In episode 178 of the Teacher Career Coach podcast, Elizabeth chats with Karen Foley, president of JPA Chicago, about the mental health crisis in schools and the support needed for educators and students.
Karen discusses her shift from insurance to nonprofit work and they explore JPA Chicago’s initiatives, like the “Connect to Kids” program, which helps teachers manage classroom challenges. Karen highlights the importance of social-emotional development and the unique skills teachers bring to nonprofit work. The episode underscores the critical need for mental health support in education.
Listen to the episode in the podcast player below, or find it on Apple Podcast or Spotify.
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Episode Transcript:
Elizabeth: Hi and welcome back to our next episode. As students return to school after the pandemic, mental health challenges have reached a crisis point. Only 48 percent of public schools can fully meet students mental health needs. A number That’s decreasing amid rising demand. Today we meet with Karen Foley, the president of JPA Chicago, a nonprofit, to discuss how they are addressing these challenges.
We talk about their Connect2Kids program that supports teachers, and on how we need to support educators at the core to build from here. Hope you enjoy this episode!
Well, welcome back everyone today. We’re very excited to have Karen Foley with us. Welcome, Karen. Good to be here. Thanks. Thank you. Well, we’re so excited to learn today about you, what your organization does, JPA Chicago.
So we’d love to learn first a bit about your background and what got you passionate about working with students and being in education. What a great question. I love to ask this question of other people because I usually find life is not a linear progression for most people. It wasn’t for me. I grew up Sitting on the front porch with both grandmothers, but in the back porch of my grandparents home, um, was my grandfather’s insurance business.
And so I loved to be out there playing with his tools and his instruments, and pretending I was a businesswoman. So, that was my dream. A first generation college kid, went to college, went to New York City, living the dream, uh, working in insurance. Not exactly the same type, I was doing more on the financial side of things, but you know, moving up in my career, became a chief marketing officer of a large insurance company, and it, uh, had an opportunity to go into the line management, which was sort of the next step for me.
And I It’s what I’ve dreamed of my whole life long, but our son at that time was little and I remember looking down, it was four o’clock in the morning and I looked down in the shower and there was a lump and it was my son. I said, honey, what are you doing here? And he said, I just, I just miss you mom.
And so, I took a step out of that career. And, um, but one of the things that I did in that role was, uh, work on the foundation. And the foundation was building playgrounds for kids and doing all kinds of things. And while I love the finance part, you know, I went and got an MBA I was always pulled towards the children.
And so it feels very natural that after a while, my son fired me, didn’t want to be the only corporate project, uh, this mother, and, um, but wanted a lot of flexibility. And I went into the not for profit working with young people. And did that for about a decade and then moved into this role with mental health.
Because, like many teachers, um, I found that the social emotional well being and functioning of kids was a prerequisite to them learning anything at all. So that was a long introduction, but that’s why I’m here. That’s very interesting, because I was going to ask how you got from marketing, um, into helping and supporting children.
And with that, can you tell us a little bit about your organization and what you all do? Sure. JPA has an old fashioned sounding name. It’s The Juvenile Protective Association, because it was founded in 1901 by Jane Adams. And I don’t know about you, but I grew up reading about Jane Adams, uh, libraries in the book or books in the library, pulling those things out.
And so she was always kind of a hero. so it was such a privilege to be able to come here and work at the same agency she had a hand in starting. Wow. And JPD provides, we’ve always focused on kids and families and, and somewhere in the fifties it started to move more into social work and therapy.
And for many, many years, three decades or more, four decades, we had a clinic here in our location. And that expanded about 20 years ago to start working in schools for the obvious reason that’s where the kids are and it makes it easier for them and for the parents. And the work has just been amazing. So we can talk a lot more about that, but we provide mental health services in schools, not only to kids, but also to teachers.
And we have very strong research and evaluation capabilities here. And did you say 1901? 1901. Wow. Wow. I know I was talking to a friend of mine who is the CEO of the Knight Ministry here in Chicago, and we were both celebrating big anniversaries. And she was asking me what we’re going to do for our 125th.
And I said, I don’t know, but I think it better gets. It’s a really good question. We’re so focused on getting through the end of the year, but we’re going to have to start doing some big planning because it’s a huge milestone to have an agency that’s been so consistently supportive of children and families and now educators.
And so in your role, it sounds like, um, you went to non profits and now you work in them and are very familiar with them. Can you tell us a little bit about just how they operate? How, how do they get funding? And, and just for teachers and educators out there, I know just breaking into that and figuring out what’s in your community, what’s available.
