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Essex Author Writes Book on School Psychology

Five years ago, when psychologist Kathleen Laundy was gravely ill, she grasped that despite doctors’ forebodings, she still had things she needed to do. After a month at Yale-New Haven hospital and a month in rehabilitation facility, Laundy recovered from endocarditis complicated by a staphylococcus infection.

“When the infection happened, I realized I was not going to live forever, and I realized there were things I wanted to say,” she recalled.

The result is her new book, Building School-Based Collaborative Mental Health Teams: A Systems Approach to Student Achievement. It advocates a cooperative model for the professionals from school psychologists and social workers to marriage and family therapists who are now part of school mental health teams.

The book underlines the fact that schools today are about much more than reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic as teachers and administrators realize that stumbling blocks to effective learning come from many sources outside the classroom. Laundy, who lives in Essex, regularly consults with local school systems on creating teams to deal with problems from autism and attention deficit disorder to family stresses that prevent effective outcomes.

Laundy, whose practice has focused on family therapy, particularly for families where one member is suffering a chronic illness, is a past president of the Connecticut Association for Marriage and Family therapy, and has also been a clinical faculty member of the Family Therapy Department at Central Connecticut State University for some 18 years.

Since 2007, licensed family therapists have been certified to work in school settings.

“The goal is to provide support so that students can achieve,” she said. “It is difficult to be present in a classroom if a child experienced trauma the night before.”

Starting in the l970s, federal law has mandated a new approach to dealing with student emotional issues, recognizing the need for plans and a staff to deal with such problems. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and subsequent legislation, requires schools to educate an array of students with wider ranging problems than public schools had approached before.

In Connecticut, Laundy pointed out, state law now encourages all teachers, not just special education teachers, to take a course during their training in social and emotional learning. The state legislature passed a law advocating such training as a result of the mass killing of students and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. The perpetrator of the outrage who shot himself at the crime scene, was widely described in newspaper reports at the time as suffering from serious emotional disabilities. Laundy contends that a collaborative psychological approach to Adam Lanza as a young student may have had a beneficial influence on his actions.

“The tragic life of Adam Lanza might have been altered if he had not fallen through the systemic cracks of contemporary U.S. education and mental health,” she writes.

Now, Laundy noted, schools address emotional and social intelligence into the classroom with programs on topics like bullying, drug prevention, and appropriate social skills as well as providing more intensive lessons for smaller groups of students and one-on-one counseling.

However, she fears the very prevalence of support personnel may lead to another problem: overspecialization and too narrow a focus. It is not enough, she maintains, to have a variety of psychological disciplines available; what is required that staffers from guidance counselors to marriage and family therapists who work in schools collaborate for an effective plan to help students.

The results of such collaboration, she argues, are more than amity and good will. Such a collaborative approach can enable school systems to deal with students locally who might have otherwise had to be sent to special schools, some residential, at local taxpayer expense.

The approach to school-based mental health services, according to Laundy, varies throughout the United States

At the moment, Laundy, who grew up in Kentucky, is beginning another book, this one with a much more personal theme, the story of her sister Christie, born with great intellectual and physical disabilities. Though her parents were told that Christie would not survive, she lived for 12 years. Laundy and her entire family were supported by a range of services and that experience still animates her belief in a team approach to problem solving.

“We learned to do things together, how to value all human beings,” she said. “Christie had a profound effect on our entire family. And our whole family was helped by the therapy.”

Building School-Based Collaborative Mental Health Teams: A Systems Approach to Student Achievement by Kathleen C. Laundy is available through Amazon and on Laundy’s website www.kathleenlaundy.com.