Transcript: Addressing Mental Health: The role of mental health and wellness data in shaping student supports

Rebeca Cerna:  Good afternoon. On behalf of the California Center for School Climate [CCSC], I’d like to welcome you to our session on Addressing mental health: The role of mental health and wellness data in shaping student supports. My name is Rebecca Cerna, and I will be your moderator for today’s session. And I’m also joined in the chat by Nakanya. 

For today’s agenda, after our welcome and introductions, we will hear from Paradise Unified and from Butte County Office of Education on how they address mental health. We will also learn about the new mental health reports that are going to be shared with districts from WestEd, and on the importance of data from UC Santa Barbara. At the end, we will also be sharing some upcoming Center opportunities that are going to be available to schools and school districts. The California Center for School Climate is a California Department of Education initiative that’s operated by WestEd and we provide free supports and trainings on school climate and data use to LEAs and schools in California. Our goal at the Center is to focus on supporting districts in their efforts to improve school climate for students and staff by meeting districts where they are, and by providing relevant supports. So we invite you to visit our website, which you can find here on the QR code, and it’s also posted in the chat. And next I’m going to pass it to Hilva Chan from CDE for a brief welcome. 

Hilva Chan: Hey, Rebeca. Good afternoon. On behalf of the CDE, I’d like to welcome you all to the last session of the multipart Strengthening School Communities for Resilience Virtual Event. My name is Hilva Chan, and I’m an Education Programs Consultant with the CDE. We are so happy that you can join us today. 

We understand the pandemic has put an enormous stress on everyone, especially school staff that are trying their best to help students reconnect and reengage, support them academically, while managing their own stress, and taking care of their families. So I wanted just to applaud you for what you have been doing to support your students. The CDE realizes the challenges, and to better support schools and districts, we launched the California Center for School Climate in January. 

The CCSC hosted this virtual event, and offers many other training opportunities, and provides technical assistance to help schools build a safe and supportive school climate. We know that having a positive school climate is critical, especially during times of high stress. It is the tier one schoolwide work that help us address the mental wellness of students and staff. 

The CDE launched Project Cal-Well, a mental health initiative since 2014. In our current cohort, Project Cal-Well works with eight districts, including Paradise Unified, which you will hear from shortly, on using a three component model to address student mental health, increase mental health awareness, reduce stigma, expand access to care, and build local capacity. You can check on more about project Cal-Well, and many of our resources, on the same website that hosts the CCSC. 

We’ve also expanded our partnership with WestEd and UC Santa Barbara to collect, analyze, and promote a use of mental health data through the California Healthy Kids Survey. We launched a California Student Mental Health and Wellness Project in 2021, to promote a use of school climate and student mental health data. You will hear from WestEd today on some of our latest support for districts under the CHKS, and hear from our partner from UCSB on the relevance and significance of why we collected this new data. 

In addition to all these new projects, the CDE works with a wide variety of national and statewide partners to support student mental health. We’ll be hosting a webinar on May 24th, to showcase over 15 mental health interventions and resources for students and staff. We’ll drop a link in the chat, so you can subscribe to our newsletter to receive registration information and other school climate and mental health resources. Again, thanks for joining us today. It’s great to have you here. 

Rebeca Cerna:  Thank you, Hilva, for that great introduction. To start off things, we would like to do a chat waterfall. And so we are inviting you to type your answer to the question in the chat, but don’t click return yet. We will all click return at the same time. Our question is, “When you think about positive student mental health, what is the ideal picture of mental health?” What does it feel like? What does it look like?  

Rebeca Cerna:  Now I’m looking at some of your responses that you have. So smiling, flourishing, engaged students and teachers, feeling safe, empowered, peace, confident, and loved. Resilient students, appropriate coping skills, clear path to a windy road wearing trail tires. Very good, there’s some great things here in the chat. Safety, belonging, wellness. Amy said calm and confident. Eileen, it is students accessing the needed support so that they are well-balanced and engaged. Able to speak freely about mental health, that’s so needed, right? So it’s not so stigmatized. Safe space, we’re creating those safer spaces. Coping skills in place, ability to adapt, to change, respectful. Well we appreciate all of these wonderful thoughts on how you envision a positive student mental health and what that looks like. 

And throughout the webinar, we invite you to use the chat to have conversations amongst each other. And if you do have any Q&A, please use the Q&A feature so that we’re able to more easily sift through the questions for the speakers at the end. Today, we are going to hear from Paradise Unified and from Butte County Office of Ed, and learn about their story and how they responded to a crisis in their community. So I would like to provide a content warning that during the session, the speakers will share content that may be difficult to hear and process on their experiences that their community endured. So please, prioritize your mental health and wellness. I am going to first introduce our first two speakers. Carrie Dawes, an Administrator on Special Assignment from Paradise Unified School District, and Scott Lindstrom from Butte County Office of Education. We’re going to spotlight our next two speakers as they get started on their segment. Thank you for being here. 

Carrie Dawes:  Thanks, Rebecca. Well as introduced, my name is Carrie Dawes. I am an Administrator on Special Assignment, post this catastrophe that has reshaped our entire community. And Scott, you want to introduce yourself real quick? 

Scott Lindstrom:  Sure. School psychologist for many years, and a former Student Support Coordinator with Chico Unified. I came out of a very brief retirement to support the fire recovery work in the schools, and have worked most closely with all the amazing folks at Paradise Unified. 

Carrie Dawes:  So, the morning of November 8th, 2018. Some of you may have heard about the Camp Fire. All of us woke up in the morning and were going to have a somewhat normal day, and got word that there’s a fire in the canyon which, as a crow flies, was quite a ways away. And within an hour, we realized it was heading straight to what we call the Upper Ridge, Paradise and Magalia areas. The kids were just arriving at school, and we had to scramble for 3,400 kids to get them on buses and get them down the hill. This picture actually on the left, is from my driveway, and the next one over to the right, I took that. We evacuated. My husband is driving the white truck with the trailer, and then I’m driving behind. And that’s what the skies looked like. 

The next day, that third picture is our Paradise Elementary School, and then the fourth picture over, is one of our brand new school buses that was destroyed that morning. It was actually the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. And the most expensive natural disaster in the world, in terms of insured losses, with 86 fatalities. 

So again, I’m just trying to put this into context  what our community went through. And it’ll come clear towards the end, as far as this data that we had to start following. So again, just context of what was going on that morning. Every patient from the hospital had to be evacuated. I am going through these fairly quickly, again just for context. The picture in the upper right-hand corner, one whole entire neighborhood that’s wiped out. And I think the pictures speak for themselves, actually. I’m going to try to do this without my voice cracking here. 