Are there things to help support, If you could talk a little bit about that. Yeah. Thank you for the question too, because not many people want to know how do we keep the lights on, but I will say it’s not easy often. Most of our funding comes through donations, and those could be through donations people make at our events.
We have a very active foundation community here in Chicago, who’ve been very generous, and, uh, we have many long term supporters. Uh, and we We just started billing Medicaid a couple of years ago as a means of expanding. That is not a free way at all. There are a lot of costs associated with being able to be in the position of billing and it puts an extra burden on our therapists, but it has allowed us to expand.
So those are the main ways in which we are generating revenue. And I will say recently we’ve been walking around, uh, talking to the principals with something that we call our, our achievement report card. And it lays out in one place. all the services that we’ve provided, the outcomes of those services, the evaluations, how many of the teachers or others in the school actually filled them out because we need all that data to get the money to provide the services.
And we also gave them a financial breakout. Here’s what it costs us to deliver this service to you. And here’s your contribution if you’ve made one. And let’s talk about what we might need to do in the future to keep this thing sustainable. And it’s been wonderful conversations. Principles have been eating it up and using the data in their behavioral health teams and elsewhere.
So it’s been a, I’m really excited. It was a bigger undertaking than I thought it would be, but now that we have been doing it a little bit, we’ve got the methodology down, and we’ll continue to share not only what we do, but what’s the outcomes. What are the outcomes of what we do? Because that’s really what we all care about.
How are the kids doing? How are the teachers doing? Thank you for sharing that. Sure. Go ahead, you were about to say. No, I said, and of course parents, you know, I need to be sure to include them because they are an essential ingredient. It would be like a cake without, I don’t know, flour. So we need the parents.
Absolutely. And when you just spoke about the parents, I remember a couple districts where I’m located or implementing these family and community engagement centers within the district. So it’s helpful and just nice to see some of these places and districts starting to bring that in realizing, you know, if we don’t have the family, the parents, the guardians, we really can’t keep this all together to support the kids.
Right, exactly. You know, and teachers. Teachers get that at a, at a, you know, basic level. They understand that. It’s very hard to engage certain parents now. I remember when I first started here at JPA, uh, one of my colleagues, Dr. Steve Buddy, told me sometimes the only thing the parent can do, and it is a loving act, but it’s all they can do, is sign the consent form for treatment.
And we try to keep that in mind. But to the extent that you have parents that want to get engaged and you make it easier for parents and more engaging, um, I think having their voice in the equation is essential. I feel that way as a parent myself. And what type of students and communities does your nonprofit serve?
So we’re working primarily here in the city of Chicago. It’s in the news a lot lately and as ground zero. And we, we are the second largest, um, we have the second largest Hispanic Latine population in the United States. Uh, we are serving communities, uh, in the city, uh, many of which are under resourced and under served.
And so that’s really our main population. Okay, and then how do schools get involved with this or learn about this to be able to access your support? But mostly through word of mouth, we have not had to do much selling. You know, the mental health crisis has not gone away. COVID may be over, but I technically, perhaps, but I think of it, it just morphed into a new phase.
And that is the phase of, of a lot of norms got busted, a lot of new creative things got created. Uh, but there’s still kind of an overhang for many students and for educators. And what I mean by that is students who are. We’re seeing it now because we’re now working with the university, with their faculty, trying to support their students.
They were not in high school in person during key, key years of development. And so, it’s very hard for them now. Likewise, children who didn’t get the benefit of pre k, kinder, first or second, are struggling. And so we see these impacts everywhere. And here in Chicago Not only were the kids and their families impacted by COVID, but many of our schools, the teachers were decimated.
They had deaths in their families. Many of them were ill. And it takes a long time to recover from that kind of trauma. And then, you know, we throw everybody back in the pot and say, let’s get cooking. Everybody’s got to be academically up to speed. And really it’s very hard with the way schools are scheduled to, and structured, to take a step back.
And do some peeling that’s hard to do so I think it’s a pretty heavy lift for teachers and educators in general. It sounds very familiar to my story when I left, I left, um, I think it was about a year or two after covid because it was like you said, right back to the races, get everyone back to grade level, even though they’ve missed all these fundamental years, kindergarten, um, and I, and now too, we’ve, we’re seeing lots of teachers, educators leave, but we also have some that are on the fence.
They love. Being in the classroom, being in education, but there’s things that are prohibiting them from that work life balance. Class size is one, just having support on staff. I remember, um, we had a guidance counselor the last year I was in the classroom, wonderful and she Was supposed to come do lessons in all the classrooms, but what ended up happening is they used her for, you know, behavior interventions here and there with children.
