By Ayla Dickerson
Ms. Missy Gomez is McNicholas High School’s Mental Health and Wellness Therapist. She started at McNicholas in the fall of 2022 and helps students with their emotional well-being. Unlike the guidance counselors, Gomez is here to discuss anything school related or not. Director of Curriculum Mrs. Katie Hambly said, “I think that kids are more open to going to her. It’s an extra outlet. She is good because she can form a relationship with any kid and she can come to an understanding of them, and she will listen. She’s an active listener. She will respond and act on what you are saying.”
Teachers like Mr. Jeff Hutchinson-Smyth heavily advocated for a school therapist at McNicholas. Hutchinson-Smyth said, “I think it just for me was becoming increasingly clear that although our counseling department folks are trained, prepared, dedicated and willing to serve students’ mental health and well-being needs, they also have a lot else on their plates that they are juggling. So, I think the vision was just having someone whose sole focus was mental health.”
Hutchinson-Smyth also stated that there had been discussions among the leadership team about the need for a school therapist. He thought it was necessary to push and advocate to proceed with the hiring of a school therapist because, “There were multiple suicides within the Forest Hills School District within the same academic year. And although I wasn’t personally connected to any of those students, I have students and colleagues who were, and I just saw that devastation and it felt to me like there was more we could be doing.”
Although it was not completely about others advocating for this, it was also because of some legal requirements. Hambly said, “There are some legal requirements for students. The ‘Save Students Act’ is a law where students must have [mental health] instruction in three different areas, and there’s approved programs. Now it’s not necessarily saying you have to have a person for that, but it [having a mental health counselor] does help other legal ramifications, like with reporting. Public schools are required to have a mental health counselor on site, but private schools are not required to have a person for mental health.”
Prior to coming to McNicholas, Gomez started her work as a school therapist at a catholic grade school in East Price Hill. “It houses a lot of underprivileged children and families with a large Guatemalan population. I was with preschool to eighth graders from every walk of life you could imagine, but primarily Hispanic. I loved it so much because I felt like I was doing major social work helping these kids to feel safe at school,” she said.
Gomez said that her journey to McNick started when she was scrolling through job applications and decided to apply to McNick for the school therapist that was needed. Gomez said that she did not want to leave the other school because she felt like they needed her and the great connections she had formed with every single child there. She then said that she “knew it was time to explore other ages I could work with and a different population of high school and people on a different side of town.” After this Gomez said, “I interviewed two times. After the interview I remember thinking I didn’t get it, but then they called me and said I got it and my heart sank because this was not supposed to happen. It was the middle of summer, and I had not planned on leaving the other school and hadn’t said by to anyone and it took me a full week to make a decision. I was driving to work at my brother’s restaurant like praying to God for one more sign to either take this job or not. This one guy walked in, he could have sat anywhere, but he sat at the bar directly in front of us and he ordered his food. I started talking to my brother about struggling and my dilemma of either taking this new job at McNick but I love my old job, so I don’t know what to do. The guy sitting at the bar turned around and asked if I had gotten offered a job at McNick, and he happened to be a contractor at McNick. He was like it’s such a great place you would love it. And I was like this is my sign and I took the job.”
Gomez graduated in 2008 from Mount Notre Dame and grew up in Deer Park and Amberley Village. She said that her favorite subjects in high school were electives, such as pottery. Gomez used to play volleyball in grade school but then decided to quit in high school. She then started to cheer for Moeller High School. “We travelled everywhere. My brother played basketball for Moeller, and the day after Christmas or Christmas Day we would travel somewhere for a huge tournament. Every other year was a flight, so we went to Arizona, California, North Carolina, and Tennessee.”
Gomez attended the University of Cincinnati for both her undergraduate degree in Public and Community Health and her master’s degree in Children and Families Social Work. After graduating with her undergraduate degree, Gomez took a few years off because she hadn’t yet discovered what she wanted to do. During that time, she worked at a gym and nannied. “There are two girls here that I was randomly their nanny for like six months. I was at their house on Wednesdays and Fridays, and I would go and wake them up, get them ready for school, take them to their bus, and pick them up from IHM in the afternoon. And then I ended up going into my master’s like seven months after being with them so then I had to quit. But low and behold, now they’re at McNick,” she said.
Gomez is a mom of a set of twins under two and a four-year-old. In her free time she said, “My husband and I like to go [out to dinner], and it chills us out because we don’t get to do that often. I also love going out to dinner with my girlfriends like [Katie] Hambly and others.”
Gomez said, “I want the students to know that they can come and talk to me about anything; it doesn’t even have to necessarily be mental health. I just want them to know that when you come here it doesn’t mean that we have to talk about something serious, we can talk about anything you want. There’s no judgment here ever. I just want people to know that if you feel different, I hope my room is a safe place for you to feel like you can be yourself.”
The McNicholas Milestone 