“Bus driver from heaven.” A lot of heroes from this day from the staff. Bus drivers, teachers, other staff members that, again, scrambled to evacuate all these kids safely, which we did. Every student that was on the Ridge that morning was evacuated safely. 

So here we are in the aftermath. It raged for two weeks. It started on November 8th and we were not able to get back to even look at our houses until the day after Thanksgiving that year. In total, almost 19,000 structures were destroyed, almost 14,000 single-family homes, 276 apartments, and then 528 commercial buildings. Out of our nine schools, four were completely destroyed, four were partially destroyed, and then one on the Upper Ridge was untouched. That day, 80% of our PUSD staff lost their homes. And there are some harrowing stories of literally driving through fire to escape. Keeping in mind, so many of our staff volunteered right on the buses with the kids, so they didn’t get back home to even pull things out of their houses before the fire came through. 

The number one thing that we did, and my first thought was, how can we A, make sure the staff is okay, and B, make sure the kids are okay. At least we knew they had scattered even to other states, Oregon and Nevada, in that evacuation. So, we pulled a Facebook page together, and I got an email out to everybody saying, “Please just post a picture of yourself, wherever you’re at, with a thumbs up or a we’re going to be okay.” 

And it took off, for lack of better terms, like wildfire. And you can kind of scroll through these. These are employees that again, wherever they were after that evacuation, and we started having parents and kids chime in saying, “Thank you so much for showing little John…” There I am, and my dog. You know, “Thank you for showing their child that their teacher is okay.” We don’t need to go through all of these, but this was an immediate thing that we tried, and it was incredibly successful, to start knowing that our kids and families were okay.  

The next thing that we did, we tasked all of our teachers with calling every one of their students. And then for TK through six, seven, and 12 were to split students into groups and start calling. And they were to take notes on the families’ or the kiddos’ current location. Were they okay? Did they have any needs? And then we had an ever-changing list of resources for food and clothing that we provided, as well. And that was within the first couple days that we started asking staff, and not only to check on them once, but call every other day and make sure that they were okay. 

So there it is, headlines, “After a fire, school district is gone.” That’s Paradise Elementary School right there, one of them that was completely destroyed. And now we’re talking about how to get these kids back into school. You could not get back up on the Ridge. Throughout the county, we had offers to utilize classrooms, utilize buildings that were not being used to set up school, and we took advantage of that. We used a school out in a local town. They actually only had a few students at that school. They offered to move those students to another campus and we could have the entire elementary school. We moved our junior high schoolers to an old OSH building. They made a school out of a hardware store. I don’t think you could say too many folks have been able to do that, but we did that. And we utilized churches, we utilized the fairgrounds, any buildings that we possibly could. We felt it was extremely important to get these kiddos back in as soon as possible. So again, this is just more headlines about the kids being displaced, and then trying to head back to school. We used a mall, the empty spaces in the mall. And here we are, we’re trying to get these kids back to school by December 3rd, was our goal, and that’s what we did. 

At the time, our social and emotional barriers… For one thing, this was pre-COVID. There’s been an awful lot of emphasis on mental health clinicians being in the schools with COVID. This was pre-COVID, so at our current time, we had no SEL counselors in our elementary schools, other than Youth for Change. We had one academic counselor with a PPS at the junior high, we had three academic counselors at the high school, and one at the continuation school. In addition, we had no one to be the liaison between PUSD and all these outside agencies like Butte County Office of Ed, Youth for Change, Butte County Behavioral Health. Which led to my position, basically. Through the Cal-Well Grant, we were able to ask them if we could shift gears and put me as an Administrator on Special Assignment, so I could be that liaison. And that’s what I’ve done ever since.  

We had to get the pulse of the students, very evident that our students and staff were not in a good place, socially or emotionally. We had no baseline prior to the fire, which was another hurdle. We had heavy negotiations going on between Certificate and Classified. Our staff who lost their homes had to deal with insurance claims, temporary housing, hundreds and hundreds of strangers coming to our community for a variety of reasons. It’s overwhelming to think of what was going on back then. 

We’re also transporting students throughout various parts of Butte County. 1,700 square miles  we were transporting kids with all these surrounding schools. The Universal Screening idea was first discussed between BCOE and PUSD at that time to try to get a baseline, where are we at? You’re up, Scott. 

Scott Lindstrom: Okay. As Carrie mentioned, we started talking about things like Universal Screeners, and assessments, and collecting data that might be helpful. Of course, all of us wish we had thought of doing that in 2017 instead of after the fire, so we could have had some baseline data. We do have some things that we’ve collected over the years. 

Couple things I want to just jump on here real quickly is, one is you noticed Carrie at the start of this talking about trying to do this without her voice cracking. And I got to say that three and a half years later, it’s still difficult for anybody who was up here to look at those pictures and get through with a dry eye. It’s still difficult. And so that’s something that as educational professionals, as mental health professionals, that we need to keep our eyes on is being aware of how long this takes to heal, what the process is. And we’re in a very different place now in terms of doing that kind of healing work than we were three years ago when we were primarily dealing with the immediate emergency, the immediate crisis, which then became the significant trauma, and now is shifting more into a grief and loss of being in a different time, and kind of never going back. Flip side of that, as Carrie mentioned, is there are all these agencies that started working together, and we always say that we wouldn’t have chosen this path, but since we’re on it, let’s be intentional about how we are on this path. 

One of the things that has happened is a lot of the old silos melted, as Carrie said. You’ve got Paradise Schools having classes on Durham School’s campuses, on Orville’s School campuses, in hardware stores. So the way that things were just immediately kind of evaporated, the metaphors using fire are pretty obvious. But what’s been really great is that a lot of folks, and Carrie has been a major, major leader in this effort, a lot of folks have said, “Let’s continue to keep the barriers down, to keep this kind of collaboration going moving forward.” And so that’s something we’re really hanging on to here. 

As we started looking at this, we started thinking in terms of screeners for kids, and we also started thinking about how we’re going to assess the wellness of the adults. Like Carrie said, 80% lost their homes. 100% had to get out of Paradise and escape. Of those, many really did not know whether they were going to make it out or not. So we’re dealing with that when we come back with this. We’re dealing with both the staff and the student trauma, and we’ve got a staff now that’s trying to take care of all these kids. So as we started moving down the road, one of the things that I think was really helpful, and if you’re facing this in the future in where you live, is to have somebody a step away  which would be BCOE to Paradise  and to have somebody else a step away from that who could then consult with BCOE as we supported Paradise Unified. When you’re in the midst of it, the way Carrie was, it’s really difficult to even think straight or think beyond the crisis. Those partnerships really helped for starting to take a bigger picture and, as somebody said, to make sure that we didn’t waste a perfectly good disaster. So, SAEBRS is something I’ll talk about in just a second, and the SDQ is something that we chose for working with the older kids, grade seven through 12. 

