Resources

The California Center for School Climate, the California Department of Education, the University of California, San Francisco, and the California School Climate, Health, and Learning Survey (CalSCHLS) System hosted a webinar on using data to understand and address student mental wellness.

Through Project Cal-Well, a federally-funded initiative to promote mental health awareness and wellness among California’s K-12 students, the CalSCHLS System added a Mental Health Supports survey module that is now available to all California schools and districts. This survey module measures students’ perceived stigma related to mental health; mental health help-seeking attitudes and behaviors and perceived barriers; and access to and utilization of mental health services and supports.

This recording provides an overview of the Mental Health Supports survey module. Project Cal-Well partners shared about emergent data that speak to the state of mental health and wellness among California students, and how data are used to address student mental health. Viewers will be guided through the CalSCHLS data dashboards to learn how to access data from their school, district, and/or county about student mental health and mental health supports.

Watch the webinar recording:

View the recording transcript.

View the session resources:

• Linktree
• Google Document

Speakers:

Tom Hanson serves as a Senior Advisor for the California Center for School Climate. Tom is a Senior Managing Director at WestEd. He has extensive experience in developing and validating survey instruments designed to measure school climate and other outcomes. He is the Director of the California School Climate, Health, & Learning Survey (CalSCHLS), a comprehensive youth risk-behavior and resilience data-collection service available to all California local education agencies. He has served as a principal investigator of multiple large-scale randomized controlled trials and has been lead methodologist for several studies examining the impacts of education interventions.

Hilva Chan, MSW, is an Education Programs Consultant with the California Department of Education. She has extensive experience managing projects promoting student wellness and resiliency both at the state and local levels, and has managed several federal grants addressing school safety, school climate, and student mental health. She is the project director of Project Cal-Well, a federally-funded mental health project. She is committed to support LEAs in data-driven school climate improvement.

Sara Geierstanger MPH, serves as Evaluation Director with the School Health Evaluation and Research Team at UCSF’s Institute for Health Policy Studies. Sara’s evaluation work focuses on the potential of school health services to improve student physical and mental health and well-being to help them succeed in school and life. Her expertise is in multi-site evaluations, using a mixed methods approach of both qualitative and quantitative methods. Her current projects include a comprehensive evaluation of school health centers in Alameda County, as well as multiple evaluations of school-based behavioral health interventions throughout California.

Samira Soleimanpour, MPH, PhD, is an Associate Professor with the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco. She serves as the Principal Investigator of several local and statewide school health research and evaluation projects, including evaluations of the California Department of Education’s Project Cal-Well and Cal-STOP school mental health initiatives and American Rescue Plan-Homeless Children and Youth programming. She is committed to the translation of research and evaluation findings into policies and programs that improve children’s health and educational outcomes, with a particular focus on school-based health centers (SBHCs), school-based mental health services, and community-based participatory research.