LAUSD student board member Anely Cortez Lopez says she’s grateful for the privilege of offering a voice to students.
Credit: LAUSD
Vowing to uplift student voices, Anely Cortez Lopez was sworn in as the Los Angeles Unified School District school board student board member on Aug. 13 — the second day of the 2024-25 school year.
While student board members, who are elected by their peers, cannot formally vote on resolutions that come before the LAUSD school board, they can issue advisory votes, voice opinions and introduce resolutions.
“Since I was very little, I knew that student advocacy was a large priority — not only for my community, but just in my heart — knowing that I have the opportunity to advocate for the most needed issues and most important issues,” Lopez said.
Although only 17-years-old, Lopez has already served on the Superintendent’s Advisory Council, a group that provides student input to the superintendent on various district efforts, and has volunteered at local retirement homes, where she was also able to witness disparities in health care.
Lopez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, said that from a young age, her mother would take her to town hall and neighborhood meetings where she would often help translate for her mother. That was where she quickly developed a passion for civic engagement — which has morphed into college plans for studying political science, with an emphasis on public health.
Soon after she was sworn in, Lopez spoke to EdSource about the issues LAUSD students feel are most pressing. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What motivated you to run for the position of student board member?
Being from a Title 1 school has allowed me to see a lot of the struggles of my community, and not only within my own community at school, but also within my family. And I have seen what happens to students when they succumb to the … .conditions within the neighborhood, and I believe that is one of the reasons why this position means so much to me. I’ve seen the situations that are occurring within our districts firsthand and can see what changes need to be implemented. And, I’m just so grateful for this opportunity and so grateful for this place of privilege to offer a voice to students.
Are there things at your own school that you wanted to see improved?
A large majority of students are low-income; and a large majority of those students are minorities, first generation, English learners. And that is primarily where the achievement gap exists within our schools. I feel as though seeing that and being in those shoes — especially as a first-generation student myself — I’ve seen the need for our community, for mentors and programs in place to amplify the needs and voices of our students.
You’ve been elected to represent Los Angeles Unified’s huge and diverse student body. What do you see as the challenges students are most concerned about as the new school year gets going?
Students’ voices are desired to be heard and not overshadowed. They’re the ones who are sitting in the seats eight hours a day and have such a unique perspective on the issues that, to them, need the most attention. And … when they feel their input is not taken into account, that is when issues begin to become present in the student body. So definitely, the amplifying of student voices and also an increase in mental health and wellness.
From the pandemic, we’ve seen an increase of issues in our student body, pertaining specifically to mental health and wellness and seeing how, at a systematic level, we can learn to combat that. And going into that also is preventive measures surrounding drug use within our youth and ensuring that our school environment is a sanctuary for opportunity to flourish, and ensure only the best for our students here in LAUSD — and also focusing on the fact that a lot of these students may come from households that might not provide mentorship. So, also providing mentorship for some of our most marginalized groups in LAUSD, such as first- generation, low-income and English learners to, once again, help close that achievement gap.
What are the issues you are most passionate about?
I definitely am very passionate about amplifying the student voice. Because although there might be issues that specifically pertain to me, I found that being in this position of power means not being led by my own ideas, but being led by the needs of my peers. Since I represent such a large group of students, it’s so important for me to take into account the various issues that are being presented to me from the student population, and ensuring that those are the perspectives that are being shared and not just my own.
What do you hope to accomplish during your time in the position?
One of the biggest goals for this year is to … amplify student voices. But especially since my term falls within our election year, ensuring that students understand the value of their civic engagement — whether it be in volunteering for their community, pre-registering to vote, ensuring that everyone in their families who is capable of voting and is 18 and older is voting in this election, and knowing that their voices are not overshadowed, that they have a place here in this country, that they are able to share their needs and problems and that they will receive solutions to them.
Early this year, the California Department of Health Care Access and Information introduced the new Certified Wellness Coach program, aimed at improving the state’s inadequate capacity to support growing behavioral and mental health needs in California’s youth.