And so then the class has missed all their counselor lessons, which just happens with the lack of resources and support. So I know. You have thoughts, too, about, you know, the class size ratio, support. What are some things that your program is doing to try to help teachers and educators in this space? Yeah, well, thanks for that question.
It’s such an important one, and as a society, we all ought to be thinking about this. In different ways, and I see a lot of movement out there, a lot of ideas being tried, but what we’ve been doing is what we call connect to kids, and this was a program that was originally focused in our pilot program just on kindergarten, and the idea is if you work with the educators to support the social emotional needs of the kids, everybody benefits. And there’s a lot of research that’s been done. We were looking in particular at the research of Bob Pianta at the University of Virginia. Just saying if kids have good experiences in kindergarten, then that’s a predictor of social, emotional, even academic success.
So we started our pilot in kindergarten. We ran that pilot for three full years and served hundreds of teachers in that program. And the results were stunning. Stunning. Teachers overwhelmingly said that they felt better able to work, especially those with very challenging behaviors. They felt less stressed out, they felt supported, and they even had more instructional time.
So what is it that we were doing? Consultation, weekly consultation. And it, it’s not therapy, but I know it feels like therapy. But that was a big change agent because teachers had an opportunity to really reflect, to also work on developing their own social emotional capacities, and to learn new and different ways with other people.
A person who’s a coach, so it’s not like going to professional development, which can be great, but, you know, it’s like driver’s ed. You need somebody in the car with you when you get behind the wheel for some of these things. And while teachers understand the importance of social emotional, Uh, development, I don’t like to call it learning because it’s more than a cognitive, uh, action, but they’re not only always sure how to do it, and they’re not understanding oftentimes the role that they play, uh, as fully, and how would they moderate or regulate or change what they’re thinking and feeling.
And it’s not at all uncommon for us to talk to teachers who are having a hard time in the classroom and it turns out to be something from home, or it’s just one more demand from the administration. You know, we know administrators have demands placed on them. So, like, it’s this fountain that’s just gushing on them all the time.
And, uh, we’re telling them, keep your, keep that classroom dry. And then we’re just, you know, pouring lots of water on them. It’s really hard. No wonder they’re drowning. It’s a, it’s hard. And we understand that. So this program does a couple of things. It works with hundreds of teachers every year, offering them individual consultation, and in some schools, we also offer group consultation.
So it could be grade band, it could be topic. Uh, supported, and it really is an opportunity to talk about one of three things. What’s going on with the administration and all the changes and updates and reports. What’s going on at home, and especially what’s going on in the classroom, uh, talking sometimes about very challenging children, but post COVID, really talking about kids in the classroom as a whole.
So it’s not classroom management, it’s capacity building. Thank you for sharing. Sure. And I’d love you mentioned this earlier. If you could dive in a bit because this is the first I’ve heard of, um, calling it social emotional development as opposed to learning. Can you kind of just dive into the differences there?
I have a problem with the term behavioral health because it sort of dictates the way in which we do social emotional development in classrooms. It’s very cognitive and skill based, and those things are important, so I’m, I’m not in any way discounting how valuable that can be, but mental health is also emotional health.
It’s not just a cognitive thing, and we also know from researchers and clinicians like Kolk, the body keeps the score, so, you know, tightness, not feeling well all of those, achiness, all of that is involved, and it often is emotional. So when we just talk about learning as a cognitive skill, We want to broaden that out to include the emotions, and that’s why I like the word development.
The other reason why I like the word development, and this, educators may, you know, say they have a point here, and I would understand it, but I think, Having been in the space now, not coming out of education as a social worker or a psychologist, but learning about the field is that it can take quite a long time to develop these regulation, emotional, self reflective capacities.
And just because we’re adults, it doesn’t mean that we’re good at it. It just means that we got older. Um, so all the focus. is on helping kids in these SEL, SEL, you know, 20 minute spots, checks, or lessons. But really, the teachers benefit, not only themselves, but they benefit the children. And I’ll just end with this one point here.
When we did our pilot, one of the most astonishing things that came out of it is that We found that the children who were the focus of conversation on a frequent basis during this C2K consultation, they were improving at the same rate as kids in therapy. Those kids weren’t in therapy. So who changed?
And what I like about that is it just underscores the incredibly valuable role of educators in the lives of kids. That’s how much additional power teachers have. And I think they know that intuitively, but how do you, how do you pull that up out of yourself? How do you give that to your students and still stay sane?
And that’s what we’re really trying to do. do you have any specific stories that come to mind? C2K is working with teachers or something you’ve noticed with educators being, you know, mentally healthier after going through the program or just what are some things that they’ve learned or been able to cope with differently?
