برچسب: health

West Contra Costa Unified loses big chunk of federal grant to support students’ mental health
West Contra Costa Unified School District administration building.

Credit: Louis Freedberg / EdSource
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West Contra Costa Unified anticipates it will receive only about $600,000 of $4.2 million it was awarded last year.

The cut is part of a big push by the Trump administration to roll back or eliminate funding to support student mental health in schools across the nation.

The district was one of only three school districts in California to be awarded grants from the Mental Health Professional Services program.
The West Contra Costa Unified School District is the latest school district in California to feel the direct impact of the Trump Administration’s elimination of a range of grant programs approved by the U.S. Department of Education during the Biden administration.

At its meeting on Wednesday night, Interim Superintendent Kim Moses told board members, who were caught unawares by the news, that she had received a letter the previous day from the department of education indicating that the five-year, $4.2 million grant awarded last fall will be cut to one year.

The letter stated that the grant was no longer “aligned with the current goals of the administration,” she said.

As a result of the cut, the district anticipates it will only receive about $600,000 of the funds it was expecting, all of which must be spent between August and December of this year.

Board president Leslie Reckler summarized her reaction in two words: “Total bummer.”

The district was one of three in California to receive a five-year grant last fall. They were among 46 grants awarded last year under the Mental Health Services Professional Grant program begun by the Biden Administration.

The grant was supposed to enable the San Francisco Bay Area district to address the mental health needs of its students by placing graduate student counseling interns in its schools, in collaboration with San Jose State University and St. Mary’s College in Oakland.

The goal of the program, as described in the Federal Register, is “to support and demonstrate innovative partnerships to train school-based mental health services providers.”

Interim Superintendent of West Contra Costa Unified, Kim Moses
Caption: Courtesy West Contra Costa Unified

Moses said she was taken aback by the news of the drastic reduction. “Of all the things that I am worrying about being reduced or taken away, I didn’t have this grant in mind,” she said in an interview after the meeting. “The grant is to build our workforce (of mental health workers). How could building our workforce and supporting students with their mental health needs be against what the administration stands for?”

School board member Demetrio Gonzalez-Hoy described the funding cut as “atrocious.” “This is just another way they (the Trump administration) are going to start hurting our kids, our staff, our school district, because of what we stand for, because of what we look like.”

The drastic grant cutback comes as a blow to the district, which has made significant progress over the past year in cutting major budget deficits and averting the prospect of a state takeover. Especially since the pandemic, educators have realized that addressing the mental health needs of students is essential to their ultimate academic success. A particular challenge has been to boost the number of school mental health professionals, especially those reflecting the backgrounds of students.

The reduction appears to be part of an aggressive drive by the administration to eliminate mental health programs serving schools. On the same day West Contra Costa heard about its grant reduction, the Associated Press reported that the U.S. Department of Education is moving to terminate $1 billion in mental health grants to schools, signed into law by President Biden after the school shooting massacre in Uvalde, Texas in 2022.

The district applied for the funds in the spring of 2024 and was awarded them in the fall. It had been working on signing a Memorandum of Understanding to begin implementing the program this fall.

The funds were designated to be spent in “high-need” school districts like West Contra Costa Unified, where nearly two-thirds of its almost 30,000 students qualify for free and reduced-price meals.

Program probably targeted because of emphasis on diversity

What almost certainly caught the Trump administration’s eye was the emphasis on diversity in the grant application guidelines, a term the current government is using as a rationale to cut federal funds to education institutions at all levels.

One of the goals of the program, according to the guidelines, is to “increase the number and diversity of high-quality, trained providers available to address the shortages of mental health services professionals in schools served by high-need districts.”

The mental health professionals serving students in those districts, according to the guidelines, “should reflect the communities, identities, races, ethnicities, abilities, and cultures of the students in the high-need districts, including underserved students.”

“We considered appealing, but the reality is that they just erased this whole grant, and everybody is in the same boat,” interim Supt. Moses said. “This isn’t a case of ‘we picked on you because you’re doing something wrong, we picked on you because the grant is going away.’”

Looking forward, board member Gonzalez-Hoy said, “We must just continue to reassure our students that even if we have less resources, we are here to support and protect them, and we will give them what we can with what we have.”

Other districts that received grants under the program are Trinity Alps Unified and the Wheatland Union High School District, both in Northern California. Also receiving grants are the Marin County Office of Education, Cal State East Bay and the University of Redlands, as well as two charter schools, Entrepreneur High School in San Bernardino and Academia Avance in Los Angeles.
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02/05/2025
Tackling the student mental health crisis in rural Central Valley

Credit: Pexels / RDNE Stock project

Este artículo está disponible en Español. Léelo en español.

