Author: Devang Pujara

Note: This article was featured in the January 2022 edition of the CCEE Connection. Read it here!

In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, the Santa Clara County Office of Education (SCCOE) established and convened a mental health Youth Advisory Group (YAG) to help guide SCCOE staff as we worked with districts and county behavioral health to open new student wellness centers at 12 local school sites. 

The YAG is one of Santa Clara’s best examples of great community engagement in practice. YAG members are between the ages of 14-25, and were selected to be representative of our student community’s diverse race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, lived experience, ability, geographic distribution, and socio-economic status. Starting in April 2021, over thirty students met monthly to develop community service projects, learn from local guest speakers with mental health expertise, and provide recommendations on the wellness centers — everything from the paint on the walls, to the types of services provided, to the characteristics and qualifications of staff. Students emphasized the necessity for services that are accessible on school campuses and are provided by practitioners who look like them: diverse, young, and from the community.

The YAG is divided into six committees, each with a particular focus around a specific aspect of mental health needs and awareness. For example, through the instruction of the SCCOE Director of Government Relations, students on the YAG Advocacy Committee learned how to advocate for themselves and the community. After a ten-week course on civic engagement, law making, and advocacy, the students developed their own proposals on mental health workforce development and began presenting their ideas to state and county leaders.

All 12 SCCOE student wellness centers are now open to students and are experiencing even greater success than anticipated — one wellness center recorded more than 700 student visits in the first week. Based on the input provided by the YAG, wellness center staff offer a broad scope of evidence-based services and supports ranging from one-on-one cognitive behavioral health counseling to clinician-led group activities such as art therapy, music therapy, and mindfulness. Now that the centers are fully operational, the YAG has pivoted to developing ongoing messaging on the wellness centers and focusing on building youth advisory groups at every campus so that wellness centers continue to grow in partnership with the needs of students.

RESOURCES

• The Efficacy of Implementing a School-Based Approach to Student Wellness (research brief) – Coming soon!

On February 9, 2022, six district teams from across the state came together to focus on their shared aim: accelerating learning for students with disabilities.  These educators from Shasta, San Luis Obispo, West Contra Costa, Sonoma, Irvine, and Clovis are part of a Networked Improvement Community supported by the System Improvement Leads (SIL) team. 

The network launched in September 2021 and spent the first few weeks thoroughly investigating their local contexts: what is working well for students with disabilities and what needs improvement.  Although the team’s contexts are very different (district ADA, urban/rural, single/multidistrict SELPAs), the findings were strikingly similar: inconsistent IEP process, varying understanding of the purpose of the IEP, burdensome data collection practices, and long standing disconnects between special education and general education staff.  Armed with this information, SIL’s  improvement coaches conducted literature reviews to identify evidence-based practices to address the identified challenges and teams set off testing them out in their local contexts.  Research is a critical starting point, but would the ideas work in practice? What would need to be adapted to make sure the changes worked for each team’s unique setting? 

To answer these questions, more than 25 special education teachers contributed to testing out the NIC’s change ideas. Preliminary data is promising: participating case managers have improved the quality of IEP goals, IEP teams are establishing streamlined processes to track student progress on goals, and teams are reframing IEP documents to move away from simple compliance and toward the true purpose of an IEP: to provide a free and appropriate education to each and every child.  Educators involved in the network report that they feel better supported, have access to high quality resources, and deeply value the opportunity to learn with educators around the state.  As Jeremy Sawtelle, Director of Specialized Support, Shasta County Office of Education shared, “Through the SIL NIC, I’m now connected with teachers in San Luis Obispo, administrators in Clovis, and service providers in West Contra Costa.  These are people I never would have met [but] now we analyze data together and give honest feedback.  We share ideas instead of having to invent everything ourselves.  Together, we are learning so much faster than any one of us would be on our own.” 

“It’s about a culture of collaboration and change, it doesn’t matter how many years you’ve done this.  We can always improve.  Other industries do this, why not education?”-Christina Boman, Coordinator of Special Education, West Contra Costa Unified School District

The System Improvement Leads (SIL) are part of California’s Statewide System of Support.  The SIL team provides direct technical assistance to SELPA, COE, and District teams seeking to improve outcomes for students with disabilities by developing high quality resources and tools, training on improvement methodologies, and providing improvement coaching to teams. To learn more about the SIL project, please visit https://systemimprovement.org/ or email us at [email protected]

DEVELOPED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
System Improvement Leads Project

RESOURCE TYPE

Blog, Hot Topics

TYPE OF AUDIENCE

Site Administrator / Instructional Coach, Systems Leadership

TOPIC AREA

Equity, Special Education

KEYWORDS

Note: This article was featured in the February 2022 edition of the CCEE Connection. Read it here!

The program’s academic instructors are funded through the Monterey County Office of Education while flight instructors are funded through the Bob Hoover Academy nonprofit organization. The partner­ship is a great example of the public and private sectors coming together to provide opportunities for students who need them the most. BHA is the brainchild of aviation legend and virtuoso air show performer, Sean D. Tucker, who is best known for his airshow performances in the Oracle Challenger. The aerobatic specialist named the program and his nonprofit after his mentor and aviation great, R. A. “Bob” Hoover, who valued education, humility, dig­nity and optimism.

Students are provided with computers, social and emotional support, internship opportunities, hands-on courses and more. On a typical day, students are provided both traditional coursework in English, math, history and science as well as advanced flight training.  Students hop from a traditional desk to a cockpit in a training simulator.  Once there, aviation mentors demonstrate flight controls and aviation concepts to prepare students for their eventual move into the BHA plane for their flight lessons. With each milestone, students find out more about themselves and what they can achieve with practice and commitment. The program is in the process of expanding to include aviation mechanics where students will learn how to build and repair aircraft.

Student poses in front of Bob Hoover aircraft