It's not easy to walk into a classroom in 2025. Maria Modzelewski, is the Director of Special Education for the Iroquois School District explained, "When kids come to school they have other things in their backpacks, besides, notebooks, pens and pencils, so they carry some trauma, stress, anxiety."


Which is why schools like Iroquois decided to invest in mental health resources and services. According to Modzelewski, "Students are presenting with increased mental health needs and it effects our day to day programming and functioning within the school district. So we have students showing up and we are mandated to educate them. We don't have the option to say, 'you know what?', go get yourself set, when you feel like you are a little more grounded and emotionally regulated, why don't you come back and learn. We don't have that."


Besides having various counselors, psychologists, and mental health professionals on staff, they also try to educate their students on the benefits of talking about how they feel.

As Modzelewski said, "The power of relationship is so important. We talk about that a lot within our school district. We have the hash tag one family. We do have the advantage of being a small school district and really being able to get to know our school and our families. And having that sense of trust between our students and our families allows our staff to be a person of influence and trust for our students."

One of the main goals of these programs is to meet students where they are at, and that means bringing in different resources like counselors and therapists into the schools to help those students. School officials said they have seen their hard work pay off when their students succeed, both mentally and emotionally.


"Last year was one of the most challenging years of my career in terms of acuity and the needs our students had and the impact it had not only on our system but on our teachers. There were a lot of tears last year, but also a lot of hope and encouragement and services made available to our students and that our staff benefited", said Modzelewski.