Educators Reach Out to Students : Counseling: Support groups, started by the Ventura district, touches on issues ranging from self-esteem to eating disorders to coping with parents’ divorce.

Last year, Beth’s feelings about her chaotic family life spilled over into her behavior at school.

After her mother was hospitalized for emotional problems, the Ventura High School student began to break down in tears in the middle of her classes. “My friends would try to help me,” the 17-year-old said. “But they couldn’t do anything about it.”

Now, she attends group counseling--at school.

The 11th-grader is one of about 200 students at Ventura High who miss one class per week to attend support groups on issues ranging from self-esteem to eating disorders.

All together, Ventura High has 18 such groups and plans this spring to launch two more--one to bring together female African American students and another to help young people deal with grief. Most of the groups are led by professional counselors who volunteer their time.

Praised by local mental health professionals as both thorough and extensive, Ventura High’s network of support groups won the school a state award last year.

But Ventura High officials say some of the credit for the program goes to the Ventura Unified School District board of trustees, which eight years ago issued a policy requiring school counselors and administrators to actively intervene in the personal problems of their students.

Spurred by concerns about drug and alcohol abuse among students, the district initially launched the school-based support groups, called the student assistance program, at its two high schools.

Now the program has trickled down to the lower grades so that nearly every school offers some type of group counseling, including elementary school support groups for children from divorced families.

The district’s attention to students’ mental health reflects the changing role of public schools, school officials said.

“It’s no longer just teaching the academics,” said Ricardo Nargi, the district’s director of personnel and special education services. “We’ve been thrown into the role of doing a lot of things that families normally would have taken care of.”

Educators said that sometimes they must pay attention to students’ emotional well-being before they can help children achieve academically.

“If you’ve got kids who are for one reason or another emotionally hurting, it’s going to negatively affect their academic performance,” Nargi said. “When they’re not preoccupied with other problems, they can occupy themselves with the task of learning.”

And Ventura High is doing more than any other Ventura school to help students cope with their personal problems, educators and county mental health experts said.

While the district gives all of its schools some state and federal money for their student assistance programs, Ventura High is the only one that takes additional money from other school funds to pay for a full-time program coordinator.

District officials credit the coordinator, Cheryl Meyers, with the program’s success at the high school.

In a survey last year, Ventura High officials found that children who had attended the various support groups had improved their school attendance by 76%. Their grades had also gone up, but only slightly, Meyers said.

Meyers believes that grades did not show more improvement because each group meets for only eight weeks, too short a time to foster a dramatic improvement in students’ study habits.

But school officials said they are thrilled that the support groups are encouraging students to come to school more regularly.

“We’ve been able to keep kids in school,” Principal Jerry Barshay said.

Some students who attend the groups said they look forward to the sessions all week, knowing that they will have a chance to air their troubles in a safe place.

In all of the groups, students agree to keep everything discussed during the sessions strictly confidential. And most groups are single sex--either all boys or all girls--to help students feel more comfortable about divulging their problems with family members or with romantic relationships, Meyers said.

Beth, who began attending the support group after her mother was hospitalized, said she gets more support from the group than she has ever received at home. Beth is the student’s middle name; school officials withheld her first and last names to protect her privacy.

“It makes me feel there’s somebody there that’s helping me through,” she said. “It helps me relax.”

Beth attends a group that focuses on boosting students’ self-esteem. But many of the other groups deal with substance abuse problems and include students caught drinking alcohol on campus who have chosen to attend the counseling sessions instead of being suspended.

In addition to state and federal money, the student assistance programs at Ventura High and other Ventura schools depend on volunteer help from local therapists and counselors to lead the groups.

John Lieberman is community liaison for a local drug-treatment facility that pays for him to spend one full day each week at Ventura High, running five groups on self-esteem, substance abuse and for children of alcoholics.

All of the various groups focus on helping children talk honestly about their problems, he said.

“The major focus in our groups is the kids being able to be honest about whatever’s going on in their lives,” Lieberman said. “If we can give the kids an hour a week, it gives them a safe place where they can dump their guts and get back into class and do the work they need to do.”