MANSFIELD — Carla James knows firsthand the challenges of advocating for a special needs child in the public school system.

“The one thing that I hear from parents is it’s so overwhelming, and I remember,” she said. “I have children who have disabilities and learning issues, so I’ve gone through the whole gamut of advocating for them, learning what their rights are, but also my responsibilities.

“It’s a lot.”

James recalled one day, long ago, when her children were still in school. After the school called her with a concern, she sat in her car crying and praying. 

“God said to me, ‘You’re going through this right now and you’re going to be OK. This is for you to help someone else,” she said. 

Now, James is putting her experience to good use by spearheading a support group for parents whose children have special needs, mental health issues or are struggling in school.

The group, Parents Rights and Responsibilities in Education, was founded in February and has continued meeting virtually due to the coronavirus outbreak. 

James, who has a background in family advocacy and special education, said she founded the group after observing students being “over-disciplined” in the school system. James said that students who are frequently disciplined at school are sometimes dealing with unacknowledged learning issues, disabilities or a history of trauma.

“Because everyone is so stressed and overwhelmed and has so much on their hands, a lot of times we don’t have time to take a deep breath and look at what’s going on under the surface,” she explained.

James hopes the support group will help equip parents to identify and address issues that may be interfering with their child’s education. 

“It’s not enough just to know their rights and be able to advocate for them, you also need to know what you’re responsible for,” she said. “I believe we’re responsible, as parents, to kind of partner with the schools to educate your child, to teach them about your child because you’re their first teacher.

“If we get that and then we learn how to be partners with the school, we can have a cohesive holistic approach.”

Parents who would like to attend the virtual meeting may RSVP to arestoredvision@gmail.com or Melodye James at 419-632-2997.

The support group is part of a larger collaborative founded last year by James and her mother, Melodye.

Restored Visions began as a community initiative to start conversations about how to address disparate conditions and stigma regarding mental health in the minority community. The goal, said James, was to provide life-changing and life-affirming opportunities for the minority community to become informed, empowered and educated.  

“It’s a collaboration of community resources that are also concerned about the needs of family,” Melodye said. “We wanted a way to say that our mental health is just as important as our physical health. That our families are important enough to invest in ourselves around mental health and growth in whatever area we need.”

The James group founded the collaborative after Melodye felt called by God to bring restoration to families. For a while, she didn’t know what that would look like, so she began holding prayer meetings at her church to ask for further guidance.

“We started with prayer and we didn’t really have a concrete plan other than this is what was put on mom’s heart,” Carla said. 

Through discussions at the prayer meetings, the Jameses began to see the need for mental health education in the community.

“There were conversations that came out of that, people started opening up and sharing things and we realized that for a lot of us, mental health is something that we don’t talk about,” Carla said. “We don’t talk about it as a community — minorities, African Americans — and to add on top of that the church we don’t talk about it. We want to try to break some of that stigma.

“We’ve been working at this two years and I don’t know that we’ve scratched the surface. It’s still stigmatized. It’s very hard to get people to talk about it and open up especially in the church community because of what we’ve been taught — that you just pray and God will make everything OK.”

Last summer, Restored Visions partnered with Richland County National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) to offer Family-to-Family classes. NAMI Family-to-Family is a free eight-week educational program for family, significant others and friends of people with mental health conditions. 

Mary Kay Pierce, executive director of NAMI Richland, said she was thrilled to be able to collaborate with Restored Visions.

“Our goal is to educate on mental health throughout the entire county, so it was really exciting when they came,” Pierce said. “We have been offering the (Family to Family) class since 1999 and we just knew we weren’t reaching minorities.”

Pierce described the free course as the best, most comprehensive mental health course available to families. The course covers topics including mental health treatment, medications, therapies, coping as a family, communication, advocating for a loved one in the mental health system and available resources in the community.  

“It’s tremendous how much it’s helped families over the years, to get connected to resources and know they’re not alone,” she said.

The courses are confidential and facilitated by trained family members who have been through the program and know what it’s like.

“When you’re in that peer-to-peer support, you know that everyone in that room has dealt at some level with the same thing that you’re dealing with and that is huge,” Carla said. “It breaks down some of the barriers and it helps people be a little more comfortable with sharing.”

Carla plans to hold another class in September, facilitated by her and Nnenna McCruter-Jordan. The Jameses hope that the support group and Family to Family class will be the first of many services that Restored Visions can offer to the community.

“The more we learn about the needs, the more I anticipate that we will retool periodically,” Melodye said. “As we learn from each other as we talk to each other and communicate and listen to our families, I anticipate that we will constantly be looking for new resources.”