Born and raised in the agricultural foothills of Tulare County in California’s Central Valley, Greg Salcedo attended the only K-8 school and high school serving his rural town of about 3,000 people, where everything seemed out of reach — backpacks and notebooks, teachers and administrators and, in particular, school counselors and social workers.

Friends and family, Salcedo said, never spoke about adolescent depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress or suicide, issues that have, for decades, disproportionately affected rural, high-poverty communities in the United States.

But after the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated a decades-long mental health problem in Tulare County — with psychiatric hospitalization rates for students 9 to 13 years old climbing 23% during the first year of the pandemic — Salcedo decided to pursue a master’s degree in social work. In his first year as a graduate student, he helped shape the county’s emergency response through Rural Access to Mental Health Professionals, a program that placed him as a student mental health support worker in schools serving his community.

“I was able to talk to students and set them up with resources, call parents to set them up for therapy referrals or services with outside agencies [and] do a lot of outreach to promote mental health,” Salcedo said. “Being in this community for so long has helped me have a better sense of empathy and understanding of these kids and what they’re going through.”

The program places early-career mental health workers in 33 of Tulare County’s high-poverty school districts. Through the program, Salcedo served a one-year unpaid internship at an elementary and high school in Tulare, after which he was hired full time as a social worker at a high school in the Tulare Joint Union High School District.

Participants are first- and second-year graduate students in social work who provide education-related services such as interim therapy and student group services, according to Marvin Lopez, executive director at the California Center on Teaching Careers, which helps coordinate the program. Since 2019, the center has supported 50 candidates through a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

“In our district alone, we started out with three social workers last year, and now, we have seven new social workers that came on through the grant,” Salcedo said.

In 2019, Tulare County had a student-to-counselor ratio of about 870:1 — one of the highest in the state and well exceeding the recommended ratio of 250:1.

Since then, the state has embarked on a historic, five-year, $4.6 billion initiative to expand school-based mental health support through programs such as the Certified Wellness Coach workforce and the CalHOPE Student Support and Schools Initiative.

Districts in Tulare County have improved shortages of mental health providers using funds from the state. Tulare Joint Union High School District, for example, reported that the district’s student-to-counselor ratio improved significantly from 300 students per counselor in 2019 to 268 students per counselor in 2021.

But, few participants could afford to stay in the school-based mental health field after completing their unpaid placements, said Lopez.

“It became evident that we needed to support candidates to make sure we retain them,” Lopez said. “We began looking at resources like clinical supervision and additional training, but also financial incentives that can allow them to continue working at school sites.”

Last year, the center secured a $15 million federal grant to develop Preparing Rural Inclusive Mental Health Educators, a program that pays final-year graduate students a $45,000 stipend for a yearlong internship and a three-year commitment to remain in the field of school-based mental health care. To date, the center has sponsored 23 interns.

According to Lopez, these candidates are able to offer more long-term, advanced care, such as individual student therapy, group therapy, parent and family consultation and school faculty support. The center intentionally recruits from partner universities closest to Tulare County, such as California State University Bakersfield and Fresno State, whose students largely come from the rural communities they will serve.

Jeovany Martin, who completed his master’s in social work at CSU Bakersfield, was an intern in the program at a local elementary school. Martin was raised in neighboring Kings County by his Mexican immigrant parents, and he applied for the program to serve families whose needs have been shortchanged by language barriers.

“I’m able to relate to these students. I speak their language, and I’m able to communicate with parents in their language, which goes a very long way in creating a working relationship with them,” Martin said.

Martin said that the program was also his most realistic path to the field of education-based mental health care. Most providers are overworked and underpaid — with nearly 59% of school counselors leaving their positions in their first two years — and non-white, low-income candidates have much less financial and professional support to enter the field.

Nationally, most school counselors are overwhelmingly white, and they do not represent the backgrounds of the students they serve. For Tulare County’s student population — where nearly 80% of students are Latino — the two programs address a shortage of cultural competence in mental health support available to students, according to program supervisor Rosie Hernandez.

“We’re also having folks who are bilingual be part of our program because it allows families to be a bit more open to services because of that simple fact that they speak their native tongue,” Hernandez said.

Most children living in rural, low-income households, Lopez said, are also more likely to experience higher rates of anxiety, depression and behavioral problems, often due to stressors such as food insecurity, parental job loss and geographic isolation.

“We’re recruiting, preparing and supporting candidates from our own communities who represent our student population,” Lopez said. “That, in itself, allows our students to connect at a much higher level with our interns to bring them comfort, a space where they can interact and feel safe.”

A legacy of bias and neglect

Martin and Salcedo’s internships in Tulare County also provided the opportunity to tackle a decades-long legacy of mistrust between social workers and immigrant families.

