Presentation by the Alameda Unified School District (AUSD) on AUSD’s Mental Health Needs Assessment. (Base Reuse/Economic Development 256)
Okay, so then we move on to the regular agenda items. Six A's presentation by the Alameda Unified School District on Tuesdays. Mental Health Needs Assessment. Thank you, Madam Chair. Hi, I'm Eric Von Stein, development manager with the City of Almeida's Community Development Department. I will make some very brief introductory remarks before handing over the presentation to Kirsten Zaza to the school district's chief student support officer. Last September, the El Meter collaboration for children, youth and their families held a retreat to clarify their direction over the next five years. The Youth Collaborative is a coalition of the city of Alameda, Alameda County Supervisor Wilma Chan's office and the Alameda Unified School District and nonprofit organizations that work together to promote Positive Child and youth development is co-chaired by Mayor AC Ashcraft, Supervisor Chan and School Board President Mia Bonta. At the retreat, the Youth Collaborative identified the mental health of the city's youth youth as a major priority that needs attention as the first step in developing an action plan. The Youth Collaborative heard presentations by the AUC on its recently completed health and wellness needs assessment. Following the presentations, the Youth Collaborative discussed the need to destigmatize mental illness and find ways to promote mental health and wellness of students and their families through public awareness campaign that has a consistent message. Supervisor Chan offered to offer some resources to begin this effort by having her staff coordinate a work group meeting with a consulting firm to help develop a youth mental health awareness campaign. An initial meeting with the consultants was held on April 4th. A USD also made a presentation on its needs assessment to the Social Service Human Relations Board. At its January meeting, the Strub members recognized the importance of this issue and stated that a larger conversation needs to take place within the entire community. The startup recommended that AOC present its report to the City Council so that the city council members can determine the city's role in addressing the issue. The Youth Collaborative intends to pool its resources to develop and implement a public awareness campaign. Supervisor Will Merchant's Office and the Unified School District are fully on board and a mental health awareness campaign effort. And we are recommending that the city also support the campaign and for the city's continued participation through the Youth Collaborative on this effort. This may include using city resources such as the city's website and collaborating on outreach with other city departments, such as Recreation and Parks Department, to disseminate information through the community. And now I would like to turn over the presentation to Kirsten. And and as mestizos coming up to the podium, I'd just like to say that she did this presentation for the Collaborative, the Alameda Collaborative and Children, Youth and Families a month or two ago. It's very compelling. And at the time I said, I really want this information to be brought to the greater community, because this is it's not just a school district issue, it is a community issue. So I so appreciate your coming to share this important information with us. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate all of you guys taking the time to hear about this a little bit about me. I'm here since Oso. I've been in the school district for over 20 years. I've been a teacher, a principal, vice principal and many different roles. And I care very, very deeply around mental health and social emotional health in our schools. This led us to do this work of figuring out what our actual needs are. We saw a huge increase in students going out on what we call home instruction because of mental health needs. And we saw students being what's what commonly people will hear of would be a 5150. So being taken out of schools for our youth, it's 5185 because of suicide. SIDLE Ideation and actually having plans to commit suicide. So we've seen these things increasing and we really wanted to get a wider understanding of what was happening in the community. So in 2017, 18 school year, we did a full mental health needs assessment. And what this looked like is collecting data from a wide variety of places. So we did online surveys for parents, staff and students themselves. We did focus groups with staff, families, students at elementary, middle and high school. We also targeted a wide variety of different student groups. So not just saying, you know, we're just going to grab a group of students and work with them. But really targeting you know, we did an African-American group. We did a what we call a high achieving group. So these are students who were getting 4.0 or above. So to really sort of get a wide perspective of where our students are, we also looked at the data that we had available on California Healthy Kids surveys are done and we wanted to look at patterns over the past several years. If there were patterns and and see if this supported any of the current data we're receiving. So after this was done, I if you're interested, there is a 50 page document that documents all of the findings that we have. But what's important is there's an executive summary that I wrote, which is the first 12 pages, which gives you the gist of what is important to know about what we found. We were able to break it into seven different categories. So we