The program is part of the historic five-year, $4.6 billion state-funded Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative, of which the Department received $278 million to recruit, train and certify a diverse slate of mental health support personnel, or certified wellness coaches, in schools and community-based organizations across the state.
Sharmil Shah, assistant deputy director of the California Department of Health Care Access and Information.
According to Sharmil Shah, assistant deputy director of the California Department of Health Care Access and Information, certified wellness coaches work under a care team of licensed clinicians and professionals in pre-K, K-12 and post-secondary school settings. Most coaches have relevant associate or bachelor’s degrees in social work and human services and are trained in nonclinical behavioral health support.
Shah says the program strives to become a long-term response to a long-term crisis in California — that rates of anxiety and depression among the state’s children shot up by 70% between 2017 and 2022, and that following the COVID-19 pandemic, many adolescents experienced serious psychological distress and reported a 20% increase in suicides.
As part of a five-year initiative’s broader push to redefine student success, the program builds on research that behavioral interventions also improve academic performance and attendance in schools. In fact, anxiety, depression and mental health are the top health-related drivers of absenteeism since the onset of the pandemic, according to the Los Angeles Trust for Children’s Health. Simply put, students who feel better do better in school.
EdSource interviewed Shah about the new wellness coach program. Her remarks have been edited for length and clarity.
Describe the Certified Wellness Coach program. What can young people expect from the new wellness coaches?
Certified wellness coaches are meant to be an additional, trusted adult on a school campus — whether it’s an elementary school, middle school, high school or a college campus. This is a person that young people can turn to in times of need. Coaches would offer preventive and early intervention services and are intended to support a child or even a 25-year-old before a severe behavioral health need arises.
Some of the things that a parent or a child might see are classroom-level presentations, supporting school counselors with [mental health] screenings, individual and small group check-ins, wellness education and referrals to advanced behavioral health providers in times of crisis, among many other services.
What are the two types of wellness coaches, and how are their roles different?
There is a Certified Wellness Coach 1 and Certified Wellness Coach II. The Certified Wellness Coach 1 offers entry-level behavioral health supports, such as structured curriculum, to small groups or classrooms, which are focused on wellness promotion and education, mental health literacy — understanding the language of mental health — and life skills. They also support screenings for young people, connect them to behavioral health resources and professionals. If it becomes apparent that someone has a more significant need for behavioral health services, they’ll do a warm hand-off to a higher level of care.
The Certified Wellness Coach II provides a little more in-depth prevention and early intervention support to children and youth. They provide structured curriculum for groups or classrooms that’s focused on enhancing awareness of common behavioral health conditions like depression, anxiety. The Certified Wellness Coach II can help young people overcome maladaptive thinking patterns, distraction strategies and emotional regulations, and are able to do higher level interventions than a Certified Wellness Coach 1.
To support a mental health screening, a Certified Wellness Coach 1 can give the child some information about it, but they won’t administer the questions. The Certified Wellness Coach II can actually facilitate a screening process, be in the room and get everything set up, but they must still all be under the guidance of a school counselor who has qualifications to administer the screening and ask the questions, for example.
Why was it important to implement the program at all levels of schooling — from early education to community college?
It’s essential for children and youth to get help earlier on in the continuum of care, especially before a crisis arises. We believe that by supporting them at a younger age, we can provide them with the tools and skills to support their behavioral health and build resilience as they age. Wellness coaches can support youth through all the different changes, not only as related to age, but to life in general. We start at a very young age and then continue to an age where they can actually remember and hold onto the skills that they’ve learned.
How did the pandemic shape your vision for the program?
For students, we saw increased levels of anxiety, depression, social isolation, a disruption in their education, economic difficulties, and, of course, a lot of loss and grief. Children and adolescents lost family members who did not survive the pandemic. From research, we knew that there was already a youth mental health crisis in the state of California. The pandemic exacerbated it.
One system alone cannot address these challenges, but the school system is where all the kids are. There’s just not enough school personnel to address the need across the state. Through the development of this workforce, we hope that we can complement the incredible work that the educators are already doing by being a partner in their students’ health. Our wellness coaches can focus on social isolation, anxiety, feelings of sadness, and feeling connected and able to talk to somebody.