“A lot of our families, especially from the Hispanic culture, think of social workers as ‘the people that take away my kids,’” Salcedo said. In his first year, Salcedo felt stifled by the number of permission slips that would have allowed him to help more students, but were returned unsigned. “Our job is also about breaking down that barrier and [explaining] our role for them to understand, ‘This person is here to help my kid with anxiety. They’re not here to judge me as a parent.’”

The National Center for Youth Law found that across the country’s child welfare, education and mental health systems, providers and educators have routinely over-referred Latino students for behavioral issues and subjected them to harsher disciplinary measures than white children. Black and Latino children were also found to be removed from their families and into out-of-home care at higher rates, while receiving fewer mental health services, such as psychotherapy and counseling, than white children.

Families that include at least one undocumented member or non-citizen — 14.3% of Tulare County’s overall population — are also less likely to opt into care if they rely on citizen children to receive basic benefits like food stamps and housing subsidies, which can be jeopardized by family separation. In a county where more than a quarter of residents receive SNAP food assistance, and two-thirds of these recipients are children, signing a permission slip could come down to what some parents feel is a calculation between their child’s mental health and access to basic services.

To address fears of bias and neglect, which remain the highest barrier for underserved communities to access to mental health care, program interns adapt a traditionally siloed approach in school counseling to work more directly with parents, caretakers and community support systems.

Salcedo, for example, partnered with the local Boys and Girls Club to run a regular backpack drive for students in the neighborhood. He also helped set up a resource closet at his school, where students frequently stop by for necessities such as food, school supplies and personal hygiene products. Most recently, he partnered with a local church to serve boxed meals to students at the end of the school day and to parents on back-to-school nights.

“We have this daily check-in routine with our students, where we say, ‘Whether you’re needing to talk to a counselor, or you just need some deodorant, a snack, or pencils, we can provide it,’” Salcedo said. “‘If you’re looking for housing, or babysitting, or transportation to get to an appointment, we can try to help.’”

Broader post-pandemic challenges

Martin, who was hired as a social worker after completing his placement, said that the need for broader support has especially spiked for K-8 students in Tulare County, many of whom lost crucial social and cognitive development to remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of Salcedo’s high school students, he said, withdrew from their counseling sessions online — some did not have reliable Wi-Fi or could not turn on microphones due to chaotic environments at home, for example.

Many also experienced life-altering trauma as a result of the pandemic. They grieved family members, experienced debilitating illness and lost access to basic needs like shelter and food.

“That’s why it’s important for us to take a holistic approach,” Martin said. “We might be doing an intervention here at the school for the student, but there might be something going on at home that the family needs extra resources for. We’re able to help bridge those gaps, wherever they might be, for the students and their families.”

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01/05/2025
Author of federal mental health law has advice for California

Seventh-graders work together on homework in their school library.

Credit: Allison Shelley / EDUimages

Mental health has been at the center of former U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy’s personal journey to recovery from addiction as well as his public career as a policymaker, author and advocate.

In 2008, while representing Rhode Island in the U.S. House of Representatives, Kennedy was the lead author of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, a federal law that requires health insurance companies to provide equal coverage for mental health and addiction care and general physical health care, such as diabetes or cancer treatment.

Forner U.S. Rep, Patrick J. Kennedy, D-R.I.

Kennedy, who has long been vocal about pursuing treatment for his substance use and bipolar disorder, remains an advocate for greater access to mental health care. Earlier this year, he published his book “Profiles in Mental Health Courage” — a reference to his late uncle and former President John F. Kennedy’s classic “Profiles in Courage” — detailing how people from diverse backgrounds across the country have taken on mental illness and addiction. In October, he was a keynote speaker at the annual student wellness conference Wellness Together in Anaheim, where he spoke about his advocacy as founder of the mental health policy nonprofit The Kennedy Forum.

“As we turn the corner on stigma related to suicide and overdose, we need to finally focus a lot more on solutions early on in a person’s life,” Kennedy said in an interview with EdSource. Not only are young people less likely to seek help due to stigma, but are also less likely to be properly insured, incurring high out-of-pocket costs for treatment when they need it.

For Kennedy, the key to addressing the youth mental health and addiction crisis is increasing and sustaining funding for care on the local, state and federal levels. He emphasized that schools desperately need the bulk of that funding, given that early intervention significantly reduces a child’s chance of developing a serious mental illness in adulthood.

California has, in recent years, invested heavily in expanding mental health support for children and adolescents. The state’s next challenge, Kennedy said, is sustaining these crucial services.

In 2019, the state embarked on a $4.7 billion Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative, focused mainly on recruiting and training new mental health providers across the state’s school system. To help sustain these programs, the state Department of Health Care Services plans to make new public school-based mental health services billable to both Medi-Cal and commercial health insurance, making California’s multi-payer fee schedule one of the largest school reimbursement programs in the country.

