GU donor is paying for part-time mental health counselor at Logan Elementary
Logan Elementary School on Spokane’s North Side has added a second mental health counselor to deal with a backlog of students needing assistance. The part-time position has been funded by a Gonzaga University donor, in partnership with the university’s Opportunity Northeast program.
Logan is a unique school, said Principal Jessica Vigil, and 75% of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Several are homeless. The school’s full-time mental health therapist can handle a caseload of 23 students and there were more than that who needed help, Vigil said.
“We have a high mobility rate,” she said. “The majority of our families are dealing with some type of trauma. We needed another layer of service.”
Molly Ayers is the senior director of the Center for Community Engagement at Gonzaga University. Even before the Opportunity Northeast program was launched in February 2020, the university has had a long relationship with Logan. “Gonzaga has been involved with Logan for 25 years through mentoring programs,” Ayers said. “It’s our neighborhood.”
Opportunity Northeast is a place-based initiative to determine how the university can best work in the community to shift outcomes and address disparities, Ayers said. In the fall of 2019, the university did an assessment to determine key health care gaps. The need for a second mental health counselor at Logan quickly rose to the top of the list.
Gonzaga tried, unsuccessfully, to get grant funding to pay for a second counselor. Word of the need went out to university donors, one of whom volunteered to fund the part-time position at Logan for three years.
Ayers and Vigil hope the counselor is just the beginning. “One of our priorities for elementary schools is to have a school-based health clinic,” Ayers said. “This is the first step toward that.”
Vigil said the school district is still determining how to put a health clinic on the school’s campus. The Logan Neighborhood doesn’t have any walk-in medical clinics and Vigil said she believes having an in-school clinic would help improve student attendance because it would be easier for students to get their health needs met.
The clinic would be open to all local residents, not just students and their families, Ayers said. The clinic would be staffed by Gonzaga nursing students as well as medical professionals. “We want to increase access to health care in the neighborhood,” she said.
Logan Elementary is not the only local school to benefit from a partnership with Gonzaga University. The university also has mentoring and tutoring programs at nine schools in northeast Spokane, including Rogers High School.
The university has also focused on food security. A weekly meal that is open to all is served every Tuesday at Logan from 5 to 6 p.m. Other community meals are held at the O’Malley Senior Apartments and Gonzaga Family Haven.
Gonzaga also co-sponsors the Bite2Go program at Shaw Middle School that sends weekend meals home with students in need every Friday. The program serves 85 students.
The goal of the variety of programs is to promote whole health for residents in the neighborhood, Ayers said.
Vigil said the school is happy to continue its longtime partnership with Gonzaga. “I just really believe in this project,” she said.