In a 2022 survey, about 55% of teachers said they would retire earlier than planned due to burnout from the pandemic. Could wellness coaches help relieve some of that ongoing burnout?
I was a PTA president, and I was in those environments in which I saw that there’s a child in the classroom that clearly looks like they need behavioral health services, and the teacher is spending maybe 90% of his or her time on that student, and the rest of the [students] are just kind of running around in circles. The current counselor-to-student ratio in California is about 1 to 464. It’s impossible, and it’s nearly double the recommended ratio. As the staff that spends the most time with students, the burden of supporting student behavioral health often falls on the teacher. That’s just not sustainable. That’s not helpful for the teachers, and they can’t do their job. By adding additional behavioral health professionals on campus, like wellness coaches, we can hopefully alleviate some of that burden and allow teachers to focus on the academic success of their students.
How will certified wellness coaches serve youth from multilingual or multicultural backgrounds? Will coaches reflect the demographics and experiences of their school’s student body?
Equity and effective access to care is a cornerstone of our programs. We have been recruiting diverse candidates to become wellness coaches and making sure that we adequately address cultural responsiveness and humility as part of their training. We have done very extensive marketing and outreach campaigns that use a variety of channels and messaging to get to as many populations as we can, including underserved and underrepresented communities.
We also selected our employer support grant awardees, mostly schools and some community-based organizations, based on geographic spread, to make sure that all 58 counties were represented and could hire coaches. And then we also provided special consideration to Title 1 [low income] schools, organizations whose staff speak multiple languages, and organizations that support Medi-Cal students. And then we had two scholarship cycles to support students who wanted to become wellness coaches. We [will support] their tuition and living expenses, especially for those who came from different backgrounds or didn’t have a lot of resources.
We are also partnering with California community colleges, which offer resources and support for underserved and underrepresented populations to enter the wellness coach system. What we found in our research is that 65% of their students were classified as economically disadvantaged. So we’re already addressing those groups.
And as part of our certification requirements, we’re focusing on specific degrees such as social work, human services and addiction studies, which already include cultural responsiveness and cultural humility as part of their key learning outcomes. What we’ve heard anecdotally from a lot of young people is that, “I don’t see myself in the people that are helping me or serving me,” and we want them to feel safe and comfortable with the person that they’re talking to.
Where are you in the rollout of the program?
In February 2024, we launched the certification program for wellness coaches. As of Sept. 17, we have certified 383 coaches, and that number is steadily growing. We’ve done so much outreach and engagement and social media blips and radio ads, because we need to be able to reach the young people where they are. As of August, the Department executed 64 21-month grant awards of $125 million to employer support grants for schools and community-based organizations to hire wellness coaches. That will fund the placement of more than 1,500 certified wellness coaches between this school year and next school year. And then, also, in August, we awarded 99 individuals with scholarships totaling about $2.8 million for those pursuing degrees with which they apply to become a certified wellness coach.
How can the program address broader post-pandemic issues such as chronic absenteeism and declining school enrollment?
We’re hoping that wellness coaches will strengthen young people by providing them with a safe place to share their fears and teaching them the skills necessary to cope with life’s challenges. We believe that equipping them with these skills will decrease absenteeism, help them focus on their schoolwork and also be able to have them integrate themselves into the school environment. Young people with behavioral health conditions are sometimes isolated, bullied, made fun of and may not even like school as a result of all of those things that are going on. If they have a safe place, a safe adult, a safe person that they can talk to about some of the feelings they have, they will be happy to come back to school, look at it as a place of learning and a place to make friends.
What kind of challenges do you foresee in keeping the program running and successful?
Sustainability. Everything runs on the mighty dollar. We are in the final years of the [Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative] right now, and we can use those funds to sustain the program for probably another year or two. We are actively partnering with the Department of Health Care Services, and other state departments, to make certified wellness coaches’ services billable through Medi-Cal [and commercial insurance], which will support sustainable financing in our schools [beyond the five-year initiative].