called. Tears of support, meaning the different types of support students need. What our coordinated practices are. What the school wide responsibility to mental health is. Do we even know that we have these issues going on in school? What our capacity as a district is to support this work. Cultural responsiveness. Do we see that there are differences between race and ethnicity? And then we have school based health centers that we partner with Almeida Family Services here in the district that they exist on. Almeida High School's campus, on in Snell's campus, we have services on islands, campus and campus and some of our charter schools. And so how was our partnership working? I also presented on no cost recommendations. A lot of this work really has to do with coordinating our services and we can get a lot done with even without throwing money at it. There's a lot that we can do. So key findings from three tiers of support is that students, parents, staff and key stakeholders overwhelmingly reported that additional staff is needed. We need counselors. We need therapists. We need psychologists. We are inadequate to the types of services that we can provide for the needs of our students, students, staff and parents. All reported that the biggest behavioral health problem for students in their schools is depression or feeling sad, anxious and teasing in that order. So whenever I see something come out where it's consistent across the board. So parents report it, staff report it, and students report it. That's very interesting to me. And this feeling of depression was consistent across all of the reporters, different groups. Student groups overwhelmingly reported problems with dealing with stress and anxiety. They also reported higher uses of drug use, especially with cannabis, alcohol and vaping. For coordinated practices. What we found for the district is that our resources are woefully inadequate and at a crisis level we have more students than ever actually have our current data. As of January 2019, we had to do 44 risk assessments in high school for students who were showing suicidal ideation, 23 in middle school and 20 in elementary school for 5180 fives, meaning students who were actually taken from school. We have 20 students at our high schools that were taken out of school because of 51, 80 fives and then two students in elementary for hospitalizations for mental health. So far this year, this is what families report. So it's probably more than this. But we are at 31 high school. Five middle school and three elementary. Four hospitalizations due to mental health. So that's just this year's data. And then what we see is that and that's just as of January. So we see that this is continuing to be a big issue. We found that families were facing significant issues and are hesitant to seek help support through the school due to a variety of barriers, privacy concerns, stigma being a lack, a big one, lack of money or time to address the issues and not knowing what services are available. This was a big one that stuck out to me as this is really a no cost thing that we could fix together. In the school district, we are really working on what's called multi-tiered system of support. So being clear about what it looks like for everybody, what does everybody get when it comes to instruction and social emotional learning? What we found is that we've been building positive behaviors, intervention supports in our school staff, and it's different across sites and we need more consistency across the district around this work. Being clear about what our expectations are, being clear about how families can actually get help across the district. Cultural responsiveness. There is a disparity regarding suspension rates in many schools, especially as it relates to African-American students and students with special needs. And when working with our student focus groups, they had a lot to say about that and what they have identified as barriers for their learning. When it came to access to the school based health center. The communication and coordination is lacking, and part of that is because of rules and laws. So we have HIPA versus for but not being able to share information back and forth between the two agencies. We also know that our school based health centers have waitlists that are very, very significant. And because they're mostly funded through medical dollars, they can really only see medical students. And as we know, our demographics in Alameda are changing. Our medical numbers are going down, which means that we have still students who need the services, but they don't have the medical qualification and therefore they're not getting the services. Interesting. Just another key finding was that cell phones, students reported cell phones as being one of the biggest distractions to their learning and that as a community, we need to address it, that students actually want, you know, some boundaries around cell phones. So this is some of the student data that came out of the surveys. So bullying reported Alameda High School, 48.8% of students feel a lot or some students are affected. And so now, 44.5%. What I want to draw your attention to are the two bottom pieces. Drug and alcohol abuse, 86.8% of students surveyed feel a lot or some students are affected by drug and alcohol abuse. At Internet, it was 62.1%. Depression, 87.1% of the students surveyed feel a lot or some students are affected by feelings of depression. Add in Snell 64.60 4.4%. So when we're talking at Alameda High School, 87.1% of students. That is significant that the students are reporting this is a big issue, feeling worried, anxious or stressed. 