Across the Palo Alto school district each week, amid math classes and history tests, band practice and recess, many students are receiving help of a non-academic nature to support their mental health. At El Carmelo Elementary School, students attend group therapy and also learn about mindfulness during class from a Counseling and Support Services for Youth (CASSY) therapist. At Palo Alto High School, students from Mandarin-speaking homes who walk into the school’s new wellness center are connected with a counselor from nonprofit Asian Americans for Community Involvement.
The mix of services that await students needing support for everything from stress about school or relationships to a diagnosable mental illness illustrate the increasing expectation that school campuses, in addition to hospitals, doctors’ offices or private therapists, are places where students can access high-quality mental health services.
As the school district grapples with a multi-million dollar budget shortfall, contracts with at least two of the nonprofit service providers are being eyed as potential places to cut.
But the nonprofits, and some community members, say that cutting from the district’s mental health budget couldn’t come at a worse time: Demand for counseling and related services has never been higher — or more utilized. Simultaneously, the organizations themselves are operating on tight budgets, and at least one organization, Adolescent Counseling Services, has said it is unable to sustain the level of counseling it provides Palo Alto’s middle and high schools without greater funding from the school district.
So what does this network of vital services include, and just how much is the district spending on it?
What’s available at the elementary level
Elementary students can access free counseling services from one of three different nonprofits: Counseling and Support Services for Youth (CASSY), Acknowledge Alliance, and Family & Children Services of Silicon Valley (FCS).
CASSY is the largest provider, covering eight campuses: Duveneck, El Carmelo, Escondido, Fairmeadow, Juana Briones, Nixon, Ohlone and Walter Hays. Acknowledge Alliance provides counseling at Barron Park, Hoover and Palo Verde, while Family & Children Services is at Addison.
Both CASSY and Acknowledge Alliance have steadily increased their contracts with the district over the years to meet a growing demand. Since 2011, CASSY’s presence has grown from six schools to eight, and its overall level of service has tripled — to 250 hours a week — since 2012, Executive Director Christy Hayes said in an interview. Through February, CASSY had provided 219 elementary students with ongoing individual or group therapy this school year. It also provided consultations to 631 parents and to 1,627 school district staff.
Similarly, while Acknowledge Alliance started at one school, it is now counseling at three campuses, where it provided individual, group and family counseling services to about 90 students last year.
In addition to counseling, CASSY provides consultations with parents and staff, staff training and classroom lessons for students. Its services vary by school and even by year depending on students’ needs and a school’s culture, Hayes said.
The most common issues the nonprofit sees among elementary-aged students at all the schools stem from peer relationships and social skills, but Hayes said in Palo Alto they see “a lot of anxiety for younger kids.”
This year, the school district provided CASSY with $396,500, and the nonprofit raises about $38,000 itself to fully fund the costs, which it does in other school districts as well, Hayes said.
Acknowledge Alliance, which was founded on the belief that children succeed when they have a caring, supportive adult at school, provides not only counseling services to students, but also resources and support for teachers and principals. Its contract this year is for $117,000.
The Mountain View nonprofit was invited by parents and teachers at Palo Verde in 2009 to provide resiliency education at Palo Verde in the wake of a teenage suicide cluster, said Sarah Kremer, who directs Acknowledge Alliance’s Resilience Consultation Program.
Last year, the Mountain View-based nonprofit also piloted a monthly support group for high school teachers to meet with a licensed staff member to decompress and talk about coping strategies for work and personal stress, Kremer said. Acknowledge Alliance also runs a similar group for principals.
Family & Children Services of Palo Alto is providing a supervised counseling intern to Addison for $12,500 a year. The district has also referred a “handful” of students to the nonprofit as part of the district’s three-session counseling program, the cost of which is only partially funded by the district, said Maryanne McGlothlin, director of grants and communications.
