Grantee Highlights
As NCSSLE provides specialized direct assistance and training to a set of U.S. Department of Education funded grantees, we collect highlights to feature helpful examples and lessons learned to the field. Below we provide a range of grantee highlights you can browse through or search by state or topic.
Displaying 10 Grantee Highlight(s).On Tuesday, May 2, 2023, Eureka City High School in Eureka, California officially, opened its new wellness center in partnership with its federally qualified health center partner, Open Door, via their Mental Health Service Professionals (MHSP) grant. The high school’s is the first of many to be developed across Eureka City Schools [ECS] campuses. These centers will aim to fulfill Priority Area 3 of the ECS Strategic Plan, which focuses on Social-Emotional Wellness.
ECS Trustee Area 1 Board Member Lisa Ollivier explains that the Board created the Wellness Center as a space for students to…
Focusing on reintegration in the 2021-22 school year to ensure the success of students and staff upon return to full in-person instruction, the Pasadena United School District (PUSD), a Mental Health Service Professional grantee in California, developed an enhanced version of their curriculum that included visual arts, mental health, and academics. As part of this initiative, PUSD created virtual wellness centers for staff and students that includes a “PUSD Wellness Studio”, a Padlet for staff use only. As Dr. Julianne Reynoso, Assistant Superintendent, Student Wellness and Support Services…
A school social worker and social work intern for Del Norte County, California’s Mental Health Service Professional (MHSP) demonstration grant are implementing a peer-led suicide prevention program, Sources of Strength, among high-risk youth at Sunset High School in Crescent City. The local United Indian Health Services has partnered with the school to support this program with assistance from a SAMHSA Garrett Lee Smith suicide prevention grant. Numerous students embrace their roles in the program with enthusiasm, and there is even potential to “extend the pipeline” for new school mental…
As an innovative adaptation to the sudden disconnection of students from their school community over the course of the past year, the student support team at Del Norte County, California schools, a Mental Health Services Professional grantee, arranged to convert its Yoga Calm, an evidence-based program, to a combination in-person/Zoom! platform. As a trauma-informed program, Yoga Calm was taught in classrooms prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the school district began to adjust to the pandemic’s restrictions, the need for tools to manage stress and anxiety was even greater than it had been,…
Oakland Unified School District held an African American Female Excellence Black Girl Power Conference in the fall of 2018. The OUSD superintendent’s plan prioritizes continued support for African American female excellence programming, a program that complements their multi-tiered systems of support efforts and trauma programming.
El Rancho Unified School District (CA), an Elementary and Secondary School Counseling (ESSC) grant recipient, used their ESSC funds to hire eight school-based mental health counselors (i.e. school social workers), provide all school sites professional development on early warning signs of students with mental health concerns, and establish a district-wide referral process known as ACCESS. The ACCESS process pairs screened students with mental health counselors directly at the school site. Throughout the course of the grant mental health counselors provided evidenced-based individual and group…
Oxnard School District, an Elementary and Secondary School Counseling grant recipient, provides mental health services to students and families living within the most underserved areas of Ventura County, California through Acción Positiva. The program is coordinated by Chris Ridge, the District’s Director of Pupil Services and utilizes a partnership between Oxnard School District and New Dawn counseling services, a local mental health services provider. Acción Positiva provides on-site, direct mental health services to over 100 students requiring intensive therapeutic counseling at seven of…
Murrieta Valley Unified School District, an Elementary and Secondary School Counseling grant recipient, won the 2017 H.P. McDaniel Foundation Group Award for their development of R.A.I.N. Elementary Counseling. Counselors in this district developed a model comprehensive program and completed significant research resulting in a major impact for the counseling field in the state of California. R.A.I.N. stands for:
Re-engaging Students,
Advocating for students and parents
Intervening with students, parents, teachers and administrators
Nurturing all students through the delivery of academic,…
Contains Oakland Unified School Districts (OUSD) Restorative Justice Toolkit which informs their districts discipline matrix. In their toolkit you can find their restorative justice resources and templates they use, from presentations to documents on how to build a restorative justice team. A notable success of OUSD's incorporation of restorative justice principles in their discipline matrix is they no longer give suspensions at any grade level for "defiance" or "disruption." Furthermore, students at OUSD are engaged in restorative justice practices through OUSD's "Restorative Justice Youth…
Presents a video, created by the Elk Grove Unified School District, on the experience and successes of schools under Project GROW, an Elementary and Secondary School Counseling Grant program. The program uses a multi-tiered approach to address behavioral issues and provide developmentally appropriate interventions to students so that they can develop the skills to succeed in the instructional environment.