EdSource interviewed Kennedy about expanding mental health care for students and families. His remarks have been edited for length and clarity.

How do we address the enduring impact of stigma on our health and education systems?

We need greater literacy (regarding mental health) across the board. Many don’t know these mental illnesses as brain illnesses, and they don’t understand that they’re treatable. If we knew we could treat them successfully, which we can, especially if we go in early, how can we think about them differently? We don’t let cancer get to stage four to treat it. We screen it, screen it, screen it. It’s embedded in my medical chart. My doctor asks me 15 ways about my risk for stroke and cancer. We need to do that with mental health.

We could address so much of this if we just incorporated better mental health services within our community. So many families have their mental health symptoms exacerbated by lack of stable housing, no supportive employment and a lack of community to help. They become isolated, which is the worst thing for those struggling with their mental health.

Why does the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act matter for young people today?

It used to be the case where, if you had a mental illness, you had to pay higher co-pays, premiums and deductibles to get mental health treatment than you would to get diabetes treatment or asthma treatment. Unlike for physical illnesses, insurance companies would cap the total of dollars you could spend as a patient on mental health. The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act established that insurance companies could not discriminate and treat the brain any differently than any other organ of the body.

Ultimately, we can’t treat everyone based upon bake sales. We have to change the metrics of what constitutes value in our mental health system. We have to get this embedded in regular insurance.

How can California ensure that new school-based coverage for mental health care is effective in the long term?

We have to figure out how to reorient the insurance process so that there’s a way of capturing the return on investment from an earlier investment. The state is the one that has the most to say about overall state coverage for mental health early on, in order to reduce future obligations on the state’s part, which means picking up the pieces of a broken population that hasn’t properly been supported by coverage through early intervention services.

We need to get organized as voters. There’s not a family out there that doesn’t have these issues affecting a member of their family, who hasn’t lost a loved one to suicide or overdose. There’s a huge need for mental health treatment because we keep waiting till people are in a crisis. Why not make this a public health issue and really embed resources in elementary and secondary schools so students can take care of themselves?

What role should the federal government play in addressing youth mental health?

We need to have Federally Qualified Health Centers in every public school in America. They could open satellites in each of the schools that can help treat kids where they are. A lot of kids, particularly from minority communities, are not going to get mental health care after school. You could bring tele-mental health into a school nurse’s office, so it’s not just where you get an aspirin, but a real clinic in the school where you could be meeting kids’ health needs writ large. You’d also need ongoing intensive care to connect them to the community health center outside.

We already fund Federally Qualified Health Centers. It’s supported on a bipartisan basis. It covers the uninsured as well as the insured. These centers and Certified Community Behavioral Health Centers cover a lot of rural areas and health deserts, and they can provide general counseling and support services. They have a board of directors, who are all people in the community who know the resources in the community and can pull together a more wraparound, holistic approach.

So many kids come to school from homes where there’s violence, addiction or mental illness. We need to reach the whole family. In many states where Republicans don’t have good benefits for their people, the centers provide a valuable safety valve for their constituents to get health care. We just need to take that model to scale in schools. The easiest thing is to run all of these through existing bureaucracies, so you’re not trying to create a new system from whole cloth.

How can students help address mental health?

I would say to young people that there are two major ways they can really help the system. One, they can learn about how to prevent mental health challenges themselves through learning about their own brain and learning coping skills and problem-solving skills. We can focus on a lot more upstream, or proactive, mechanisms early in a student’s life, when they can start to build different coping skills and learn how to manage their emotions.

And second, if they’re interested in going into the mental health space, they can create a much better track to get into the mental health field. We just don’t have enough hands on deck to really meet the enormity of the need for those who desperately need treatment. Not only do we need to build that infrastructure and access, but also build a workforce pipeline for those trying to go into the field in greater numbers.

It’s got everything to do with young people. These are illnesses where 50% of them occur before the age of 14, and 75% occur before the age of 25. They’re illnesses of the young; they can take you hostage and take out whole parts of your life, when, ordinarily, you’d be in the most productive period in your life as a young person.

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28/04/2025
How to balance the health and educational needs of chronically ill students

Credit: Alison Yin/EdSource

Any parent or teacher who has worked with a seriously ill child knows how difficult it is to meet the child’s educational, physical and emotional needs all at once.

Melanie Brady, a lecturer at USC’s Rossier School of Education, suggests that parents and teachers can improve the lives and schooling of sick students in Los Angeles as long as they realize the uniqueness of each child and understand that there cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach to balancing both a student’s health and their education during formative K-12 years.

Students with chronic conditions or who are going through difficult periods of treatment often don’t have the best options to pursue their education. But here are some steps Brady suggests both parents and teachers can take.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What kinds of options are there on a traditional school campus to support students who are sick?