Family & Children Services has also sent its counselors to the schools on a pro-bono basis in times of crisis, she said. (Many other organizations have done the same. The school district also has a standing contract with Palo Alto grief-support nonprofit KARA that it activates in times of crisis, such as a student death by suicide or teacher death, said Brenda Carrillo, director of student services and wellness for the district. For the last two years, the district has paid KARA $10,000 for those services.)
Secondary level services
At Palo Alto Unified’s middle and high schools, Adolescent Counseling Services (ACS) is the primary on-campus counseling provider. Five days a week, the nonprofit provides each of the middle schools with one part-time licensed psychotherapist and two or three interns and each of the high schools with one full-time psychotherapist and five or six interns. Paly also has an additional part-time licensed supervisor.
The nonprofit is at about 90 percent capacity across the five schools and is “often times teetering at the brink of being full,” said Christine Tam, director of school and community-based services. The high schools’ new wellness centers have increased drop-ins and referrals to ACS, she said.
On average, the nonprofit serves between 650 and 800 students each year across the schools.
This year, the district is paying Adolescent Counseling Services $100,000, up from $90,000 last year. The nonprofit also receives $106,000 from the City of Palo Alto through the Human Services Resource Allocation Process, which provides grants to organizations that provide direct services to residents.
Palo Alto high school students have also long had access to two Stanford University fellows, who are at each high school four hours a week. A child and adolescent psychiatrist who oversees the fellows is also available at each high school for a half day every week.
The fellows help about 15 to 20 students each year, providing short-term consultation rather than ongoing treatment, said Steven Adelsheim, director of Stanford’s Youth Center for Mental Health and Wellbeing. The fellows also consult with school staff and have provided education and training at the schools.
Stanford’s contract, which this year was about $62,800, is one of two that district staff have proposed cutting.
The other is one of the district’s newest contracts, with Asian Americans for Community Involvement (AACI) of San Jose. In 2015, the nonprofit started providing part-time counselors who speak Mandarin, Spanish and later Korean to the high schools. Today, the counselors are at Paly and Gunn for one day each per week as well as at the district office to provide after-school “clinic” hours three evenings a week for three to four hours. They currently serve about 20 students each week, according to AACI.
AACI has also organized parent-education classes in Mandarin, Korean and Spanish to help parents whose first language is not English understand mental health.
AACI’s contract has doubled since last year; the district is now funding the nonprofit $83,700.
District staff have suggested — but not yet recommended — cutting the Stanford and AACI contracts by half, leaving AACI services only at the high schools and eliminating the Stanford fellows program. (The district would retain Stanford’s psychiatrist consultations and other activities.) This would save the district $80,000. Carrillo said she doesn’t expect any of the other mental health providers’ contracts to be up for review as part of this budget cycle.
At a March 7 budget discussion, Superintendent Max McGee said the Stanford fellows provide an “expensive service” that is “of some limited value” given a decline in demand for the fellows in the last two years.
Sarita Kohila, AACI interim president and CEO, said she sees a “critical” need for the district to keep culturally competent mental health services in students’ and parents’ native languages.
“It’s much easier for a person who can speak the language and has been in this culture … to be able to explain to the parents and empathize with them (and to) relate to them a little bit better — as well as to the kids,” she told the Weekly.
Carrillo said her department hopes any cuts would have little impact on students. She said AACI’s Korean parenting classes have not been well-attended. But last spring, according to AACI, about 15 to 20 parents participated in the class; this fall only four attended — but the nonprofit attributes the drop to the district advertising the classes via email rather than by distributing fliers in Korean at the schools.
School board members discussed a list of $3.8 million in potential budget cuts on March 7. Vice President Ken Dauber was the only trustee to explicitly voice opposition to cutting either AACI’s or Stanford’s contract. The board will discuss the 2017-18 budget again in April.
Challenging environment for nonprofits
Adolescent Counseling Services has become increasingly concerned about its ability to sustain its services, primarily due to a sharp rise in salaries.
Competitive annual salaries for their licensed psychologists have almost doubled in the last two years, from about $50,000 to $93,000, Executive Director Philippe Rey said. The district’s contract with ACS has seen $10,000 annual increases in the last several years, but it’s not enough, he added.
