School Safety and Mental Health Awareness: Recommendations from K-12 Texas Public School Teachers.

Background: Mass school shootings have created fear in the American public. The results of this fear have been the hardening of schools, lockdowns, and active shooter drills, yet the mass shootings have not ended. The goal of this study was to analyze the mental health awareness of K-12 public schools teachers in Texas with a goal to identify the connections between mental health awareness and school safety.

Methods: Data were used from an archival database of K-12 teacher responses in the 2020 Texas Educators' Needs Assessment Regarding School Safety and Victims Services to assess the current state of student mental health concerns and the connection of these concerns to school safety. This needs assessment included one mixed methods survey that was collected from Texas K-12 educators and Texas educators working in higher education in 2020. The original study included 25,161 usable responses (6.1%). For the purpose of this study, only K-12 teacher responses were used in the analysis. The K-12 teacher participants (n = 19,888) included the following institutional levels: (a) special setting, 2,919 (14.7%); (b) elementary school, 6,813 (34.3%); (c) middle/intermediate school, 4,189 (21.1%); (d) high school, 5,864 (29.5%); and (e) district level, 103 (0.5%). A total of 8,053 participant's qualitative responses and 10 of the original quantitative survey questions from the archival data were used to identify all findings in the study.

Results: Collected qualitative and quantitative participant responses' outlined a need to improve student mental health by strengthening the focus on supporting all stakeholders (e.g., teachers, parents, counselors, and students) in mental health awareness and education. Participant comments focused on the lack of training, counselor support, and community support regarding the mental health needs of their students.

Conclusion: Recommendations to improve student mental health that were developed from this study identified key goals in school counselor role and responsibility to student mental health, increased involvement of community agencies, and improvement to in-school mental health counseling. Final recommendations of this study were focused on the need to improve student mental health if stakeholders want to develop a positive school environment. The failure to build an environment that is focused on student mental health will continue to affect the goal to improve overall school safety.