It varies depending on the (grade level), ability and performance and needs. So, I think that if a parent finds themselves in a situation, they want to plan ahead and contact the teacher — and also plan ahead and ask the doctors or the nurses for resources.

You want to talk to the school and see what’s available. Sometimes, people who have long-term health conditions already will have a 504 plan in place, or an IEP (individualized education program). When those are not in place and something takes somebody by surprise, that’s where the process needs to be initiated.

What kinds of options are there if a student can’t pursue their education on a traditional campus?

If a person, the parent, needs more support for their student, see if (the school or district has) a liaison. Sometimes, the hospitals will also have a liaison, usually in the form of a nurse or social worker. If it’s a larger hospital, they will have a schoolroom. They will have some teachers. They will have a process to try to help collaborate with the home studies.

There are (also) home school options that sometimes the schools will collaborate with for independent study, especially with teenagers. That’s a helpful thing.

There are also California Virtual Academies. And they are set up with the whole academic public education that’s similar to the L.A. schools and the public schools throughout the state. There are several different options to take a look at, but working within the current setting is probably the best place to start for any parent or student, especially when the difficulties or the challenges that are upcoming are new.

What types of pedagogy are most effective in working with students who are enduring chronic medical conditions?

One of the things is actually really simple, and I actually found it on the California Department of Education website, and they have articulated just a basic goal that’s kind of broad but important: working with that individual child and what they can do and trying to help them not to lose ground.

But then you have these different dynamics that require flexibility, because if the condition changes, if they’re in the hospital, there’s timing of treatment. They’re not going to be able to be in a room or have bedside teaching when certain things are going on.

Some people may not be able to leave their bed. That’s where bedside teaching is going to be helpful, and also to engage with students (in) conversation, because the longer they’re in the hospital, the more prone they are to depression. There (are also) things to do to ameliorate that for those students, to try to bring them together.

They have different educational needs, especially in that environment. And you can’t do teaching like you can all at once in a K-12 classroom.

How do educational approaches vary across age groups when it comes to working with sick students?

When we’re looking at the younger children, we really want to make sure they have significant playtime. Playtime is so important to the development of their minds and their brains. There’s a lot of learning that goes on there. There’s stress relief that goes on there.

Part of it is to be aware of what the typical development is, but also where a child is, because I think that they’re already in a distressing social- emotional space. So, moving forward from where they are is what’s important — and not comparing them to others. I don’t think we have to look so far to see that once they get to double digits (in age), with some of the social media platforms, how negatively impacted they can be because of those comparisons.

It really needs to be a building-them-up kind of thing, because when a student feels like they have at least one area where they can do well, and one thing to be self-confident about in terms of their skill sets, I think that goes a long way to helping somebody feel like they have something that’s of value out in the world. A kid might be really good at chess. Somebody might be good at math, not good at language. Somebody might be good at art, but maybe struggles with some of the other subjects. (Finding) something that people are good at, and helping them be good at that thing, can go a long way for helping them with their identity development and forming of themselves.

How can dealing with ongoing treatment affect students’ mental health?

Not only do you want to try to maintain the current level of education and help with the focus on school as a recovery, (but students also) fall behind with friendships. They’re not in their usual environment. They’re removed from things they knew before. They have lost autonomy. And then, there can also be, because of these spaces, the accelerating of maturity, so there’s these individual thought responses in terms of behavior within these spaces.

The other problems that can happen in this space is with the emotional struggles, the social-emotional difficulties that can impede your working memory. It can make it difficult to focus. A person may or may not have learning difficulties or learning disabilities, but it certainly could highlight or accentuate some of those struggles and make it a little bit difficult.

And, the thing that we want to try to help them with is to prevent that risk of not engaging with school because of their absence. We want to help support that so that there’s as little fallout as possible for them as they hopefully are adjusting back to home life and some real normalcy and in getting back into being present in a physical school environment.

What are the most important things educators and schools need to understand about working with students who are dealing with serious medical conditions?

I don’t think there’s an environment today where anybody (working with these students) feels like they’re underworked. I think we all feel a little bit stressed and stretched out very thin. And, I think there are a lot of accountability measures that we try to use to make sure that we’re doing our due diligence, but I think sometimes they can fall short.

Let’s say there’s a situation that needs some attention, there’s some support that’s being asked for. These students who have any of these needs hear “no” so often. There are so many no’s, there are so many struggles. It’s quite a weight of discouragement. In that space, anytime I can say yes, because they’ve been told no so often, I want to be able to say, “Yeah, we can take a look at modifying that assignment.” Yes, we can take a look at what might help the students out in terms of social-emotional support.

Modifying assignments for students becomes very cumbersome. But if we could just realize the enormous impact that we have every day on everybody and take that extra minute or that extra situation and say yes and help somebody, that can be really powerful.