Adolescent Counseling Services is now asking the district to increase its contract by $50,000 for next year in order to maintain the same level of service. The nonprofit has pushed for different models of service, such as having more interns and fewer psychologists to cut costs, a proposal Rey and other staff said was quickly rejected by the school district.
“This puts us at a situation where, how much are we willing to sacrifice to complete our mission of our agency?” Tam said. “It’s just not viable.”
Other providers said they’re struggling in what is a challenging economic environment.
“We are having a hard time finding staff — not just because of the amount we’re able to give but a baseline nonprofit salary is so difficult to have and be able to have a decent standard of living around here,” Acknowledge Alliance’s Kremer said.
Across the six districts Acknowledge Alliance serves, schools on average are covering about 35 percent of the nonprofit’s costs, Kremer said.
In the meantime, the district is considering some alternative models. Staff are looking, for example, at the possibility of allowing health care providers like Kaiser to send clinicians to the schools and serve students through their insurance, Carrillo said.
“Schools overall are being called upon to broaden their scope when it comes to looking at supporting students,” Carillo said.
She noted research shows schools are ideal places for students to access mental health services, given that securing private services presents barriers of access, cost and stigma.
“If we see that trend moving up, in the future, maybe 10 years, five years down the road, I think the education mental health landscape will look differently,” she said.
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Seems so short-sighted to cut mental health services in our high-pressure school district, just to save $80K. Our students and parents benefit from these services.
How about reducing one of the many district office staffpeople’s time from 1.0 FTE to 0.8 FTE instead?
Perhaps this should be a lot more strategic than renaming schools?
As I’ve written here before–like a broken record and I’m sure, by now, ad nauseam for my fellow Palo Alto Onliners–it would truly be churlish to disparage the efforts of so many dedicated citizens who, deeply worried about the well-being of our youth, have enriched our local store of teen outpatient clinics, inpatient units, Facebook support groups, crisis lines, adolescent support apps, public surveys, youth forums, and school wellness centers, wellness team, mindfulness lessons, peer observation, school assemblies on sleep or pedagogy, and classroom lessons on the warning-signs of suicide or on social-emotional well-being.
But wouldn’t be be failing our kids, not to ask the obvious question:
Why don’t we just undo some of what’s making our kids feel so miserable in the first place?
For, we’re subjecting our kids to toxic environments and instead of just pumping out the fumes we’re equipping our young with gas masks.
Many “usual suspects” are rounded up to account for the stress and depression that besiege modern adolescents: college-admissions pressures; parenting practices; a “culture of perfectionism”; the impact of Asian cultures; the effects of modern technology and personal devices.
This list is perhaps useful–but I’m continually shocked and bewildered that it excludes the single most overwhelming and preoccupying and inescapable fact of teenage life: their daily experience of high school.
I’m not talking about our many wonderful teachers, rich array of courses, or fantastic abundance of clubs and arts ensembles–all of which we can be proud of.
But the fact is: our high-schoolers spend more of their waking hours at school and doing schoolwork than anything else. Our rates of teen hospitalization for mental distress have, during the school year, far exceeded the same rates during summer. And school attendance is not something intermittent or occasional– like taking the SAT or experiencing a social media humiliation–but persists day after day, semester after semester, across four developmental years so intense that most of us continue to “re-live” them long after, through decades of class reunions.
And yet in Palo Alto and nationwide, at affluent high schools, we continue to oversee and countenance: classes so overcrowded that kids can’t connect with each other or braid lifelines to teachers; sleep-deprivation because kids have no effective nightly voice in their homework amounts and families have no timely, pertinent counseling about what it means to enroll in three, four, five, six AP courses; schoolwide distrust caused by casual, rampant cheating; hyper-competitiveness (and lack of emotional recovery periods) due to relentless grade-reporting mandated by the district; and our kids’ schoolday dependence on social media, even while classes are in progress, just to grasp hold of enough emotional support to make it through the day.
