I am superintendent at the Miami County Educational Service Center and writing to state my support for the services our organization has received from Empowering to Elevate during the 2022-23 school year.
We currently partner to operate a “day treatment” style classroom for primary students in one of our client districts. Empowering to Elevate provides the mental health and behavioral support and we provide the academic programming. This classroom has been very successful this year. We serve several students with significant social-emotional and mental health needs. Prior to this year, the district struggled to keep many of these students for an entire school day. Now we are seeing significant growth with the children and they are able to receive a full day of education and non-academic supports.
We work primarily with Zach Logan from Empowering to Elevate. Zach and his team have been great partners. They are flexible, proactive, and responsive to the needs of the students. The staff we get to work with are professional and skilled in the area of working with children who have significant challenges.
The mission of the Miami County Educational Service Center is, “For children who face challenges and have ever-changing needs, we are here to believe in them, to support them, and to make a difference.” Empowering to Elevate has helped us continue to support and serve these children.
I would highly recommend Empowering to Elevate to any school who wants to provide a comprehensive solution to meeting the social-emotional and mental health needs of students who are struggling. Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions or for follow-up information.
Empowering to Elevate has done what their name says! They do a great job of Empowering students to be a better version of themselves. Since working with them we have had many successes and I look forward to continued growth and success with our students!
Empowering to Elevate has proven itself to be worth every penny of investment. In a suburban school district serving approximately 3,300 students in grades K–12, we have built what we consider a solid pyramid of multi-tiered supports for our students demonstrating social and emotional needs. We have at least one school counselor in each building, a behavior coaching team in each of our K – 6 buildings, school-based mental health services for those students with and without private insurance, and for those students identified with disabilities we contract for small group resource room services through our local Educational Service Center.
We recognized we were still missing a layer of students that needed more mental health services than we had available. We had students that could benefit from day treatment programs but those were only offered in the larger county to the south of us, but we were competing for limited spaces in those programs. We did our research and met with various entities, both schools and therapeutic groups, to learn about what it would take to bring day treatment to our students. We sought out Empowering to Elevate and they worked with us through every twist and turn to make a K–3 program happen right here in our own district.
Some of our students were so unstable and unsafe the previous year that they were only able to attend partial days, but since participating in this program every child has been supported through every emotional dysregulation and has remained in school for full days. The team’s approach with whole group/small group therapy every single day for half of the school day paired with individual therapy and family therapy has been just the right recipe! We have seen such success that we have expanded this model to our 4–6 grade and E2E is open to tailoring it so we can implement it mid-year. I can’t tell you enough how good it feels to be able to partner with this team to provide a service to kids and their families that we once thought was out of reach.
Our staff is able to depend on E2E’s professionalism, engagement, and structure to allow staff to focus on academics. E2E’s individualized focus and goal setting for each student has ensured them that their goals are truly achievable. Their services have made a world of difference in our classrooms.