92.8% of students reported that a lot or some students are affected by this, while it's now 71.6. The nice part is that when it comes to feeling unsafe, those numbers were a lot lower. Still not low enough for me, but lower. With the California Healthy Kids Survey. So remember I said we were looking over time for patterns of chronic sadness and hopeless feelings were alarmingly high at the gray levels, ranging from 21 to 35%. And this was reporting from students starting at fifth grade through 11th grade. 14% of ninth graders and 21% of students at the continuation school seriously considered attempting suicide. So. Those numbers are alarming. For the focus groups. I sort of put a little bit of narrative around what the focus groups talked a lot about. High school students talked a lot about cannabis on being, of course, a much bigger issue than alcohol, but also the use of Adderall. So a lot of, you know, prescribed drugs, but also over the counter drugs. They talked a lot about depression and anxiety and the stressors that are happening, you know, struggling with grades, balancing school and sports. What was interesting is that the consistency across the groups, around things that they were struggling with and this depression and anxiety was across all groups. And then the cannabis was across all groups with the highest sort of issues that they're struggling with. So after this was done in 1718, we formed a steering committee and we started what I hate this term, but it really is kind of a road show where getting out and getting as much information out as I possibly can to the greater community, because this is not just a school issue. This really is a mental health crisis. It's happening across California, but it really is now showing itself here in Alameda, especially with students in our schools. We came up with an action plan of the things that we need to do to start implementing as soon as possible this school year. And it really is a three year action plan. So we have a three year action plan of what we're doing inside the school district to address these issues. We have a budget. I'm sure some of you know about our school budget. Some of you don't. But we, you know, are struggling. We're struggling. We want to be able to give our teachers raises. We have a limited budget and we're trying to figure out how to balance it. Currently, we have a lot of the mental health pieces not funded. So at the tier one level, that's sort of what everybody has access to. We've funded more than the other tiers. But when it comes to funding things like muftis to support school for the first time we got four MFT is in place at $360,000. This was the first time ever in a school district that we've actually had marriage family therapist working inside our school district and we're working with Alameda Family Services to bring in that support to really meet the needs that came out in the mental health needs assessment. We need at least eight FTE. We have 17 schools in our district and, you know, thinking we're splitting them around, we could probably get away with having services of eight FTE. It would be lovely if we had more intervention leads that can help find these students and connect them with the right services and also give us services separately for Tier three, those wraparound services. So we really feel we need social workers in the district to do some of those wraparound services. You know, as you know, we are also seeing many of our youth that, you know, are losing homes that are having to leave the cities. And a lot of these pieces are, of course, all connected. And so having the help and the support of social workers to do some of that wraparound services is really important. Connect them that with the services that Alameda has in general. So I went where very, very quickly because I said 10 minutes. So I'm here for questions that you guys might have on the work that we're doing and then on the support that we would love to have from the city. Thank you very much. Council Questions. Comments. Councilmember Ody, I just had a question. Thank you for this presentation, by the way. It was I appreciate that you guys brought it to the council because it's it's something that we need to hear about. When you did your focus groups, did you have any special focus groups with any LGBTQ students? Yes. Okay, good. Yes. I didn't see that. As as you know, that with our LGBTQ youth, the chances or I don't know, but the the data shows that they are more at risk of suicide than other groups. Okay, thanks. Questions? Comments from anyone else. Vice Mayor in a tweet. Hi. Hi. Thank you. Great presentation. How is the district working with the county public health department? So with the county mental health department, most of the support that we get is for special education. Right now, my special education budget, what I pay county mental health for the total of supporting 92 students. I pay $1.2 million to county and again 92 students that $1.2 million supports. That budget is going up and up and up because county mental health. The reason why we still use county mental health is because they can bill for Medi-Cal. The county mental health charges us 10% on top of regular billing. So right now we're getting a very small amount back and that's why our budget keeps going up and up and up. So as a district, I really am actually looking for how we can do this differently, because as our Medi-Cal numbers go down, county mental health is really not going to work because we won't be able to sustain this increase in budget that's continuing. So it's it's