The Gyeonggi-do Office of Education Staff Welfare Center signed a memorandum of understanding with the Suwon Mental Health Project Group on June 16 to build a cooperation system for the mental health of school staff. It widens the response, which used to circulate only within schools and the education office when staff members face a psychological crisis, to local mental health agencies. The agreement has three items: crisis intervention and follow-up support, consultation on mental health projects, and support for prevention and promotion education.
The Suwon Mental Health Project Group is not the name of a single agency. It is an umbrella name covering six places, including the Suwon Happiness Mental Health Welfare Center, the mental health welfare centers for children and adolescents, for adults and for older adults, the Addiction Management Integrated Support Center and the Suicide Prevention Center. The agency a teacher is connected to differs according to the individual's situation.
The roles are divided. The Suwon Mental Health Project Group takes charge of the initial response, such as psychiatric risk assessment, emergency psychological intervention, and transfer to medical institutions and hospitalization referrals. The Staff Welfare Center runs professional psychological counseling and recovery programs, and links them to its existing in-house psychological support system to look after follow-up management and return to duty.
This division of work matters because it shows where the gaps had been. Whom to contact at the moment of a crisis, and how to return to the classroom after going to a hospital, were close to matters that individuals had to solve on their own. The agreement put names to those two ends so that a different agency takes responsibility for each.
The Staff Welfare Center said it would take this agreement as a starting point and sign agreements in turn with the mental health welfare centers in the 31 cities and counties of Gyeonggi Province by July. Suwon is the first. Whether the center, led by director Han Geun-su, can create the same form of connection with the remaining 30 cities and counties will become clear within next month. Implementation conditions such as the term of the agreement and the personnel to be assigned were not disclosed in this announcement.
Around the same time, a different voice came out of school counseling sites. The National Union of Professional Counseling Teachers put out a criticism of the Ministry of Education's suicide prevention measures. Although the details of the measures and the union's demands have not yet been released, the fact that counseling staff who face students raised an objection to the form of the policy has itself been left on record.
The system for school staff and the system for students still run separately. The beneficiaries of this agreement are school staff, and those the counseling teachers deal with are students. Yet the two groups are inside the same school. It is hard to see the crisis on one side being prevented while the burnout on the other is left alone.
In the regions there have also been attempts of a different grain. The Gyeongju Mental Health Welfare Center in North Gyeongsang Province held a training session on "Understanding Slow Learners and Support Strategies" for some 60 local elementary school teachers on June 10. What this center, led by director Park Jae-hong, dealt with was children and adolescents with borderline intellectual functioning, in the IQ range of 71-84. It is a case in which a local mental health agency entered the school by broadening teachers' understanding.
The Suwon agreement and the Gyeongju lecture are different projects, but there is a point where they meet. Mental health infrastructure outside the school has begun to be connected with work inside the school. Until now, mental care in schools depended in large part on the disposition of individual teachers or the interest of the principal.
The schedule of 31 cities and counties by July is short. Signing an agreement and designating the staff member who will actually take the calls are different things. What is needed to fill that gap can be known only after the first case has actually worked.
