The Lee County School District will now create its own script and storyboarding for Wellness Wednesday videos, which will discuss substance abuse and prevention, human trafficking and mental and emotional wellness.
The school board approved the $100,000 agreement with Dreamtime Entertainment, which is funded through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, ESSER II. The agreement will terminate on Nov. 1. With the approved agreement, Dreamtime Entertainment will do the video production of the required health instruction lessons, which will be shown to sixth through 12th grade students.
“The purpose of this contract with DreamTime Entertainment is actually to create the video lessons that our own mental health team members have written the curriculum for under the three state board education rules for required health instruction,” School Counseling and Mental Health Director Lori Brooks said. “In 2019 those three state Board of Education rules went into effect for instruction under substance use and abuse prevention, human trafficking, or child trafficking prevention and mental and emotional wellness.”
She said all required health instruction topics that the state Board of Education determined that if students were not receiving health class every year in grades kindergarten through 12th, the instruction of those specific topics needed to be scaffolded instruction that occurred annually.
“We were previously renting curriculum through videos,” Brooks said. “It was really good just-in-time product, but our intent has always been to create our own curriculum for our students using our own health professionals and mental health professionals. Now we need to take that curriculum and turn it into video instruction for those Wellness Wednesday lessons.”
Brooks said their intent is for every Wellness Wednesday video instruction to be posted with an accompanying parent guide.
“Our parents can view what the students are viewing and actually have their own parental discussions with their children and support that learning,” she said. “It will be live on our site every month.”
There is notification within the parent guide, which is part of the code of conduct.
“We release a letter when we are getting ready to engage in our Wellness Wednesday discussion,” Brooks said. “We push that out to parents and guardians.”
She said there is no opt out for this health instruction, which is another reason the district is leaning into providing parent discussion points.
“This has been a difficult journey,” Brooks said. “While we understand the value of engaging students in this learning there are various levels of comfort. This is required health instruction and these are our health standards.”
With the current program being used, Brooks said the videos included a script for teachers to read. The intent is for the new videos to engage through a structure that will lay out the topic, have pause and reflection options, as well as tools for each student to put in their emotional tool box, which will be expanded from sixth through 12th grade.
Before the videos are made the script and storyboarding will go before such focus groups as DAC, Student Advisory, parents, teachers and the mental health team. The hope is to get the feedback during the last quarter of the school year into the summer.
The school board asked how teachers are being identified to implement these health videos, as well as making sure no further work is being put on teachers.
“Their work load and comfort level will be easier and higher because they don’t have to read the script and do all these other pieces,” Brooks said.
Currently the Wellness Wednesday videos are being embedded during science classes at the middle school level and either during the first block, or the end of the second block at the high school level. She said none of the videos are shown at the end of the school day.
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