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28/04/2025
It hurts not to have access to affordable health care

Credit: Liv Ames / EdSource

I provided quality child care and early education to children from birth through 13 years old for over 29 years. Throughout my tenure as an early educator, the reality that I literally could never afford to become ill has haunted me.

As a home-based, licensed provider, I never had the luxury of affordable health care. Over the years, whenever I felt a sniffle that lasted far too many days or a pain that became problematic and persistent, the dread of scheduling a doctor’s appointment was always present.

My body needed a doctor’s attention on numerous occasions. While sitting in the waiting room to see a physician or getting wheeled into an emergency room, my mind was not able to focus on my health. Instead, all I could think about was how much this was going to cost and please, Lord, don’t let the doctor say I had to be admitted to the hospital. The absolute terror of the mounting cost of health care services was overwhelming.

Fast-forward and following my recuperation or recovery from any doctor’s visits or hospital stays, the anguish did not ease. Like clockwork, the hospital bills started arriving weekly. Whenever I saw the Kaiser return address on each envelope as I had done so many times, my stomach would knot up and my mood quickly soured. Eventually, I became numb to the arrival of each new bill and the reminders to pay the old bills.

It is painful to work in a field where my services did so much good for the economy and families, yet my family and my health suffered. Child care is essential. Child care workers have been and will always be essential workers. Family child care providers are independent contractors and, for most of us, access to an affordable health care plan is limited or nonexistent.

While Obamacare did open the doors for providers to access health care — especially those with pre-existing conditions, like myself — the cost is still too high.

Through Covered California (the state’s version of Obamacare), I was able to receive health care services under the Bronze Plan with a higher co-pay. I was relieved to be able to finally have health insurance, but the co-pays weren’t necessarily affordable. When it comes to health care and access to quality, affordable services, the cards are stacked against early educators. I stand firm in my belief that many providers have died early deaths due to a lack of health care and ignoring ongoing health problems for fear of losing their businesses and their livelihoods. No one can tell me that working 60-70 hours a week for 15-30 years does not contribute to an early demise. Research has demonstrated that women face unique barriers to health care. Inequities, compounded with gender roles and expectations, present unique burdens on women, and while costs of care are important, consideration of additional burdens women face is critical to finding equitable solutions.

There is some good news, however. Child Care Providers United (CCPU), a union for early educators, has negotiated a health care reimbursement fund for the provider membership. To qualify for the reimbursement benefit, providers must have at least one child eligible for subsidized child care enrolled in their program. This fund reimburses licensed providers who are already enrolled in a health care plan. It does not replace their health insurance, nor does it offer a health care plan as a benefit. Licensed child care providers must be enrolled in a qualified health insurance plan to qualify for this reimbursement plan, which helps with out-of-pocket expenses such as service co-pays, prescription co-pays, and some monthly premiums. This is considered a good start, but it is not enough. The reimbursement fund is not available to all early educators, and it only covers the provider, not their family members.

We already know that child care is in crisis, statewide and nationally. We need healthy early educators and child care professionals on the job. Child care workers put their lives on the line during the pandemic. In the face of any emergency, these women always bridge the gap and show up when things can appear dire. The least we can do is create a pathway for these professionals to be healthy.

Health care is complicated and expensive. We get it. Child care is expensive. We get it.

State and federal policymakers must recognize the need to ensure that every practitioner is guaranteed an affordable option to stay healthy so that our children will have their caregivers and educators when they need them most.

•••

Tonia McMillian is a recently retired family child care provider in Southern California.

The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.

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20/04/2025
EdTech, AI, and Mental Health: Improving Student Learning, Improving Students’ Lives

Mar 28
2024

EdTech, AI, and Mental Health: Improving Student Learning, Improving Students’ Lives

Esan Durrani

By Esan Durrani, co-founder and CEO, Study Fetch.

Students in high school now have already lived through two global economic crises, and live in a world that is literally burning at a record rate. They must handle all of this while also coping with the normal chaotic ups and downs of adolescence can be overwhelming. Into this maelstrom, students are supposed to shuttle from Geometry to Social Studies and maintain focus on their studies.

The chaos of the post-pandemic world only adds to difficulties, as it has seen an increase in an already rising percentage of students dealing with mental health problems.

Some of these problems arose in part due to the remote and hybrid learning necessitated by the global pandemic. While undoubtedly better than no learning, students are still recovering from that ‘learning loss.’ Furthermore, the social cost of such extended isolation cannot be fully understood as it has no modern point of comparison. In order to put students back on track, and best position them to succeed in the future, any solution must take into account both the mental and the educational barriers our students face.

Fortunately, just as remote learning software mitigated the damage, proper investment in and uptake of available technology can put student learning back where it needs to be.

