BUSD names mental-health and wellness coordinator
John Costanzo was recently named the Burbank Unified School District’s Mental Health & Wellness coordinator.
Just months after Burbank school officials approved Burbank Unified’s first-ever mental-health and wellness plan in April, they named John Costanzo, a longtime school psychologist, as the district’s mental-health and wellness coordinator.
“It’s long overdue that we actually started trying to deal with the whole child, and that’s going to be your charge,” said board member Larry Applebaum during a school board meeting last week when school officials announced Costanzo as the new coordinator.
As part of his duties, Costanzo will help establish a mental-health and wellness center at John Burroughs High School, modeled after the one that opened at Burbank High this past school year.
He’ll also help streamline referrals, coordinate teacher training on positive-behavior intervention and implement social and emotional curriculum, among other efforts across Burbank’s 20 schools to address students’ physical, emotional and social well-being from kindergarten through 12th grade.
“In trying to look at the whole student, we’re trying to look at the whole district,” he said during an interview Tuesday at Burbank High’s wellness center.
John Costanzo, who was recently named the Burbank Unified School District’s Mental Health & Wellness coordinator, talks at his office at Burbank High School, on Tuesday, July 26, 2016.
The center, which opened last spring as part of an initiative by the Family Service Agency, provides a space where students can receive counseling from counselors employed by the agency.
Starting this fall, students can also receive counseling from 15 peers who spent the last semester participating in training from the Family Service Agency in how to talk to fellow students about significant issues they may be facing.
Costanzo noted that the Family Service Agency, which has provided counseling to Burbank Unified students for years, saw about 2,000 students last year, and their partnership with Burbank Unified will help accelerate the implementation of Burbank Unified’s own mental-health plan.
The plan was pushed, in part, by Burbank school board member Steve Ferguson and made a reality after months of planning and support from Burbank Unified administrators, fellow board members and parents.
“It’s much more difficult to be a student nowadays,” Costanzo said. “The expectations, the demands are much higher. There are pluses and minuses there. We are giving our kids more starting in [prekindergarten], in terms of readiness and reading skills and a lot of important things. But the expectation — the GPA that you need to go to a UC [school] far exceeds what it was 20 years ago. Social media also places a number of demands…being social looks very different than it did 20 years ago.”
In addition to those demands, the depressed economy in recent years has put pressure on families.
A combination of factors have led educators to note increased instances of students dealing with stress, anxiety and signs of depression, he said.
“When I graduated from school, you didn’t see kids having anxiety or panic attacks, and you do nowadays. Kids come in and they define a panic attack. I think some of these things are happening at younger ages,” Costanzo said.
He said he’s looking forward to expanding the district’s ability to address students’ needs.
“We are truly blessed in Burbank to be leading the way and developing a model that I think can sustain for years and years and service a lot of kids,” Costanzo said of the plan, adding that schools need to address students’ well-being if they want to see the students succeed academically.
“This is the future of education,” he said.