Extensive research has demonstrated that students who feel like they belong in schools perform better in the classroom and have better rates of attendance. This not only benefits the student, but it also potentially benefits the schools in retaining coaches, as school finances are based in-part on school attendance.
What kind of feedback have you received about the program?
I had a student who said, “I didn’t really feel like there were a lot of places to go to, even though they had help available. I didn’t trust people to confide in.” You never want people to feel like they have nowhere to go or that they’re alone. This was a student who would then become a wellness coach. Another student who became a wellness coach said that she didn’t feel there was enough support when kids needed help where she lived. She said, “If I’m struggling, I want to know there’s someone there for me if I genuinely need it.” She said she’s had really hard days, but being able to open up and talk about it makes the world seem a little more colorful. It makes her feel lighter on her feet.
We had some parents indicate that wellness coaches are a great way to give back to the community, because they’re giving back to our future, our children. It’s helping them be productive members of society and be the best version of themselves.
What are education leaders doing about transformingthe way schools address learning, behavior and emotional problems? The current answer, it seems, is: not much.
We do see increasing discussions among education leaders about transforming education in general. Naturally, much of the focus is on improving instruction and making major changes in how schools are managed (e.g., financed, administered, held accountable). However, when it comes to improving how schools play their role in providing support when students are not doing well, proposals for transformative changes generally are not forthcoming.
The result: As the number of learning, behavior and emotional problems increases, schools continue to react in inadequate ways.
What’s wrong with what schools are doing now?
All schools devote resources to coping with student problems. Some are able to offer a range of student and learning supports; others can provide only what is mandated. In the majority of schools, what is available usually covers relatively few students. More resources would help. But school budgets always are tight, and adding the number of student support staff that advocates call for is really not in the cards.
In general, districts plan and implement student and learning supports in a fragmented and piecemeal manner, generating a variety of specialized programs and services. Over many years, increasing concern about fragmented approaches has produced calls for “integrated services” and, recently, for “integrated support systems.”
However, by focusing primarily on fragmentation, policymakers and school improvement advocates fail to deal with a core underlying problem. What drives the fragmentation is the longstanding marginalization in school improvement policy of the role schools must play in addressing barriers to learning and teaching.
A fundamental challenge for education leaders and policymakers is ending this marginalization. Meeting the challenge requires escaping old ways of thinking about how schools address learning, behavior and emotional problems.
What might a transformed approach look like?
Addressing the pervasive and complex barriers that impede effective teaching and student learning requires a systemwide approach that comprehensively and equitably supports whole-child development and learning. This involves districts and schools rethinking how they frame the practices they use to address learning, behavior and emotional problems.
In this respect, the current widespread adoption of some form of a multitiered “continuum of interventions” (commonly known as MTSS) is a partial step in the right direction. This framework recognizes that a full range of intervention must include a focus on promoting whole-student healthy development, preventing problems, providing immediate assistance when problems appear, and ensuring assistance for serious and chronic special education concerns. But moving forward, our research has clarified the need to reframe each level of intervention into subsystems designed to weave together school and community resources.
Moreover, our research indicates that the various programs, services, initiatives and strategies can be grouped into six domains of classroom and schoolwide student and learning support. The six arenas encompass interventions that:
Embed student and learning supports into regular classroom strategies to enable learning and teaching
Support transitions (e.g., new grade, new school, before/after school, during lunch and other daily transitions)
Increase home and school connections and engagement
Respond to — and, where feasible, prevent — school and personal crises
Increase community involvement and collaborative engagement
Facilitate student and family access to special assistance.
Organizing the activity in this way helps clarify what supports are needed in and out of the classroom and across each level of the continuum to enable effective teaching and motivate student learning.
We recognize that the changes education leaders are already pursuing represent considerable challenges and that the changes we discuss can be daunting.
But maintaining the status quo is untenable, and just doing more tinkering will not meet the need.