After the pandemic many school districts transitioned into hybrid learning systems, and educators had access to information about different learning styles previously unavailable. During and after the pandemic, Artificial intelligence (AI) enabled learning allowed educators to create personalized and inclusive learning for their students, progress that we must continue to build on.

Elements of the remote and hybrid learning implemented during the pandemic must be replicated because without embracing the available technological resources, we are not giving our students the learning opportunities they deserve. Effective teaching must include any and all available resources to support students dealing with ADHD and other mental health issues, or anything else that may impact their learning experience. The increased use of educational technology (EdTech) has a long way to go to meet the need, with 71% of students strongly agreeing that EdTech helps them engage with course materials. Greater access to EdTech helps broaden access and equalize student learning, while AI-enabled platforms can maximize the benefit those students receive.

When it comes to the benefits of AI-enabled EdTech, we cannot forget the impact the pandemic had on teachers as well. The very people responsible for our students and their learning outcomes feel overstressed and overworked, a situation that can only harm the education our students receive. Fortunately many of the same benefits to students enable teachers to perform better as well. With AI platforms able to assist with note-taking, students can pay closer attention in class. This not only helps students struggling with ADHD but those who are hard of hearing, those with reading disorders, or the visually impaired.

Better able to focus on the lesson, AI can then tailor student learning on the very lesson they just sat through. Furthermore, over time, AI platforms will learn about the learning style of students, tailoring advice and assistance on an individualized basis. Students from all ages and backgrounds can benefit, as it enables them to learn in ways that work best for them.

Properly implemented AI will learn from the student just as the student learns from the software. This will lead to more inclusive and cohesive learning, able to cater to every students’ needs. By easing access to learning, and helping tailor learning assistance on an individual basis, AI can relieve the stressors burdens that contribute to poor mental health among students. This, in turn, makes it easier for students to learn, a cycle that can not only erode pandemic learning loss, but help students get ahead.

EdTech and AI software are helping students all around the country, indeed all around the world, at this very moment. My team and I are proud to say we have helped over 250,000 students around the country combat mental health problems to improve learning outcomes. But that is not enough, that number does not even scratch the surface of what AI enabled EdTech can do for learning outcomes. Reducing the burden on our teachers, improving access to learning, and removing mental health barriers will foster a sustainable system of excellence.

By taking the lessons of the pandemic and applying them to today, we can best prepare our students for the future. Not only will AI systems help them in the short-term, but increased AI fluency and comfort with accepting new and emerging technologies will prepare them to be ready to take full advantage of the next advancement as we move deeper into the Digital Era.

by Scott Rupp
Tags: Esan Durrani, Study Fetch

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13/04/2025
How Covid’s mental health toll transformed California’s schools
Top Takeaways

Growing numbers of California students reported feeling hopeless in the wake of the pandemic, with 42% of juniors reporting chronic sadness in a 2019-21 state survey.

California has made substantial investments in its mental health infrastructure, including the $4 billion Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative.

School mental health professionals say they feel more valued as essential partners in education.
When schools shuttered five years ago, many students like Benjamin Olaniyi turned to their phones to find connection during a profoundly unsettling and isolating time.

“Social media made us feel more connected with the world,” said Olaniyi, who is now a junior at King/Drew Medical Magnet High School in Los Angeles.

Benjamin Olaniyi

The pandemic struck in the spring of his sixth grade year, causing him to miss a school camping trip he had looked forward to. He remembers a sense of unity online in those early days amid the uncertainty and fear.

People were afraid of an unknown disease, profound isolation, economic instability and grief for family members killed by the virus.

Young people logged on to share how they felt about what they were facing in real time: the loneliness, the hopelessness and the fear that they could lose family or friends to the strange illness.

This exposure to frank discussion of mental health on social media “probably made us more aware of mental health struggles that previous generations wouldn’t have been exposed to,” Olaniyi said.

The early years of the pandemic turned out to be a key moment when the conversation about students’ mental health and wellness went mainstream. And it wasn’t just students who took note that their peers were struggling with depression, anxiety and other mental health challenges in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This showed up in the pandemic era of the California Healthy Kids Survey, where more students reported that they experienced hopelessness. In data collected in 2019-21, 42% of 11th grade students reported chronic sadness, up from 32% just four years earlier.

Dr. Ijeoma Ijeaku, president of the California Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, said that the pandemic lifted a veil on a worsening crisis among young people.

“It has forced us to look at our mental health in a way we had never looked at it before,” Ijeaku said.

She credits Gen Z, in particular, for their searing honesty about mental health: “They said, ‘Yes, it’s OK to not be OK.’”