it's been difficult with them. Do you think that there is a role? We're on a limb on this one. Is there a role for a conversation with the school district in the city to try to approach and to try to talk to the county about how we can work differently? But in that. Yes, I do think that there is definitely a role with that. I think that there are other grants also that county mental health can get most of the grant money goes to states and unfortunately to cities that have more medical eligible students. And so there has to be this with the increase in mental illness. And I really say that there there's there's there's a mental health, but this is mental illness. So when we have students that are having suicidal ideation at this amount that we're saying we have to address it holistically and not just as Alameda, but what are we seeing across the county and how can we share services in a better way? Yeah. Okay, great. Thank you. Councilmember Avila. In terms of these are our numbers, how are we comparing when we're compared with other communities? Are other communities experiencing similar issues or have they seen similar trends? Mm hmm. So I work with many other school districts. They haven't done many other school districts that have not done this intense level of needs assessment. If you look at the California Healthy Kids surveys, then yes, I would say that, you know, we're seeing the increase, but there hasn't been this in-depth work that has been done in some of the other districts. So there is we don't have the same comparison. But anecdotally, I would say, you know, what is being reported is that everyone is seeing an increase in suicidal ideation. I think that we had new legislation that came out that every school district has to have a a plan for suicide prevention. So that has made districts track things a little bit better. But, yes, we're seeing it across the board. And then with the school based, based health centers. I know that. And we struggled. I used to be on the board for all media, family services. Things that we struggled with was meeting the needs of the students, because one of the things that we hated seeing was any student being turned away, right when students are coming to ask for help. I know that the the waitlists have kind of continued to grow over the years, and that was a trend that we noticed a while ago. How are we going about addressing the students that are coming, that are sitting on a waitlist is the right way for those school based health centers to make other referrals , to give the students other opportunities or access to aid I know for, but it makes it very difficult. Yeah. So Kayla Jenks and I work very, very closely together and we actually just hired a new director for Alameda Family Services. And so I'm excited to work with Kathryn to sort of address some of these issues. Kayla and I, however, have that's part of the reason why I have used Cal through consulting. So I pay Alameda Family Services a good amount of money so that we can sort of cross our services together. So if there's a student who is non-medical, who is sitting on a waitlist, he at least can communicate to the person who's coming out of my funding to sort of take them. But it's it's just still not enough. You know, I'm supporting for MF TS and they're throughout the district. So that that was our first attempt of trying to to to blend services a little bit without crossing financial lines too badly. And do we know how long the waitlist is? So what we are seeing is that and this is sort of comes to the next piece around the need for stigma reduction. So we are saying that. If we know that a student is really at harm, I don't mean a Family Services is taking him. They're still seeing him if they're showing that they need, you know, support right then and there. If we find out that they have a they have insurance. We're trying to work with them in the family to get them seen. Many of our students have Kaiser. On the time. To the issue. Yes, Kaiser has a wait time, too. But the other issue is that families have this stigma attached to it and don't want the school knowing if something is happening because it's linked to, you know, college admission. They think that all of these things are linked and so they want to separate it. And so that's part of the stigma that we're running into about getting kids services. And I also noted the the portion or the focus that has been placed also on cultural sensitivity. What are we doing to work with that in terms of the in the classroom atmosphere around that? So we have started on a three year professional cycle, professional development cycle for our teachers. The first piece is around restorative practices, so implementing restorative practices across school sites. The second piece is anti-bias work, and then the third piece is called Universal Design for Learning, where it really is about helping all students access curriculum. And so that's sort of the foundational work that we've started across the next three years. And then offshoots of that work are trauma informed practices and then specific specific strategies within cultural relevant pedagogy. So that's that's the work that's happening right now. Any of our staff taking the Harvard implicit bias test or anything like that? Not that I know of. Okay. Not that I know of. And I just want to say that we have said the the three chairs of the Alameda Collaborative, Young Children, Youth and Families, our county supervisor, Wilma Chan, said We are in contact with the county school board president Mia Bond and myself, and we just had our chairs planning meeting for our