MARIETTA - Cobb's Success for All Students program kicked off Wednesday with a special presentation at the county's new Safety Village.

State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox, Cobb County School District Superintendent Fred Sanderson, County Manager David Hankerson, local mayors and other county officials attended the event.

Earlier this year, Cobb school officials announced the district was the recipient of an $8.5 million federal grant to increase mental health services to students in west and southwest Cobb. The grant is the fourth-largest of its kind in the nation.

The school system has started using the money to build its Success for All Students program, which focuses on issues such as substance abuse, violence prevention, and early-childhood programs to reduce the risk factors that come between children and their ability to learn, said Rebecca Whicker, community resource specialist for Success for All Students.

The program is limited to students at McEachern, Hillgrove, Harrison, Kennesaw Mountain, Allatoona and North Cobb high schools, and the primary schools that feed into them.

The Success for All Students program will span four years and potentially impact 37,390 students, or 35 percent of the entire enrollment for the Cobb school district, Whicker said.

The program offers free intervention that is more intensive and ongoing than what school counselors can now offer, as well as a many other mentoring and evidence-based program curriculums. Cobb Juvenile Court, Cobb Community Services Board and the Cobb Sheriff's Office are among the program's partners, said Matt Yancey, the school district's project manager.

Sanderson said the Success for All Students project would be anchored by the premise that mental health is critical to everything an individual student does.

"This initiative effectively uses our community resources to address some of our student's greatest needs. From providing mental health counseling and therapy to developing early intervention and transitional practices to keep kids in class, and very frankly, out of jail," he said. "Ultimately our goal is to keep kids in school and increase our graduation rates. If you're not going to take a chance or risk, than you need to do something else besides educate kids. You've got to take chances and do things differently."

Cox said there's a correlation between the mental health of a student and their likelihood for success.

"It's a reality. We know now that things happen to kids that have an affect and that the end result is the lack of performance in school. That's not the root cause. I think for a long time there was a belief that whatever happened in school might have caused the other behavior and issues, but in fact, school is sometimes the place where the results of what's going on in the house start to show up," she said. "We have to recognize that it's not the child's fault if there's a divorce in the family or domestic abuse. It's not the child's fault if there is a drug or alcohol problem."

Cox said the program would help more than just the child.

"We know parents need help too, and sometimes they don't know where to turn. This is really Cobb County embracing all families and saying they want all families to be successful," she said.

The grant is part of the Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative created by the federal education department in the wake of the 1999 attack at Colorado's Columbine High School.