And then we also dove into a screener, an assessment of staff. We used the ProQOL, which has basically three subscales in it, and asked all of the educators in Paradise Unified to respond to this. Not just teachers, not just school-based staff, but actually district office staff, food services, transportation, all of them. So we had everybody respond to this. We also broke out in the results, the responses, and how they looked for different groups of people. Not going to show all that, but we’ll just show you a few things from this. And then at the end of the ProQOL, we also added some narrative questions just to say, basically, “How are you doing? What would help?” to try to get that input. 

We’re going to show several of these pie graphs. Basically, these are how the responses look to these questions. Of all the assessments we’ve done, this one was probably the one that surprised us, this ProQOL. In this one you’re seeing about a third of the folks saying they’re very often or often having emotional/mental/behavioral health issues related to the fire. Would’ve thought it might have been higher, but when you add sometimes to that, now you’re up at two-thirds. Part of the process here is now we’re actually talking about mental health, making it okay to talk about that. We’re not just doing a screener to see what the numbers are, but we’re doing it as a form of communication as well. 

“Feel like others understand the stress I’m experiencing.” About half of them felt often or very often that they were being understood. Some of them, not so much, but mostly people were feeling pretty good as far as being understood. Keep in mind, this is a year after the fire that we did this. So this was after people had their year of being scattered to the field and then were coming back home to their old schools as this was done. 

“More stressful since the fire.” About half of people said either often or very often. More than three-quarters said that they felt like sometimes, often, or very often their jobs were more stressful since the fire. Honestly, I’m surprised it wasn’t 100%. And I think that the fact that it’s not 100% is one of the things that we’re going to look at in just a second.  

“I feel worn out because of my work as a helper.” Again, the fact that we’re acknowledging this is part of the process of healing from this, too. Giving people the chance to respond to questions like this. So again, about half, they’re worn out. About two-thirds, three-quarters feel at least sometimes that they’re worn out. Honestly, as an educator, I don’t know that there’d be any time of any year that we wouldn’t have at least a third of people saying, “Yeah, I’m worn out.” Education is difficult work. 

“Believe I can make a difference in my work.” So this is really an important one, too, because still people are believing in their own power to support kids and make a difference in the world, make a difference in the community. That’s a powerful statement to me, that people…Look at this, over three-quarters are saying either often or very often I feel like I make a difference for my work. Almost everybody said at least sometimes they feel that, that’s amazing. 

And then “I’m a very caring person,” you can see super high. “I’m happy I chose this work,” pretty darn high still. And this is a year into this post-fire chaos that was going on. And it was still incredibly chaotic. Of course, all of this is now colored by COVID since this was done. So that’s where we are with the ProQOL, how some of those answers came back. 

And then these are the subscales we mentioned earlier. So you have the Compassion Satisfaction Scale. Look at that, moderate to high, almost 100%. Secondary Traumatic Scale, there’s no way we would’ve guessed that it would be this low, that that few people in that little red slice there would report high in terms of secondary traumatic stress. Same way with the Burnout Scale, the fact that after a year of dealing with the fire, that we had those strong numbers in terms of the wellness of the people represented was amazing. And I think it’s a reflection of who we all are as educators, anyway. And I also think it’s a reflection of the way that Paradise Unified, the way that Butte County as a whole, gathered together to support one another, and dealt with this stuff and said, “We’re not just going to support kids. We’re not just focused on getting kids back in school, but we’re focused on wellness and taking care of each other.” 

When we did the narrative questions, we got to these kinds of things. Part of that was just curiosity, “What are they going to say? How are people doing? Will they tell us?” Part of it was to be able to report back to them, “These are the things you’re telling, and these are the ways that we’re going to try to address those.” More counseling for staff was one of the things that hit us from basically the very beginning of this disaster was the staff was clearly needy, and also clearly expressing that need. Of course, they want to support the students as well. Mental health days without guilt, still something that we struggle with. Just this fall we were saying probably one of the best things we could do for teachers is not training, is really going to be, “Can we give them just a day off to take care of themselves, take care of each other?” 

The next one, the self-care stuff. The self-care became really big, but I want to caution on that because we talk an awful lot about self-care, and I think that without each-other care, self-care is going to become empty. And people did sometimes express that in all of this talk about self-care, is it just …. is starting to get old. But these are some of the ways that we did it. We set up CrossFit activities. We got people into gyms, or had gym folks come to the site to do this. We set up even massages, we set up group walks, those kinds of things. All of that was part of that therapeutic process. And when you can do it together as a staff, then that promotes the healing even more.  

But, as you can see, it gets down to a year later and I would venture to guess still now people don’t have homes. As of last fall, we were only at about 10% rebuilt. Career change, very few said that, but it was in there. Smaller classes, which actually it kind of accidentally happened for a little while because staffing remained the same while fewer students returned. Something as simple as a lunch, or a coffee, and a “thank you” from the district office, can’t tell you how many times we’ve heard that. We even used some grant funds to support that process, so that’s one of those things that’s so easy to forget as a district or site-level administrator is just a simple, very obvious, “Thank you.” 

Less training is one of the last pieces I want to mention here, which is that you want to be careful in a post-disaster to go too soon into training, because people need the basics, need to recover, before they can start even having the capacity to take in training. So we’re still on that, one of the things that we’ve done with that is to really focus on lots of doses of brief training versus lots of the big, day-long trainings. And the guilt piece there, I want to mention just real quickly is that a lot of folks have the survivor’s guilt, that sense that I should be doing better than I am. And what we need to do is be sure that we’re giving everybody space to be where they are, and that it’s okay for that. We still have people three years later who are, for the first time, saying, “I thought I was doing okay, and I’m not.” So giving people the space, without guilt, to not be doing okay, or even to be doing okay and not have guilt around that, it’s really important. I’m going to go ahead and pass through this slide, we kind of hit this, that they were really calling out for the ability to support one another and to be supported. 

All right, that’s the summary of our ProQOL stuff. Again, supporting the staff has been more critical. And honestly I think we’re at a time, let’s not waste this time, when we can really be talking about multi-tiered approaches to staff support, to staff wellness, too, not just student wellness. 

