Organizational Background: Teach Plus empowers excellent, experienced, and diverse teachers to take leadership over key policy and practice issues that advance equity, opportunity, and student success. Through Teach Plus’s programs, teachers from across the state learn how policy is made and how it impacts their classroom. Teach Plus provides teachers with training and opportunities to change and influence policies at the school, district, and state level—achieving change in schools and in the broader education system. Teach Plus Mississippi has the dual benefits of access to representative educators seeking to guide policy and practice decisions, and has the needs, and unique contexts, of rural communities as a top-of-mind priority.
Project: In phase I, Teach Plus Mississippi collected input from teachers across the state through their signature teacher fellowship and targeted educator questionnaires on how to allocate federal education relief funds, notably the essential need for school districts to invest in mental health services.
In phase II, Teach Plus MS hosted a Youth Mental Health First Aid training for their Policy Fellows, alums, and Mississippi Teacher Network members. Combined with the research done by Teach Plus Policy Fellows, the training provided a basis for the policy recommendations that were created to strengthen mental health legislation under consideration in the state legislature.
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