Whitworth University has received a $3.4 million grant to create a program intended to address mental health needs within rural Eastern Washington schools and support Spokane-area schools with high refugee and immigrant populations. 

Reneé Schoening, director of school counseling and social-emotional learning programs, says the Whitworth University School-Based Mental Health Partnership Program will increase the total enrollment and diversity of certified school counselors it serves. She says Whitworth is one of 46 schools nationwide to receive that type of funding. 

“The big vision is ultimately to serve underserved kids,” says Schoening, who has fielded numerous calls from rural administrators asking for support and counselors to hire. “This is a clear need in our rural schools.” 

While conducting site visits of her students working in Spokane County schools, Schoening noticed the impact of new refugee families moving to the region. Often, those K-12 students are from war-torn countries and arrive with a degree of trauma, overwhelming schools as they struggle to support those students, she says. 

Spokane-based Thrive International, a nonprofit organization that provides transitional housing and services to refugees and immigrants, is a partner in the initiative.

Mark Finney, executive director of Thrive International and a Whitworth alum, says Spokane has a long-running history of welcoming waves of immigrants. Over the last two decades, the Inland Northwest typically has welcomed between 500 and 600 refugees a year. Since the war broke out in Ukraine, however, close to 3,000 Ukrainian refugees have resettled in Spokane. 

“It’s really important for our educators to be equipped to serve and support multinational and multicultural students,” Finney says. “Globally, half of the world’s refugees are ages 18 and younger. That is about the same percentage we see arriving in Spokane.” 

According to the International Rescue Committee, refugees are people who are forced to flee their country because of war, violence, or persecution, often without warning. An immigrant, by contrast, is someone who consciously decides to leave their home country and move to a foreign country. 

Thrive, which has a staff of 30, says the partnership with Whitworth will enable the organization to expand the work they already do in the community. Thrive offers internship and volunteer opportunities for students to gain firsthand experience with newly arrived populations and collaborates with regional universities on educational activities like expert lectures and research. A key piece of the Whitworth grant will help ensure an immersive learning experience for school counselors and students, Finney says. 

“It will include information about refugees and immigrants, but it also is designed to simulate some of the experiences a refugee goes through in navigating confusing systems,” he says. “Our hope is to make that available to lots of other community members and students.” 

In addition to Thrive International, Whitworth has partnered with five Spokane County School districts: Cheney, Mead, East Valley, West Valley, and Central Valley. In rural communities, Whitworth has partnered with Education Service Districts 101, 123, and 171. The three Education Service Districts account for over 100 school districts in Eastern and Central Washington. 

The five-year grant was awarded by the Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration program through the U.S. Department of Education.

A key component of the proposal includes financial incentives for participating Whitworth students through scholarships, mileage reimbursement, and stipends for field experience. The new grant also will fund a new faculty role for the program, which is housed in Whitworth’s School of Education. Schoening says students in the program already have started being issued scholarships and mileage reimbursements. 

Rural communities and schools may not always have the funds to hire a counselor or may have only one counselor for an entire community, says Schoening, who worked as a counselor for over a decade in rural Montana and was the only therapist in her small town. The program, which holds lectures in the evenings to accommodate working professionals, is meant to remove barriers for people already living in these communities. Schoening adds that there is also room in the budget to accommodate overnight stays when the winter weather may upend travel plans. 

The program is conducted in person and doesn't offer online courses. 

“The in-person experience of learning in an in-person program is invaluable,” Schoening says. “Especially when it comes to programs like counseling. Counseling is more about becoming and being than it is about doing and knowing.”

For instance, Schoening points to two students in the program who make the two-hour drive twice a week from Kettle Falls, Washington, to the Whitworth campus. They claim the in-person experience is incomparable to the experience of colleagues enrolled in online courses. 

The school counseling program dovetails with the social-emotional learning program, sharing several courses, Schoening says. Social and emotional learning focuses on self-awareness, self-management, relationship skills, and problem-solving—all the things a school counselor tries to equip students and others with already, she says. The people who are in the social-emotional learning program are primarily teachers who either want to earn their master’s degree or learn how to develop close relationships with their students.

Also included in the proposal is funding to host a summer retreat for educators in Eastern Washington, Schoening says. The two-day retreat will provide professional development training in burnout prevention, secondary trauma mitigation, and social-emotional learning.

Schoening joined Whitworth University in 2022, moving to Spokane from Deer Lodge, Montana. There, she was a school counselor for 16 years, the executive director of the Montana School Counselor Association, and an adjunct professor at the University of Montana, in Missoula. In July, she was awarded the inaugural Comprehensive School Counseling Programs Trailblazer Award from the Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction for her development of a new curriculum for Whitworth's school counseling program.

Schoening says she set out to create the new curriculum when she arrived at Whitworth because it lacked a class on trauma. Schoening redesigned the curriculum to train school counselors on how to use data to aid decision making and to teach for trauma-informed care.