Carrie Dawes:  During this time that we had done the fall screeners, about the same time in the Northstate, just a huge increase in suicide ideation and suicides, and this had come out from our local hospital in Chico, Enloe Medical Center, as far as comparing those numbers and the huge increase. And then I receive an email that went out to a few of us in the district as a Paradise Senior High: High student suicide ideation alert. This came to us shortly after we took the Healthy Kids Survey, and it’s the first time I’d ever seen an email like this. It shows that Paradise Senior High, our ninth graders, 40% of them had suicide ideation. That was just a blow for us. We just couldn’t believe it. 

So we pulled together a meeting within two days, called up the Suicide Prevention Task Force, and on that task force we had every PUSD counselor, BCOE crisis counselor, their supervisor, site administration, our superintendent, Butte County Behavioral Health, Youth for Change counselor, supervisor. Everybody that we could think of we invited, and they all showed to this Zoom meeting. And one of our counselors that we still have actually who… another one we brought out of retirement to help us post-fire. She made the comment that we hit the ground running that next Monday morning. So they did what they were familiar with, which was the Yellow Ribbon Program. We were concerned because we had just a handful of days left before heading off to spring break, which is always scary when you get news like this and then heading off to time off for the kids. We were also on a A/B hybrid schedule at that point with COVID, so we had so many things working against us. But what they did…They pulled it all together, got into all the ninth grade classes before spring break, every ninth grade class.  

And then, after spring break, all the teachers were told about the alert and asked if they would be willing to show a short film that was put together by some Chico Unified School Districts talking very bluntly about suicide. And we were concerned about the emotional state of our teachers and staff. Did they have the bandwidth, actually, because they were still struggling themselves. Would they be able to facilitate a conversation about suicide ideation and be able to show this film? Every one of our teachers said yes, they will do it, and every one of the teachers did. The counselors, they were in the library, they had all the counselors in the library to make sure they would be on hand from the classrooms if any teachers needed to send them there. 

So again, they facilitated their own schoolwide suicide prevention program with the same message going across the entire school. The entire school student body had that message. So we are giving our Healthy Kids Survey out actually right now, and are excited about trying to see that data improve. But not having that alert, and then going off to spring break, we think back now how scary that could have been when we had such a high percentage of our ninth graders with the suicide ideation in mind. 

Scott Lindstrom: My turn? Okay, try to keep this moving quickly. Going back to the ProQOL, quickly, is after we got those results, we went site-to-site to share with the staffs how those results turned out, including some of the narratives, but also the graphs in terms of how they were doing. And part of that issue is, again, that taking care of people includes that kind of open conversation, making it okay to be talking about that. As we were in those meetings talking about the fact that in the room on any day, there’s going to be people at all different places in terms of their emotional wellness. And so we were really trying to create the space for that, to have the conversations, to let them know that we were intentionally listening, and to know that we’re going to continue to follow up and focus with them. 

Moving to the students’ work, we felt like we wanted to do a screener. We chose the SAEBRS  could have been most other screeners, because it has pretty much the same kinds of subscales that most other screeners have. With elementary schools, I find it easy to be able to do the screeners because all you need to be able to do is get a half hour to an hour of staff time a couple times a year, and you’re good to go. The processing of the scales is typically not that difficult, so we work with an evaluator on that.  

With the SAEBRS we have the three basic subscales  the Social Behavior Problems, which is more the externalizing, the aggression, impulsivity, lack of cooperation, difficulty with peers. We’ve got the Academic Behavior Problems, which is more the reflection on the classroom, distractability, kind of the hyperactivity type of stuff, the lack of ability to work up to capacity. One thing I want to just point out with that is anytime we’re talking about attention issues and hyperactivity issues, those behaviors pretty much mirror reactions to trauma as well, so we can keep that in mind. And then the Risk for Emotional Behavior, this is more the internalizing behaviors, so it’s that shy, withdrawn, the anxious kids. We’ve got some very interesting results, so let’s get to those. 

So this is the comparison we did in fall of ’19. Did it again in fall of 2021, did not do it in… We didn’t do it in 2021 because of COVID, and we didn’t have teachers having access to kids in the way that would’ve worked to do the SAEBRS really. But we did it again this fall when kids were back in school. 

What you can see is there were kind of some mild improvements from 2019 to 2021-22. The thing that has stood out to all of us most, is when you look at the emotional behaviors. So that again is our internalizing, the anxiety, the sense of disconnect that kids are having. It’s totally predictable with COVID on top of the fires, but the fact that it was so universal and so big has created an uproar for us. Or not really an uproar, but just an area to focus on, something that really draws attention. And the nice thing about having this data is you can take it to any staff and share this data and say, “Look, it’s telling us right there. Probably what you already knew, but here it is in numbers.” 

So looking at how we use the SAEBRS. Partly it’s for a universal screener, so we print it out for each classroom, that teacher’s results. So she would see her kids listed in rank order, and in that sense, you can use it as a screener for each class. When I’m doing that, I tend to look at it as each class is its own norm group. So we want to look at the rankings within a class, because two different teachers may use the screener a little bit differently, but you can count on what’s going on class by class. But also, we use it for program evaluation. We don’t want to use it for kid evaluation. We’re not using it for staff evaluation, but program evaluation. As we use it in our screeners, it’s a piece of data. It’s not all of the info we need for making decisions, but it is a piece of the data. What I find often with this data is that when I’m going to teachers to discuss which kids might need some additional interventions, the ones that are often forgotten are those ones on that emotional scale, because they tend to be invisible. They’re not the first kid a teacher thinks of as being concerned about. First ones are typically the ones that are having those acting out social behaviors. So they help you identify some kids that might have been invisible. But again, not eligibility, it’s just a piece of the information we want to use for the conversation. 

I want to point out, too, that we can also use those screeners not just for pointing out who needs help, who needs intervention, but also who our stronger kids are who’re doing well. And how I can use that in a classroom is if I’m doing groupings, cooperative learning groups, for instance, I may mix in some of the kids that I know are doing well with some of the kids that are struggling. If I’m doing a pull-out intervention group, I may pull in one of the kids that’s doing really well to be in that intervention group. In part, it’s easier for the counselor to do that with a star in there, but also because it’s good for the kids to have that kind of presence.  

The other thing that we are using it for, which is kind of different when we talk about universal screeners, is that idea of building our classroom SEL around it. So if we’re seeing kids with lots of emotional issues, we can be talking about the anxiety. Then we can be talking about mindfulness work, that ability to self-regulate, to note our bodies, and be able to deal with some of that anxiety through some mindfulness work. That’s something that Paradise has done a great job with. And when you have a disaster, there are organizations coming out of the woodwork offering their curriculum for this. But another is to look at, if you’ve got those kids who are tending to isolate through emotional behaviors, is what are some ways that we can build stronger social connection? What are some ways that I, as a teacher, can make sure every kid in my class is seen every day of the week? Those are ways that we can start using that universal screener for classroom-level, tier-one kinds of work. 

