Paint Valley Alcohol, Drug and Mental Health (ADAMH) Board Manager of Prevention and Evaluation Bill Showman at the monthly Highland County Prevention and Recovery Coalition meeting.
Paint Valley Alcohol, Drug and Mental Health (ADAMH) Board Manager of Prevention and Evaluation Bill Showman spoke about the importance of the upcoming Ohio Healthy Youth Environments Survey (OHYES!) during a meeting of the Highland County Prevention and Recovery Coalition on Wednesday, Oct. 23.
OHYES! is a voluntary and web-based survey used to assess mental health and at-risk behaviors of students in grades 7 through 12 and address specific challenges. It is offered to Ohio school districts by the Ohio departments of Education and Workforce, Health, and Mental Health and Addiction Services.
“It’s been around for about 10 years now, and I have received two grants because of the data that we have received from Pike and Fayette counties,” said Showman. “I want to have the data to have information for our kids in Highland County and know where they are at in comparison to the state.”
If more than one school in a county participates in the survey, all of the information from the county will be accessible, but if only one school participates or if there are less than 50 respondents, the information is not shared.
The deadline for schools to register for the survey is Nov. 8. “If schools don’t do the survey this year, maybe we can at least get the schools talking about it, and maybe they can do it next year,” said Showman.
Showman said information from a previous survey has resulted in a grant from the Appalachian Children Coalition to the Paint Valley ADAMH Board to provide safety training to children.
Additionally, the Paint Valley ADAMH Board has received a $750,000 grant from the One Ohio Foundation because of information provided by the survey. “Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Central Ohio is going to be doing Strengthening Families programming here in all five of our counties as one component of it, and then another component is, in each of our five counties, we wrote in money to do positive alternatives, and that is literally providing positive activities for kids to participate in,” said Showman.
The program is funded through the grant for three years.
Showman said that information from previous surveys has revealed that one in three students in Ohio reported challenges with anxiety, and one in three students in Ohio reported feeling sad and hopeless. He said 115,000 high school students surveyed have experienced depression. He said the survey also measures for poverty, adverse childhood experiences, and societal stressors and reports information about impacts on learning and behavior.
“The glaring information that we had from Pike County, and I think Fayette also, is over 50 percent of the students felt like they didn’t have a trusted adult that they can talk to,” said Showman.
The standard OHYES! survey is 110 questions and an optional version has 120 questions. The survey takes about 35 minutes to administer.
Reach John Hackley at 937-402-2571.