And yet Superintendent McGee and the school board neither lead or foster any public discussion of these toxic conditions.
The Weekly’s article cites: “the increasing expectation that school campuses, in addition to hospitals, doctors’ offices or private therapists, are places where students can access high-quality mental health services.”
But why is there no, similar, “increasing expectation that school campuses” should foster mental, social, and emotional health by doing the obvious: sending our cherished young not into a routinized daily grind but into an environment that is itself sane, supportive, compassionate?
This goal is the aim Save the 2,008, a community alliance for school change, which you may join with just the keystrokes of your name, at savethe2008.com.
Sincerely,
Marc Vincenti
Gunn English Dept. (1995-2010)
Getting to he root of the problem seems improbable. That would require admitting shortcomings and no one- not administrators- not teachers and not parents- is willing to take responsibility for creating a dysfunctional environment. So children continue to suffer in the name of academic rigor. I would love to hear from parents whose children graduated from college and are off onto their adult lives and hear what actually mattered and what didn’t.
Adolescent Counseling Services was not at all helpful for my son when he was in high school in Palo Alto and having problems, CHAC (Community Health Awareness Council) in Mountain View was way better, way way better. CHAC will actually deal with the difficult issues, and not just refer you someplace else. CHAC is effective, too. In my perfect world the Palo Alto School District would drop ACS and use CHAC instead. They have been around helping the kids in Mountain View schools for years, and they do an amazing job.
Wellness centers- bastions of hot chocolate, tea, and lots of stress balls. “Legit way to miss the class I don’t like” pass writing. Wanna skip G per? Go to the wellness center. Easy peasy.
At Family & Children Services, we appreciate the dialogue and engagement about how to offer children and youth multiple entry points to counseling and support services. Schools play an important role. For students who prefer not to access counseling services on-campus, our Cambridge Avenue office offers sliding fee scale services and accepts many insurance plans (as well as the free sessions with PAUSD referral mentioned in the article).
This Saturday, March 25, our LGBTQ Youth Space is hosting a get-together for local LGBTQ youth from 11-1.
Also, Project Safety Net will be announcing its new plan on Wednesday, March 29, a meeting that may be of interest to those following this Palo Alto Weekly coverage and conversation.
As unpopular as this comment will be, I see no reason why “the addictive use of cell phones, smart phones and other hand-held devices” be left at home or at the school office in case of emergency. It is quite obvious that students, parents and adults use these devices, too. We have become accustomed to communicating this way. I’m sure it has occurred to many others, that this is no way to learn to get along with others. We need to rediscover “the old way” of talking to people. The important personal feelings do not come across the same way when talking on one of those devices. It is my judgment that there would be smiles, eye contact, and the joy of communicating in person that I’m missing when I watch people in daily life with their heads down talking on one of those “things.” Think about it. I believe we need to help our children have more joy in their lives.
I am also aware of the need to have these devices with you in an emergency situation, but then when they are in our possession, it’s almost too difficult NOT to use them. I know. I’m also addicted to my cellphone.
Here in Silicon Valley, we should be able to allow/disallow cell phones on school campuses on a campus or classroom by classroom by auditorium basis. I know the technology exists; it just needs to be adopted and installed. Quit hand-wringing about cell phone use in schools and start a program by petitioning the School Board. A massive write/phone/email campaign should be effective. Maybe the whole campus should be blocked during school hours, maybe just certain classrooms/areas at the discretion of the staff. Start a dialogue and get something done! It won’t be perfect to begin with, and so continual improvement should be a part of the plan. Be sure to consider responses special circumstances (emergency, disaster, etc.) BEFORE they happen.
“I know the technology exists…” The FCC claims that is a Federal offense. But we in California get to choose which Federal laws apply here.
Wow! If you really look closely at the funding from the District, it pays to be the newcomers in town. You do less for more money…. Or perhaps close friendship with a Board Member also helps like in the case of AACI!