Then of course, we can use the SAEBRS, and we are using SAEBRS, also for a pre-post. So we use the screener as the pre, at the end of our counseling services we’re going to administer it again and use it as a post to see if we are showing some movement in that. And then we’ll have year-by-year-by-year showing of whether we’re showing some growth or not. I think it’s going to be really interesting to see a couple years later after COVID has settled down to see how we do there. So that’s SAEBRS. 

Quickly, the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire is the one we used for seven through 12, and in this case we had kids reporting. We were not able to use it as a screener because of permission issues. We would’ve needed positive permission for this, but what we were able to do is have kids do it voluntarily and then either voluntarily include their identifying info or not. What’s most significant here in looking at the differences from 2019 to 21, and this is a comparison of the Paradise Junior Senior High, which those two schools were combined on one campus for a couple of years, and then it’s comparing that group to two years later at Paradise High School. Things that stick out to me are, first, that emotional problem scale again. You’re seeing it higher for those guys two years later, so that’s continuing to show, just like it did for the elementary schools, that’s an area of concern. The other two scales that really showed strongly here, the conduct problems, not particularly drawing attention. Hyperactivity problems, not particularly. Interestingly, those two, again, reflect that externalizing scale. 

The two that reflect the internalizing scale, emotional problems and peer problems  look at that peer problems issues this year compared to two years ago. When you talk about the isolation, the disconnect that’s happened, and the struggle with coming back to school and being with peers, it’s just telling us loud and clear that that’s a concern. And then going over to pro-social strengths, to see the pro-social strength self-ratings go down that much is a major concern. 

Let’s real quickly hit the next two slides. This is Paradise Junior Senior High in ’19 compared to this year. Again, similar things. Not as much with the emotional problems, but similar with the peer problems and the pro-social strengths issues. And then one more. This is the Ridgeview. This is Continuation High School, where Carrie is also principal, in addition to all the multiple hats that she wears. Again, these are fairly similar. The particular issues that hit us are the peer problems, the disconnect there, and the reduction in pro-social strengths. 

To me, those point in a direction of saying, “How can we use this schoolwide? How can we be aware of this as we’re serving kids that may need some interventions?” But on a schoolwide level, we’re saying, “We need to do things to really engage peers with one another.” The Healthy Kids Survey, as well as some of the other stuff that we’ve collected, says that kids are trusting of the staff. There’s actually some really nice data around that, which is great to share with staff as well. But kids are struggling with kids, and so we need to be considering ways that we can support peer relationships so we engage kids in positive activities, even in activities that are service activities where we know kids learn from that. And then continue to work on the pro-social strengths. 

All of that stuff that we expected might happen because of absences, that all happened. With the SDQ, we’re using that to help drive where we might want to head with SEL, with schoolwide efforts. Using that as a point in time, let’s compare last year to next year. We’re going to continue to use it that way. And then what I really like about this is the capacity for this to tie into our tier-one planning, and then from there going towards interventions as well. That’s the quick version of using data. 

Carrie Dawes: We did it. 

Rebeca Cerna:  Thank you. 

Carrie Dawes: Three years in 30 minutes. 

Rebeca Cerna:  Thank you so much, Carrie and Scott. We really appreciate learning from you, and from everything that you learned from this experience, growth areas, and from such tragedy that happened in your community, and being able to lift and grow from there. So, before we move to the next section, we’re going to invite everyone to take a mindful moment as we process the sharings from Paradise Unified and from Butte. We’re going to take a quick moment to concentrate on breath, and do a box breathing. And we’re going to be inhaling, holding, exhaling, and holding. We’re going to start right here with an inhale. Hold. Exhale. And hold. And we’ll do it one more time. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. And hold. Thank you for joining in this box breathing. 

Before we move forward to our next segment on the mental health report, I’m going to pass it to Tom Hanson, who’s the Senior Managing Director and CalSCHLS Director at WestEd, to move us forward on this next segment. Tom? 

Tom Hanson: Great. Thank you, Rebecca. And thank you for getting past that picture as fast as possible, I really appreciate that. I think Carrie and Scott’s discussion provides so many lessons about why it is important to monitor students’ mental health and wellness. And in addition to that, both national and state data, as well as the recent Surgeon General’s report, have shown that the mental health of adolescence has declined dramatically over the past 15 years. And that decline has been even more dramatic for many student with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

To help districts better support students’ mental health needs, CDE expanded the CHKS Core Module to include more questions assessing student mental health and wellness. This slide here shows the mental health and wellness measures included on the core. And if you’re not familiar, the core is a part of the CHKS that’s taken, all participants who administer the CHKS administer the Core Module. And the Core Module’s also included in the statewide biennial sample, so any data that’s collected on the core, we have a state-representative sample estimate for. These first two measures, chronic sadness and considered suicide, those have been on the core for a very long time. The chronic sadness item is just a single item, it asked, “During the past 12 months, did you ever feel so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more that you stopped doing some usual activities?” Which is a huge mouthful. It’s the definition of clinical depression, I believe. Never really liked the item, but I do like the item because it works incredibly well. The next measure is the suicide ideation measure. That is the measure that CDE uses to alert districts if the district or school rate is abnormally high. WestEd runs an algorithm and determines whether that rate is too high. We send a message to CDE, CDE reaches out to the school districts. Newer measures are the social and emotional distress. This is like a 30-day scale based on five items. 

We also added a life satisfaction measure, and that’s also a five-item measure that students describe their level of satisfaction with their family life, friendships, school experiences, themselves, and where they live. And then there’s an optimism measure, which has been on the social emotional health model module, that’s been moved to the core. That assesses students’ positive expectations towards the future. So we have positive mental health or wellness items, and more items associated with the more undesirable, depression, anxiety items. 

The CalSCHLS team has created a self-contained mental health report that provides data on these five mental health and wellness indicators, and these data are provided for the current school year, as well as data from past years, so that trends can be examined across time. That district report is provided to all LEAs that participate in CalSCHLS this academic year. These reports, they’re basically being distributed as we speak. School reports are also provided to LEAs that ordered the school CHKS reports. 

Let’s just look at the first page of the report. This first page of the report shows current-year data by grade, so that grade level comparisons can be made. If we just look at this sort of light green set of bars on the top portion, those are the results for chronic sadness, and it basically shows that chronic sadness increases with school grade. It’s 33% for grade seven, and 40% for grade 11. 

