The St. Joseph County Health Department has distributed nearly a million dollars in new state public health money to area groups.
The health department on Wednesday released a list of 19 organizations receiving a combined $973,000 in Health First grants this year, after the county council recently approved the grants.
The grants’ “school wellness” area drew an application from the South Bend Empowerment Zone, which received the county’s largest grant, for $108,000.
The empowerment zone will use the money to implement a Post-Pandemic Wellness Intervention Project at Navarre Intermediate, and Harrison, Wilson and Coquillard elementaries. The project aims to improve student wellness, along with attendance, behavior, and academic performance.
Ryan Yazel is director of partnerships and athletics for the zone.
"An unprecedented harm that our students experienced needs an unprecedented intervention," Yazel says. "So this is about trying to get our students caught up on the social-emotional and behavioral development needs, so that then the standard systems of our social workers and our counselors can continue to do the work from there."
The zone will forward most of the grant, $75,000, to Gentlemen & Scholars, a local nonprofit that mentors at-risk youth and helps them to regulate their behavior in school despite trauma they’ve experienced outside of school. Gentlemen & Scholars piloted their program last year at Coquillard.
"The anecdotal stories that we received from teachers of the improvement they saw in their students was quite profound, and so we're excited to expand this across all of our remaining zone schools, and to get some concrete data that we expect to come from this."