Transforming how schools play their role in addressing barriers to learning and teaching into a unified, comprehensive and equitable system that is fully integrated into school improvement policy and practice is essential to enhancing equity of opportunity for students to succeed at school and beyond.
•••
Howard Adelman and Linda Taylor are co-directors of the Center for MH in Schools & Student/Learning Supports at UCLA, an initiative to improve outcomes for students by helping districts and their schools enhance how they address barriers to learning and teaching.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the authors. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Students work on homework during an after-school program in Chico, the largest city in Butte County. (File photo)
Credit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
At 14, Charlotte Peery dropped out of high school.
“I was one of those silent sufferers,” Peery said. “I was battling with addiction, and once I finally decided I couldn’t go to school anymore, there wasn’t anyone around to say, ‘Well, let’s see what we can do’.”
It took another four years for Peery, raised in rural Tehama County, to return to school and enroll in an alternative education program. There, she met a counselor who provided the academic guidance and mental health counseling she needed to graduate from high school. Peery has since started earning her bachelor’s degree in social work and has become one of Tehama County schools’ first certified wellness coaches.
“When I had the opportunity to apply to be a wellness coach — it was everything I’ve always wanted to do — to provide the kind of support that I lacked when I needed it most,” Peery said.
As an entry-level wellness coach, Peery provides students with nonclinical support such as quick check-ins, screenings, referrals to specialists, structured mental health curriculum and outreach to their families.
Peery’s role is part of the state’s $4.6 billion Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative, for which the Department of Health Care Access and Information received $278 million to recruit, train and certify a diverse slate of mental health support personnel, known as certified wellness coaches, for schools and community-based organizations. Since February 2024, the department has hired over 2,000 certified wellness coaches.
“The wellness coach program helped define what coping skills and home-to-school services I could focus on,” said Jacque Thomas, who serves as a certified wellness coach II and is able to provide more in-depth services to students, such as individual 30-minute sessions focused on coping skills, goal-setting and life skills.
According to a 2021 study, 45% of California youth between the ages of 12 and 17 reported having struggled recently with mental health issues. The overall suicide rate in Tehama and neighboring counties is more than twice the state average, and according to a 2017-2019 survey, more than a third of 11th graders in Tehama County reported feelings of depression.
Research shows that children ages 2 to 8 in rural communities consistently have higher rates of mental, behavioral and developmental disorders than children in urban communities, largely due to financial difficulties and geographic isolation. Students in Tehama County tend to start struggling with mental health issues at a younger age, said Savannah Kenyon, a parent to a fourth grader and an education behavior assistant at Red Bluff High School.
“Our neighbors could be acres and acres away, and we don’t know them by name — so there’s a lot less socializing,” Kenyon said. “A lot of our students also come from a family of addiction or have to be the providers for their families.”
In Tehama County, nearly 1 in 5 children, and a third of children under the age of 5, live below the poverty line. The county also ranks sixth in California for the number of children who have experienced two or more adverse childhood events, such as abuse, neglect, substance use or mental health problems, known to have lasting impacts on health and well-being.
“It’s hard to see our children dealing with adult problems, and as a result, adult mental health problems, way younger,” Kenyon said.
Wellness coaches like Thomas and Peery try to understand students’ needs as they evolve. Thomas said that in the past school year, they saw an increase in students referred for substance use intervention, mirroring troubling rates of adolescent drug use and fatalities in the U.S.
In response to the increase in referrals, Thomas and Peery decided to become trained in Mindfully Based Substance Abuse Treatment, a program focused on building emotional awareness and examining cravings and triggers in youth substance use. In the process, they also learned about students dealing with unhealthy relationships or domestic violence at home. In response, Peery developed and ran a 16-week curriculum in three schools and a juvenile detention center, teaching students how to identify and respond to issues like abuse and family trauma.
Charlotte Peery, certified wellness coach I in Tehama County.
Peery is often the first point of contact for a student struggling with mental health issues. On paper, her job spans the next two or three steps in the process — a mental health screening, a mindfulness and stress reduction session, or a referral to a specialist. But in practice, she hopes to strengthen the long-term network of care available to students. She has partnered with the Tehama County Department of Behavioral Health, which provides substance use recovery treatment, and Empower Tehama, which helps victims of domestic violence, for example.