These blue horizontal lines represent the levels in the state, so the districts can compare their levels with those in the state. The seventh graders, those results are one-third of students. That’s really high, and disturbing. And that is what the rate is in the state, as a whole. The 11th grade results are actually a little bit better. Low would be good on this measure, those students are less likely to be chronically sad than the state average. This is how the reports are structured. You can see the five indicators, by grade, for the most recent year.  

We also show trends over time, and we have five years of data. Some districts administer the survey every year, others every other year. We go back to 2018, regardless. So this shows for grade nine what the trend is for, let’s take the first one, chronic sadness over time. And we see a definite increase from 28 to 43 during the pandemic year, 2021. And then it sort of drops in the most recent year to 36 for ninth graders. 

The suicide ideation stays fairly stable until 2022. Social and emotional distress declines a little bit. Life satisfaction, we only have one year of data for that. And then optimism, it declines a little bit by four percentage points. Also included in the reports are tables with the results, and then further descriptions of how the indicators were calculated. 

So those are on the way if you’re a CHKS participant. And this is something we just decided to provide, just because we’ve added these measures and it’s such a salient issue at the current time. I think that’s all I have, so should I pass it to Mike? 

Rebeca Cerna:  Yes. Thank you, Tom. Next up, we have Michael Furlong, Research Professor from University of California, Santa Barbara. And we’ll pass it to you to get started, Mike. 

Michael Furlong: Thank you, Rebecca.  

Well I really appreciate the presentation so far, really moving to hear what Carrie and Scott and the community up in Paradise have been dealing with the past three years. And of course, they provide, I think, an exemplary model of how a school and community can collaborate, come together, when they use data to help inform them and better improve their services for students. And Tom’s presentation provided information about the efforts that are being made to try to inform everybody about mental health services. I’m going to try to add to this some perspective on how you might think about, as you consider the type of information that you’re receiving and the type of information you might need, I’m going to try to provide some perspective on that. So I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you today about some ways that you can use data as part of your school’s behavioral health and wellness services and evaluation efforts. 

And, you know, when it comes to using data, one way to think about it is like a shiny new car. You can have polished, colorful, engaging infographics and reports. And they’re important because they highlight potential areas of need and attract attention to the importance of addressing students’ behavioral health and wellness. However, an in-depth look at your data can also reveal additional information, and that’s what I’m going to try to do in the time I have with you today  is try to provide some perspective on how to use your data to address your particular needs. So this involves, using the car metaphor, looking under the hood to get your data hands dirty. 

So with this metaphor in mind, if we could move to the next slide, please. Just as a quick overview, I’m going to try to look at a little bit of information about the new mental health indicators that are in the Core Module of the Healthy Kids Survey that Tom just presented and provide a little information about the items and some preliminary student responses, so you can get a perspective of how some California secondary school students have been responding to this. I’m going to also have a little bit of information about a data user beware issue when we look at the chronic sadness question and the suicide question… I’ll just say that. And I will also talk about the indicator best-use considerations, the importance of aligning them with local wellness values, aspirations, and plans, much as Carrie and Scott provide an example of. And looking at local trends, and not necessarily state or national trends. So I’ll provide some perspective on that. I’ll show you a quick example, WestEd and the CDE have made available information from the CHKS in a dashboard where you can actually look at some of your own district or school trends over time. And again, I just want to end with a statement about trends alone are incomplete, and that’s why you need to look under the hood, and maybe take a deeper look at your data. 

So for example, Tom talked about the life satisfaction measure, that’s in the Core Module now. These are the five areas that are there. It asks for students’ overall life satisfaction with friends, family, neighborhood, themselves, and school. This information here gives you a glimpse at how California students are responding to this question, a sample of 10,000 secondary school students in California. This was prior to the pandemic, but the percentage of students shown there, 73% down to 43%, the green bars show the percentage of students who are satisfied or very satisfied with each of those areas. So you will be getting this information about your school. 

Now, just to give you a quick sense about, “Well, can I look at that more deeply?” Well one could count of those five areas, the number of those five life satisfaction domains that a student said, “Yeah, I’m very satisfied or satisfied.” So of course, if you did that, each student could get from zero to five life satisfaction points, if you will. That shows there, over those 10,000 students that we asked this question to, you can see 25% of the students said they were satisfied or very satisfied with all those domains in their life. And you can see at the other end, 13% said they were not satisfied or very satisfied. So one question would be, “Well, does that make a difference?” If we go to the next slide, please, and what you see there is an example. So one of the questions that’ve been asked for years in the National Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey and in California’s Healthy Kids Survey is the item that asks about whether they’ve had chronic sadness in the past 12 months. If you look here, to try to exemplify why we think it’s important to start asking questions about, for example, life satisfaction, you can see there that, of those 10,000 students, of those who expressed that they were satisfied with none of their five life domains, 53% of them answered the chronic sadness question saying that yes, they had been chronically sad in the past year. And you can look at each one of those domains as it’s added reduces the percentage of students who say that they were chronically sad. Those who had all five of those strengths, only 11% expressed that. So this is an example of using the information that’s available to try to dig deeper to understand what students’ experiences are. 

The same goes for the question… Paradise talked about the importance of getting a report and monitoring the students’ expression of suicidal ideation. This is that same question that’s in The Healthy Kids Survey, and you can see the same pattern there. The students who are expressing lower levels of life satisfaction are substantially more likely to also report that they’ve had suicidal ideation in the past year, which emphasizes the importance of these indicators like suicidal ideation as being reflective of broader wellness development for the students. And you can see of students who have four and five of, they’re satisfied with four or five domains in their life, a much smaller percentage of them say that they’ve had suicidal ideations in the past year. 

Now, the five items that are now in The Healthy Kids Survey that ask about past month emotional distress, this just gives you a quick glimpse of those items, what they are  “I was easily irritated.” “I had a hard time relaxing.” “I felt sad and down.” So as Tom mentioned, they’re sort of sadness or maybe some anxiety types of questions. So these aren’t diagnostic, but these are more an indicator of whether a student’s experiencing some emotional distress in the past month. And you can see there, we had the opportunity with CDE and WestEd to ask over 100,000 students in California this question. And this here just gives you a glimpse again, about what percentage of students in the state might be looking like they’re answering these questions. And again, the state averages on your mental health report are important because they give you a benchmark. 