meeting next April. And what Supervisor Chan has done is she has within her office access to it's a public relations consulting firm and she has generally given us an hour of their time for a conference call to help plan a messaging strategy. And she just added another hour. And so there's a subcommittee working on that when they come back to us and we'll expect to report at the meeting later this month. I'm going blank on the day. I think we may have some better ideas for how the city might be able to help. But what we did talk about just on this Monday last year is that it is important to destigmatize, seeking help for mental health issues and things like, you know, recognizing warning signs. And I know this surprised me, I guess, because my kids are now 27. It's been a while. But you need to look for these signs even in preschoolers and you know that that young and but and then of course the cultural sensitivities and what a taboo subject seeking help for mental health is in some cultural ethnic, racial populations. And so to the extent possible, at the very least, I would like to suggest that the council directed staff to work with the collaborative on children, youth and families and also to help in ways we can with the public awareness campaign. The idea was to reach out not only to the young people. That's certainly important to the students, but also their parents and their caregivers and and places where you would find children. So the libraries, park and recreation and camp programs, there were preschools. And so, you know, social media is one way to get the word out. I know when it comes to young people, they communicate on, you know, Instagram or whatever, whatever platform they're on. But there are some ways that the city can can pitch in and help. So after this next conference call among the subcommittee who's working on strategizing the best, most effective means of messaging, we'll have a little better idea. I don't even think it necessarily costs a lot of money, but we just want to be, you know, targeted and effective. So that would be my recommendation. And I'm happy to hear from my colleagues about direction we might want to give to Staff Councilmember Vela. I'm supportive of that. I also think that there's a lot of parents that participate in families that participate in our rec and park program, not to put more on our RICKENBACH program, but I think also integrating how we communicate with our rec and park staff that that work with these families or see how we can get the information out. I know one of the things that we get from the city that at least in my household we always save is the rec and park guide. And if we can, in the next version that we put out, include the kind of the advertising materials or the get the information. Out, whatever comes out of this. Um. Yeah. Okay. Any other thoughts? Councilmember de SA. Well, thank you. Thank you very much for the presentation. I was very struck how perhaps almost nine out of ten youth at Alameda High were reflecting a certain concern on two variables. Right. And and and and now it was almost two out of three, which is still also a really high threshold. And I think numbers, especially the nine out of ten numbers, really forces Alameda City Hall to kind of move outside of the of its usual things that it does. So I you know, I am very supportive of whatever we can do to help out because when I see numbers like nine out of ten reflecting a certain concern to me that they have rings, certain alarm bells and and the better that we can play a role in assisting the school district and the county in in lowering that number and even lowering the two thirds number. Right. And so now I think all of our community were well, will certainly appreciate what efforts that we can lend to that. Thank you. All right. And Councilman Brody. You know, just a second of what everyone said. I mean it. There's ways the city can be helpful. Mm hmm. I mean, even if it means I. If there's some legal way we can, you know, help with funding, I'd be open to. To hearing what those opportunities are. And Vice Mayor? Not quite. So I was going to say the same thing that councilmember already said, but I also, whether it's to the youth collaborative or whatnot, I think that the more that we can engage the county in developing a messaging, the messages that are going to work in Alameda are going to work in San Leandro, etc. and the more that we can, that messaging can be very expensive to be done right. And we should not have 13 school districts all. Developing to do it all. Yeah, right. So the more that we can can do that as a collaborative and then use our various voices to amplify that, we'll be more successful. So anything we can do to help on that. All right. So anything further to add. Okay. So thank you so much. As a for. Giving, I have to give a shout out to the park and RECs program and we are also are joining forces. I'm going to be doing restorative practices, professional development for all of our parks and RECs, new staff in in June. So I'm excited to have that coordinated coordination as well. Thank you for helping confirm what we know that we have an outstanding recreation Parks Department. Okay. So thank you all for your attention to that council. Do we want to quick? Sure. Okay. We are going to take a five minute break. We are gonna give you until nine. Ten. That's 8 minutes. Don't squander it. It's never five. Because I see everyone back at 910. I knew it before. Yeah, yeah. I love it, too. Me jinxed it. Guess. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So we are on to item six B, is that correct? Correct.