourceFinder/ guidelines-for-mentall- healthy-schools.pdf