However, we need to look below the data because if you separate out the responses, for example, using a traditional binary gender identification indicator, you can see that students who identify as female are substantially more likely to say that they’ve experienced these things in the past 12 months. And I’ll very quickly say as an aside, I like to be sensitive to this matter because I also like to say, “Well, does that indicate that students who identify as female, are they just more likely because they’re having more internalizing problem?” But I also stop and reflect, and I think about it as, “But is that also reflective that maybe there’s more challenges for females in the way that they experience our social community.” So this isn’t just a personal student matter, could be a matter of our school climate or community climate and what that’s like for female-identifying students in our community. So just an aside comment from me. 

You might think that there’s all other sources of information, and you’re going to be exposed to them. So for example, in the past, just very recently, the Centers for Disease Control came out with a report that looked at youth risk behaviors, and they showed you trend lines from 2009 to 2019. The emphasis I want to get at this section is to try to emphasize that there’s a lot of information out there. You ought to attend to it, but then you also need to beware… Like, “Data user beware,” is to make sure that you understand what’s out there and the context. So for example, this is what is in that report, and there’s been a lot of interest nationally to look at that report. And, as you can see there, if you track the percentage of students who said they had past-year suicidal thought from 2009 to 2019, you see it increase from 13.8% to 18.8%. That’s a 36% increase. There’s been a lot of public reports mentioning this., and then people say, “We’ve got to do something about it.” Which we do, but what I’m also saying is looking under the hood, you can get better understanding about the data. And now this is national data, not necessarily your local data, but if you also look on the table there, it shows you in that same report the different student intersectionalities and identifications for students who had the highest and lowest reporting groups. So as you can see for males and females, it was different, 13% to 24%. American Indian/Alaska Native students had the highest rate of 35%, versus 17% for Black students. Ninth graders, lower, as Tom was indicating from the data reports, and 12th graders, highest. And much larger differences for students who identified as straight versus students identified as bisexual. What I’m saying, even if we have the trend line, it’s really important to stop and think about who are the individuals in our community? How do they identify? How do their intersectionalities might be related to the data? So we just don’t look at one trend line. 

And just so you know, I will say buyer beware. Now Centers for Disease Control made that report, and you can see from 2009 to 2018-19, it went up from 13.8% to 18%. But what they didn’t tell you in the report is the same exact question has been asked since 1991. As you can see, it was actually much higher in 1991, 1993, and 1995 and so on. So that’s why I always say try to dig deeper to try to better understand what the patterns and trends are. 

And you can see also the need for looking deeper, looking at student subgroups, different intersectionalities, to understand… You can see again, doing a traditional binary, male-female gender identity that the increase that we’ve observed since 2009 has been disproportionately among female identifying students. Now even with that, you got to stop and say, “Well what’s your local trend?” So Los Angeles does do a portion of the YRBS Survey, and if you look at that dataset, the sample they’ve had in Los Angeles has not been increasing, just up 3%. But you can see San Diego and San Francisco did increase. Oakland actually decreased slightly. So, this is to emphasize the importance of looking at local information, it is really critical, and not to base decisions and programming based upon these sometimes highly visible and influential, maybe national, reports. 

The same you can see for chronic sadness, it’s the same type of pattern. It has increased since 2009, and it looks like it definitely has increased based upon data that were collected from 1999 on. But again, looking at student intersectionality is important, because you can see the difference there between straight- and bisexual-identifying students, for example. But again, you need to look at your local information. Using the same question, and looking at some California YRBS samples, you can see that the trends are not the same. 

And again here, the chronic sadness question equally increases for males and females, so that would be important to know. Taking a deeper look, and a few examples just to show you how some other districts have been doing that. For example, one district that you work with has been doing school mental health screening for a number of years now. And prior to the pandemic, and during it, they had been administering an instrument called the Mental Health Continuum Short Form. One part of it asked students about what they call social well-being, so this is an example of an item on the social well-being measure. “Society is a good place or becoming a better place for all people.” As you can see in this slide, prior to the pandemic in October of 2019, 58% of the students, we could rate them as having high social well-being. You can see from October 2020 and October 2021, in 2020 during distance learning and in 2021 after they had returned to school, those had decreased from 35% to 25% of students expressing higher levels of social well-being. This is information the district got back specifically on this. 

This is a little bit complicated but I wanted to emphasize this, this district was actually doing screening where the students were providing identifiers. They were able to identify which students had, for example, high social well-being in 2019, and if they decreased. So for example, just quickly here, 427 students that took the survey in the fall of 2019 had high social well-being, but you can see in 2020, 107 or 25% of those students, had actually expressed low levels of social well-being, and by 2021, there were 89 students who had moderate or low levels, still. So the school district was able to identify this particular type of well-being. The point here is in addition to all the great things that are in The Healthy Kids Survey, you may need to think about your own community, its own values, and its own interest, and see if there’s some other indicators that you might have an interest in pursuing. 

Here’s one other quick example. This is a district that actually had Drug-Free Community funds in their community, and they were interested what their substance use trends were over the years. So what they did was they got access to their past Healthy Kids Survey, and they looked, for example here, past month alcohol use and binge drinking in the past month. They had an interest, and you could see there it decreased substantially. Tom can tell you more about this, the decreases in substance use among students. But their interest was to look deeper, they wanted to know, “Well, it’s going down, but is it going down for even students that we might consider being more at-risk?” So in this case, they broke out the patterns from 2004 to 2018 for students who expressed sad or hopeless feelings in the past month. Because they wanted to know, “Well, we may be going down, but we’re also helping students who might be more vulnerable to substance use.” And in this case, the community was able to use their Healthy Kids Survey to document that their efforts to help reduce substance use in their community were working for both students who were at low-risk and students who were at high-risk. 

WestEd has their dashboard where you can go, this shows an example of ABC Unified, you can go back and you can search your Healthy Kids Survey data and you can get a trend graph for questions such as suicidal thoughts from 2015 to 2021. and for the chronic sadness. 

Just a quick thing, you’re wondering what are some of the trends that might be happening during the pandemic? There was a report that just came out in the Journal of the American Medical Association that compared 29 studies, they combined their results to try to get a sense of what has been the impact of the pandemic on students’ behavioral and mental health. Prior to the pandemic, generally, actually diagnosable sadness appeared to be about maybe 11% to 12% of the students. These 29 studies that have been done during the pandemic, I won’t go into all the details, but generally it looked like depression was up to 25% of the respondents in these studies, anxiety at 24%. So this was one indication that yes, as many people are experiencing, that the pandemic is having an impact on our students’ wellbeing. 

