Scott County Schools to launch pilot to support bereaved children; one in nine Kentucky children lose a parent by the age of 18

Scott County Schools will launch a pilot to support bereaved students with a Kentucky Association of Health Plans grant through the Kentucky Center for Grieving Children & Families. From left: Liz Yandell, the schools' assistant director of student services; Supt. Billy Parker; Leila Salisbury, founder and executive director of the center; and Tom Stephens, president and CEO of KAHP. (KAHP photo)

By Melissa Patrick

Kentucky Health News

The Kentucky Center for Grieving Children & Families, launched in 2021, has received a big grant that will allow it to team up with Scott County Schools for a pilot program to support children experiencing grief and bereavement, to begin later this month. 

“This initiative is a great opportunity to support the mental health and well-being of our students, a goal that is very important to our district, schools, and community," Supt. Billy Parker said in a news release. 

Parker told Spectrum News of a student who lost both parents to overdoses: "That was the first student I thought of when I thought about the fact we were getting this grant. Sometimes, I don't think people realize until they start digging into what the root cause of some of the issues for our students are."

The two-year, $90,000 grant is from the Kentucky Association of Health Plans, the trade group for companied offering health insiurance in the state. It will allow the center to offer 16 school-based, 11-week, facilitated grief-support groups for students at all levels in Scott County Schools. It will also include district-wide staff training on best practices for grief support in the classroom and the school setting at large, says the release. 

“Studies have connected childhood bereavement to poorer physical health outcomes (including early death), increased incidence of depression, mental health issues, and far higher levels of substance use and juvenile justice involvement,” Tom Stephens, president and CEO of KAHP, said in the release. “By providing these school-based services, the goal is to decrease the feelings of isolation in students with death losses and to provide coping skills that can help students manage the emotional distress caused by these losses.”

Bereavement is the state of having lost a significant other to death and Grief is the personal response to the loss, according to  the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs. 

According to state data modeling, one in nine Kentucky children will lose a parent or sibling by the age of 18, with 25% of parental bereavements caused by overdose. "This represents more than 40,000 Kentucky children, enough to fill Rupp Arena nearly twice over," says the release. 

“We appreciate the generosity of KAHP,” Leila Salisbury, founder and executive director of the center, said in the release. “This grant helps create a service model for school districts around Kentucky.”

Salisbury, former director of the University Press of Kentucky, launched the center in 2021 with a mission of "supporting children, youth and families as they grieve and grow," according to the nonprofit's website.

The site says the center offers free school-based grief support groups in several Fayette County schools; free community-based grief support groups for children along with concurrent parent and caregiver support groups at Tates Creek Christian Church; a teen-led online peer-led grief support group for teens aged 13-18 called Peer Healing; and an online anine grief support group for young adults aged 18-30 through a partnership with Kate's Club of Atlanta. 

It also offers training and education in youth bereavement and provides community and mental health referrals for additional services and support. And, it offers a webpage that includes resources about coping with grief.

Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky offers free webinar, 'Kentucky Inspired: Grieving in the Time of Covid-19,' at noon Oct. 29

The Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky will host a free, one-hour webinar on death, dying and grief during the covid-19 pandemic.

"Kentucky Inspired: Grieving in the Time of Covid-19," is part of the foundation's "Health for a Change" series. It will be offered at noon ET Oct. 29. It is free, but registration is required. Click here to register. 

Karen Cassidy, founder and executive director of the Hildegard House, Kentucky's first and only comfort-care home, will lead the conversation around these important questions: What have you lost during this time? What does that feel like? What about the people who have died alone? How can we begin the conversation on grief? What resources and supports are available? 

Cassidy is a former palliative care nurse practitioner and nursing school teacher. 

If you are struggling with grief, several care and crisis lines are available to help: Hosparus Health Grief Center, 800-264-0521; Bluegrass Care Navigators, Grief Care 855-492-0812; National Suicide Prevention Lifeline,800-273-TALK (8255); National Youth Crisis Hotline, 800-442-HOPE (4673); and  Crisis Text Line, Text HOME to 741741.

Health for a Change webinars are recorded and posted, along with slide presentations, on the foundation's website. 

Grayson County newspapers introduce health department's new public health director, who says he's going after human trafficking

Grayson County Public Health Director Joshua Embry
(Photo by Matt Lasley, Grayson County News-Gazette)

By Al Cross
Kentucky Health News

LEITCHFIELD, Ky. – Health departments in Kentucky usually operate in the background, or under the radar of local news organizations, unless a health issue arises. But their work is important, so they deserve more regular attention, and both weekly newspapers in Grayson County did that when it got a new public health director.

Some residents of the west-central Kentucky county may have been startled when they read a headline in the Grayson County News-Gazette saying that Joshua Embry was going to "address human trafficking." He told reporter Matt Lasley, "Based on our clinic services, we know for a fact it is happening in our community. . . It's definitely happening in small, rural towns."

"According to Embry, human trafficking is not solely related to sex, it also includes human labor, and can be drug-related as well," Lasley reports. "In many instances, people are brought into the country and forced to provide unpaid labor to work off a debt to the person who brought them here."

Also, "Underage children can be victims of human trafficking without ever leaving their homes, by being deceived into sharing explicit images of themselves with people online. These images are then widespread, which falls under the umbrella of human trafficking, health department officials say."

January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month, and Embry "is beginning an awareness campaign aimed at educating the community on the issue and how to address it and report it," Lasley writes.

The front-page story in the county's other weekly, The Record, briefly mentioned human trafficking and was more general, reminding readers of the health department's wide range of services and responsibilities, which include "grief counseling services for families who've lost a child."

"People hear 'health department' and they automatically think STD tests" for sexually transmitted diseases, Embry told The Record's Rebecca Morris. "I want to be able to educate the community on all the programs we have. A lot of people just don't understand the great resource the health department is."

Embry, 32, began work last month after almost seven years at Breckinridge Health, which operates Breckinridge Memorial Hospital in Hardinsburg. After a brief teaching career, he started as an emergency-room admittance clerk and ended as coordinator of compliance, emergency preparedness and safety. He told Morris that health care is a "field you definitely have to be called to."

One could say that about the weekly newspaper business, too. I was editor of the News-Gazette (and general manager of a predecessor, The Leitchfield Gazette) before the Louisville Courier Journal hired me away in 1978. One of my successors as editor, Jenny Searcy, started The Record a few years later.

Grayson may be the only county in the U.S. with weekly newspapers operated by competing chains, which usually don't buy papers with less than $1 million in annual revenue, and certainly not in competitive markets. But Landmark Community Newspapers of Shelbyville bought The Record to give advertisers in its Elizabethtown daily, The News-Enterprise, an opportunity to buy combination ads. It ran a circulation campaign, managed by Searcy, that won it the local circulation lead and thus the public-notice ads. The News-Gazette went through several owners and is now owned by Paxton Media Group of Paducah, which bought in a 2017 package deal with two other nearby papers and moved it from twice-weekly to weekly publication. The county of 27,000 also has an AM-FM radio station with an active news department, WMTL-WKHG in Leitchfield, a town of about 7,000.