Five years after the pandemic began, experts say that the way students, educators and policymakers discuss mental health has dramatically changed and that, though there is more work to be done, policy changes and substantial state investments made in the wake of this crisis have had a lasting positive impact in schools.

“So much of the infrastructure is really enduring past the pandemic,” said Kendra Fehrer, the founder of Heartwise Learning, who has worked as a consultant for schools and community organizations to improve mental health services for students.

Pandemic’s unequal effects

Medical professionals have become more vocal about the mental health crisis that children and adolescents have faced due to the pandemic — and how students living in high-poverty communities and Black and brown students have borne the brunt of the crisis.

In 2021, a declaration from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Children’s Hospital Association said the pandemic added fuel to already rising rates of childhood mental health concerns, including suicide, noting that communities of color have been disproportionately impacted by Covid’s medical and social problems.

The pandemic represented the “unveiling of how the status of our health is determined by our ZIP code, not our genetic code,” Ijeaku said.

More affluent teens, who lived in houses with more space and more privacy, fared better during the pandemic, said Andrew Fuligni, co-executive director of the UCLA Center for the Developing Adolescent. These kids were more likely to live in communities where they could escape to a park to congregate safely or have reliable internet access to keep in touch virtually.

Conversely, teens with fewer resources tended to live in overcrowded homes where rates of Covid transmission were high. They were more likely to live with those deemed essential workers exposed to the virus and faced a more serious threat of death or serious illness, factors that take a toll on mental wellness.

While the whole-child approach to education — championing the importance of school climate, student safety and health for learning, alongside curriculum and instruction — has been growing for decades, schools began to take mental health even more seriously, said Loretta Whitson of the California Association of School Counselors.

Teachers are asking for more support from counselors and other mental health professionals, Whitson said. There is a great appreciation for “the value of the work that is being done and how that complements the classroom work in developing a highly functioning adult.”

State invests billions in mental health

In the past, when school districts faced a budget crunch, it was typical for counselors, psychologists and social workers to be first on the chopping block.

“The rest of education caught a cold, we caught pneumonia,” Whitson said.

But Whitson says things are changing, thanks not just to a shift in the mindset, but also to the infrastructure, such as the Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative, that the state has worked on for the last few years. In 2021, the state launched the effort with $4 billion to be invested over five years, which aims to support those under age 26.

This year, the initiative launched a fee schedule that enables mental health professionals on campus, such as school counselors, psychologists and social workers, to bill Medi-Cal and other types of insurance for the work they do on campus.

It can be extremely complicated to get two very different systems — education and health care — working together. Medical billing isn’t the traditional purview of education. Whitson says, however, that this is providing a real alternative to the boom and bust budget cycle that makes it hard to sustainably fund mental health professionals.

“We’re trying to fully employ people on school campuses that are going to be focused on children’s mental and behavioral well-being,” Whitson said. “This is a big piece of that, to make sure that we have funding that sustains.”

However, this new funding model could be undercut if Medicaid is slashed, as some fear Republicans intend.

California has been moving in the right direction over the last decade, Whitson says, and has roughly doubled its school counselor ratio. Still, the state has a ratio of 1 counselor for about 400 students, well above the 250 students recommended by the American School Counselor Association.

California school districts have been laying off staff in the wake of budgets weakened by the sunsetting of Covid-era federal funding and shrinking enrollment. Whitson said the good news amid the layoffs is that job cuts are not disproportionately hitting school counselors as they did in the Great Recession in 2009.

The state has supported bringing a broad array of health services to campuses in low-income neighborhoods through the California Community Schools Partnership Program to the tune of $4 billion. This early post-pandemic effort is continuing to grow, according to Fehrer, the founder of Heartwise Learning.

Fehrer applauds the state’s investments but says a lot of the real work of transforming school cultures doesn’t happen in Sacramento.

“The hardest stuff to change is stuff you can’t legislate,” she said.

‘Coalition of the willing’

Fehrer said a major transformation is reshaping the way schools respond to mental health and that it transcends economic divides, and is happening in wealthy enclaves like Palo Alto and farmworker communities like Pajaro Valley.

Fehrer calls this a “coalition of the willing.”

Alexis Mele, a school counselor at Laguna Beach High School, credits her school district and school board for understanding the value of school counselors, who are too often viewed as people who mostly handle academic scheduling and college planning.

Mele calls the work she can do with a caseload of 250 students “transformative.” At the beginning of the year, Mele holds a one-on-one meeting with every single one of her freshman students with their families, deepening her relationships right from the start.

On a recent morning, a student dropped by her office to say they were struggling. She said that’s a moment that reinforces the importance of her role.

“That student was sitting at home this morning, waking up feeling like, ‘This isn’t going to be a good day, but I can go to the office and talk to Miss Mele and that might help.’ And that to me is everything,” Mele said.
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13/04/2025