You can look this up, CDC just came out with another report in June that looked at suicidal thoughts and sadness on a new sample of 7,500 students during the pandemic. You can see the red boxes there show the percentage in the standard Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey, the percentage of students who said they had chronic sadness, for example, females was 47%. This survey, during the pandemic, 57% of the students responded in that way. So you can see, generally, sadness for both males and females increased during the pandemic, suicidal thoughts didn’t change all that much. 

Now, the other thing, there’s this study that just came out to emphasize “Why do we do these things?” One, if you look at the social-emotional learning literature of course, we think these things support students’ academic performance. But here’s one where they took a sample of over 21,000 individuals who are at age 50  I’m in this demographic so I was interested in this study  in 2006, and they followed them for 14 years, and they actually looked at the mortality within this group. They also were asking questions related to life purpose, life satisfaction, optimism, positive affect, much like we’re doing in The Healthy Kids Survey now. And what they found is the individuals who were in the top one standard deviation, maybe about the 80 or 85th percentile on these characteristics, that starting at age 50 and following for 14 years, that this was associated with mortality. And what they estimate in this study is that people who develop high levels of these psychological strengths had two or four years longevity added to their life. So if you’re helping foster these things in students, you’re not just helping them learn, but you may actually be adding years to their life, to emphasize the importance of why we do these things. 

So anyway, kind of in conclusion, using data wisely. Local values, based on your local values, and your desired outcomes, attend to national and regional reports, but ask, “What do we know about this for our students?” Use resources that you have, The Healthy Kids Surveys reports, the Mental Health Indicator Report. Suicidal ideation is there for you, and also the CHKS dashboard. Use them, they’re there, they’re great resources. And if you’re getting flat or desirable trends, yes, dig deeper, because there may be student intersectionality issues that might be hidden within that data. And the last point is positive indicators, at least in my experience, keeps everyone engaged because the outcomes are important for everybody. And I thank you, and I’ll pass it on. 

Rebeca Cerna:  Thank you so much, Mike. And thank you to all four of our speakers. I think we have some time now with Nakanya. I’m going to stop sharing so that we can spotlight the speakers and Nakanya. And maybe you can do a couple minutes of asking a couple questions before we close. 

Nakanya Magby:  Sure, Rebecca. Thank you. So, the first question is probably going to be for Scott or Carrie. Was there a conversation about selecting SEL-specific screeners as opposed to behavior-specific screeners? 

Carrie Dawes:  I would say our primary concern was SEL post-fire, immediately after the fire. And we could see that in our staff, we could see it in our students. And there was no question that that had to be the priority, in my opinion. 

Scott Lindstrom:  Most screeners do tie to classroom behaviors, and it’s something that’s been easy to use. And part of what we’re looking for is not just “Do they have the skill or not?”, but “How does it play out in terms of their behavior?”, which was reflected there. However moving forward, Paradise Unified is getting deep into RULER. And with RULER, they will have the capacity to assess more specifically the skills related to RULER and how kids are doing with those. Also, with some of the screeners, and SAEBRS is one of them, they do have places where you can compare the different subscales they have with what are some of the SEL skills that could be used to bolster those areas of difficulty. So that’s something that’s available on the CASEL website. 

Nakanya Magby:  And then a follow-up to that question, how did you decide to choose the SAEBRS? 

Scott Lindstrom:  Somebody was using it locally. We’ve actually talked some at the county level of, “Wouldn’t it be neat if we could get all schools to use the same one?” So that was where it started. We knew that some people were using it, it had been promoted. So that’s kind of where we started. 

Carrie Dawes:  We did like the idea of the teacher-reported for the SAEBRS, as well. And we knew as a whole, for our district to have the teachers participate in that, knowing, again as a whole, we were trying to move our district forward socially and emotionally, and wanted their buy-in on that as well. 

Nakanya Magby: Thank you. So another question regarding SAEBRS, do parents need to give consent or is it opt-out? 

Scott Lindstrom:  That’s something that you would take your local, as Mike was just saying, use your local norms around that. But, what we’ve typically found, and I’ve done this in other districts as well, is that if the teachers are doing this on all students, if it’s tied to their overall SEL programs, their tier-one work as well, and that’s just a part of who we are as a community, we have not sought positive permission for this. What we have included is just some descriptions about this kind of stuff being a part of what we do at the school, and that would be in the parent handbook. 

Nakanya Magby:  Okay. And then as a follow-up, what was the communication to parents regarding the screenings? 

Carrie Dawes:  Well, the teacher-reported, we did not communicate with that with the parents. That was the teacher level, and then meeting as teachers once we got the results back. The other screeners that we did, we did let them know that we were going to be administering these surveys and it was purely voluntary for their students. They could opt-out if they wanted to. We had very few students… We really tried to frame it, as a district, on moving forward with social-emotional, and here are the steps that we need to go through. And made sure that we had the buy-in of all the staff presenting this, and then pushed it out to parents from there. 

Nakanya Magby:  Thank you. Okay, next question would be probably for Tom. Someone saw that the data presented was for 2019 through 2021, so when will the next set of data be available? 

Tom Hanson:  Somebody has an eagle eye, good catch. Soon. The blue lines, that’s the 2019-2021 biennial data. That will be released publicly soon. That’s not an adequate response, but in May, probably three to four weeks. 

Nakanya Magby:  Great, thank you. And then the last question, and this one is probably for Mike. Can you provide some thoughts on why having one area of life satisfaction is worse than having none, as reflected in the higher percentage of students expressing chronic sadness and suicidal ideation? 

Michael Furlong:  Yes, again- 

Nakanya Magby:  I can read it again if you need me to. 

Michael Furlong:  No, no. Someone also is looking very closely at the graph, which is appreciated. I’m not sure about that to be honest with you. There’s a little bit of difference there, but I’ve noticed it on some other stuff we’ve done. I just think there’s not much to differentiate between zero and one. If you have these five domains in your life, and you’re saying only zero or one of them are okay, some students might say, “I’m satisfied with my peers, but everything else is not positive.” So I just think there’s probably not much to differ between the zero and one students. Generally, when you think about it, if a student is saying, “All these areas in my life, I’m not satisfied with them.” Probably that’s pretty strong indicator of being at-risk as the California students’ responses have already demonstrated in that information. 

Nakanya Magby:  Thank … 

Michael Furlong:  But as we get more data, we will take a look and see if we can better understand it. 

Nakanya Magby:  Thank you for that. And that concludes our Q&A, so I’m going to turn it back over to Rebeca. 

Rebeca Cerna:  So, again, thank you to our speakers, and thank all of you for joining us today. Because we know that it’s very busy, and you just spent 90 minutes with us. We appreciate you coming and joining us today. Thank you.