“I’m making connections with drug and alcohol counselors and becoming more aware of which clinicians are accepting new clients once students transition out of our program,” Peery said. “To have that open communication, I’ve seen a huge shift in the way all of our partners are working together.”
School-based support is likely the most effective way to reach Tehama County students in need, she said, because most families cannot easily access major services, in part due to a disproportionate shortage of mental health providers,
“We’ve been able to provide more services to the farthest outreaches of our community and helped build rapport with every school,” Thomas said. “We go out to all 33 schools in the county to provide check-ins and open up the doors for our clinicians to meet with high-need students.”
Early intervention matters
After her daughter’s school shut down at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, just as she was starting transitional kindergarten, Kenyon noticed that her daughter was missing some key developmental milestones.
“We were realizing that the kids were not socializing at some of their peak times when they should be learning social skills,” Kenyon said. “I knew at an early age that she was going to be struggling with her ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), so we knew that starting young was going to be the best way to help her in the long run.”
Early intervention for Kenyon’s daughter began with a screening and diagnosis of ADHD. From there, she said, her daughter’s counselor and teacher helped with little things like — motivating her through action-oriented feedback on her work, or teaching her mindful, deep breathing when she feels anxious — that allowed her daughter to handle emotional distress as well as social expression and inattentiveness in the classroom on a day-by-day basis.
“We’re always having open communication with the counselor or teacher. Being able to tell them, ‘We struggled last night, so she might be a little tired today; she might be a little bit emotional,’ has been imperative to her success,” Kenyon said.
Research shows that early, multidisciplinary interventions, such as a combination of school-based programs and family support initiatives, significantly reduce the risk of carrying mental health disorders into adulthood.
School shutdowns during the pandemic compounded the youth mental health crisis in California. About 65% of young people with depression did not receive treatment during the pandemic, while the rate of suicide among adolescents rose by 20%.
“We saw heightened anxiety, depression and delays in social development for students that had gone longer without intervention than they typically would have if they were on a school campus,” said JoNell Wallace, school mental health and wellness team coordinator at the Tehama County Department of Education. “We’re now starting interventions in third or fourth grade that we would’ve caught in second grade.”
Jacque Thomas, certified wellness coach II in Tehama County.
Despite the additional support, Thomas said she has been flooded with students approaching her for help (“which is amazing,” she adds) and that students’ needs in Tehama County are still outpacing available staff and services at schools. She frequently eats in her car on the way to a counseling session, or sometimes skips lunch altogether, to fit another student into her schedule.
“You start to get stretched thin, and I don’t want any one student to have to be on a waitlist,” Thomas said.
Understaffing has also underscored the weaknesses of the referral system, a process through which schools assess students and refer them to wellness coaches, depending on the level of support they need. Schools do not always connect students to the support they need because of how time-consuming referrals can be.
“I think schools would much rather prefer it if we were on site,” Thomas said. “And that’s the goal — that more schools are qualified to have more wellness coaches, so their referral process will be in-house, and those services can start happening with a lesser barrier.”
There will be some relief starting this fall, when five additional certified wellness coaches will be placed at elementary and middle schools in Tehama County. Kenyon said the expanded service is a win for students like her daughter.
“She used to hide under the table if she got any type of feedback or if she felt like she had done something wrong,” Kenyon said. “But she hasn’t done it this entire year, which is such a big change from how she would try and escape her feelings.”
Now, with help from her counselors, coaches and teachers, her daughter comes home excited to talk about her day, feeling more confident and self-assured.
“Knowing that she’s coping, and for me to have help beyond just parental help — I know she’s a hundred percent supported through these programs,” Kenyon said.
West Contra Costa Unified School District administration building.
Credit: Louis Freedberg / EdSource
TOP TAKEAWAYS
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 MosesCaption: 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, “shouldreflect 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.
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.
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.”
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 wasthe 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 mentalillnesses 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