You know, there are so many reflections and stories, but what we often hear, I’ll give you one example. A teacher was having a very particular time with a student. It was challenging. And in consultation, what eventually emerged is, this teacher just did not like this kid. Just didn’t like this kid. And that happens.
We’re just human beings. Um, and the teacher was feeling guilty. She was also angry, and she was frustrated. And as time went on, What really was happening is that she was having an issue with another person and that child was reminding her of that person and she was transferring a lot of her frustration on this kid and when she had that realization and was able to think about it and work on it, she really was able to turn around
the situation with the child. It was hugely important for that kid. Kids know when teachers don’t like them. And it’s really hard. They can carry that all their lives. So that was, that transformation not only helped the child, but it also really deeply helped the teacher. And she was able to let go of the feelings of frustration, but also the guilt that she was feeling and learn different ways to work with herself and with kids.
That’s great to hear. And so I know that you’re based locally in Chicago. If there’s some teachers out there who are in that area, and they’re hearing of you for the first time, how would they, what would be some next steps? Would they go to their district and say, let’s look into this nonprofit, or what would you suggest?
Yeah, I think that would, we’d love to share what we’ve learned after a decade of doing this with consistently high scores from teachers. We could, there are lots of ways that we could do this. In person is ideal, but it’s not always necessary. Here we are doing Zoom. So if, If a district or teacher was interested, I would invite them to contact me or contact somebody on our staff.
And, um, let’s see if we could work together. We’d love to be able to be helpful and provide value. Perfect. And then I know educators are thinking about this as well. How do we expand something like this to more states, to more districts? Um, you know, where, where do teachers or principals look if they are looking for resources for their schools or Title I schools?
Right, so we. We are just starting a series of webinars, so you’ll be able to go to our website in the next couple of months. Uh, we have had this concept of doing a C2K Institute, um, for a long time now, and I think we are finally going to get that going in, uh, fiscal, our fiscal 2026, which is hard to think about.
It’s just next year. Um, and And then I think you can also kind of just Google mental health providers, not for profit and see what kind of capabilities are, are available and resources. But I will say it’s tough. Uh, our caseloads are largely full and, uh, the demand’s not going away. It’s not getting any smaller.
So we’re hoping to be able to share in new creative ways. That’s great to hear about the webinar series. And you mentioned earlier, um, this is exciting. On the podcast, we’ve interviewed other teachers who’ve transitioned into non profit roles. Um, can you talk a little bit about your staff and, um, I know you have some teachers on your staff currently.
We have several teachers on our staff. Some of them have gone back to school and they’re social workers now. They work in the classroom with kids, or they consult with teachers in our C2K program. We have someone who is a, I’m sure, an incredibly talented special ed teacher. And I remember sitting with her, uh, just a few months ago and she was explaining what she was doing and how she really loved the children and how important this work was.
But the resources were so scarce. The administration didn’t always understand sometimes the teachers that she was trying to work with. The mainstream teachers didn’t always understand. She looked at me and said, you know, maybe if I’d had C2K, I would have stayed in teaching. we really love having teachers here. And of course, that’s really valuable because when they’re out talking to other educators, they know which they speak you know, mental health and teaching are related, but they’re often, I think of them as like baseball and football, you know, you, you wear uniforms, you’ll play with balls, you’re out on a field, but they’re very different games.
But there’s a lot to learn from each other. And did you notice specific skills or characteristics about these teachers when they moved, you know, in and outside of the classroom role? What, what are some that were, came to light that you appreciated? Oh, what an interesting question. You know, most of the teachers and principals that I’ve met are phenomenal people.
Um, They are empathetic, they are curious minded people, they love to share what they know, and they’re invested in the future, they’re future oriented people, because they understand that, look, I’m sitting where I am because, yes, of my parents, but also because of teachers that had a major influence in my life.
And so, those are the kind of characteristics of great educators. And, um, You know, perhaps someday we’ll be able to create systems that allow them to really be their best selves, but I don’t think the systems function that way. And we love to kind of wrap this up by learning about what you yourself have learned. You know, being in business with your MBA, uh, now being the president in this role at JPA.
Stay humble. Um, there’s still It seems like the older I get, the less I know. And I don’t know if that means it’s because I’m learning more every day, but I, I feel inspired by the work that I do. I can see the impact that it has. And what I’m hoping is that, um, I can stay off enough social media to keep reading.
That’s my big goal for the new year. More reading, less scrolling. I love to hear that. Oh, and we’ll, we’ll be sure to put your organization and the show notes. And thank you so much for your time today. We’ve loved learning from you and getting to know you. Well, thank you so much.
