Rebeca Cerna:

Hello and welcome. Welcome everyone. Hello and welcome to our webinar on Peer Advocacy in El Dorado County. Please feel free in the chat to say hello and to share where you are joining from. We’d love to see where you all are joining us today. This webinar is being presented by the California Department of Education and WestEd. It’s part of the California Stronger Connections Technical Assistance Center. My name is Rebeca Cerna and I am part of the WestEd team, and we’ll be introducing today’s session.
So we have 60 minutes together today and participants will be muted throughout the session, but we invite you to be active in the chat and you can submit questions via the Q&A feature at the bottom of the Zoom bar. This session is being recorded and it will be posted on the Stronger Connections website, and we will let everyone who registered know when it is posted on this website.
So again, we’re here on behalf on the California Stronger Connections Technical Assistance Center. It’s funded by the California Department of Education and we’ve invited Stronger Connection grantees, private schools, private schools, and anyone in the state who might be interested in topics related to school safety, healthy learning environments, violence prevention. You should see a poll popping up in your Zoom window, and we’d love to know what other topics related to Stronger Connections we could address during future webinars. So we appreciate your feedback and it would help us in our planning.
Okay, so we’ll just leave that up for you and you can continue filling that out while I move on and share a little bit about our goals for today’s session. We are going to do a deep dive into peer advocacy efforts in El Dorado County, why this became an initiative and a priority in the region, and how it’s being implemented and what’s been learned along the way. So we’re very excited to hear directly from some students who are also involved in El Dorado County.
Anyone who also attends is going to be invited to an office hour. We have a lot of information that is going to be shared during today’s session, and because we might not have enough time for questions and discussions, as much time as we would want to, we have a office hour next Friday, next week on October 3rd from 11:00 to 12:00. So if you attended this session, you will be getting an invitation to that session. The slides from today’s session and other resources are available on the Padlet. We posted the Padlet link in the Zoom chat, and you can also use your phone and the QR code to scan it and get a link to the Padlet.
Okay, so here we are now with today’s presenters. We have two individuals, adult individuals, and then we’re going to introduce our youth speakers as well. So we have Tim Hooey. He is a mental health and wellness coordinator for El Dorado County Office of Education. Tim is a licensed marriage and family therapist who has spent most of his career working with middle school and high school students. He has been with El Dorado County for two years and has helped lead the way for the countywide peer advocacy initiative.
Larry Bryant is the peer advocacy teacher at Golden Sierra High School in El Dorado County. Larry has been in education for 27 years teaching science and health at the high school level. He has worked with the peer advocacy program for the last 15 years and has been a class advisor for the last 10 years. And they’re also joined by some of the peer advocates at Golden Sierra. And so we’re thrilled to have him here. And Larry, if you could help us by helping us introduce them.

Larry Bryant:

Yeah, I’ll introduce my fabulous peer advocates here. I’ll let them introduce themselves.

Dakota Flaherty:

All right. Hi, my name’s Dakota Flaherty and this is my first year being a peer advocate.

Elena Vandervoort:

Hi, my name is Elena Vandervoort and this is my second year of being a peer advocate.

Sarah Parr:

Hi, my name is Sarah Parr and this is my second year of being peer advocacy. And that’s all the people we have.

Rebeca Cerna:

Thank you team and peer advocates. And Larry, we’re going to now pass it to Tim to take us through this next section.

Tim Hooey:

Great. Thank you Rebeca. And thank you Larry and students. We’re really excited to be with you this morning to talk about what we’ve been doing as a county with this peer advocacy program. I personally am just very excited to be here because it’s always a highlight to hear from Larry and from his students. So we want to make sure they have plenty of time to tell you about their program and some of the things that they’re doing.
In terms of where I’m planning on heading today, definitely as Rebeca mentioned, some of these things, want to spend some time talking about the why, why we chose this as an initiative in El Dorado County and why we continue to support it. Talk a little bit about what the program actually is and some of the options through peer advocacy for our high school and middle school campuses. Get a chance to hear from Larry and his students and then we’ll end the day talking about how we’re sustaining these programs and what it looks like to hopefully grow them in the midst of a time where a lot of us are dealing with declining enrollment and declining budgets. What does it look like to throw a new program onto a school campus?
So that’s a bit of where we’re going to head today. Give you a little bit of background about El Dorado County. We are a fairly rural county. We stretch all the way from Georgetown or El Dorado Hills, if you can picture those parts of the map, all the way up to Tahoe. So we cover a big geographic space. We have about 30,000 students total. In our county, that’s six comprehensive high schools and five alternative education high schools. So it’s starting this year. I’m really proud to say we’ve been working really hard and we actually have five of our comprehensive high schools and one of our alt ed schools that has a peer advocacy class on their campus. We also have some middle schools that have a program going.
So that’s essentially all within the last two years. We started this initiative about two and a half years ago, and I do want to spend some time getting into the why. When I think about the why we chose peer advocacy, I mean quite simply, I think for me it kind of boils down to two things. Our students wanted it and it works. So essentially that’s the answer. But I want to share a few stories of what we’ve seen with peer advocacy that, for me, made the why become very clear as soon as we started this program.
Two and a half years ago, one of our alternative ed high schools, Independence High School started a program. It’s a continuation high school, they have about 100 students there, and they started this program with about three months to go in the school year, and almost immediately we saw it starting to pay dividends. So one of the students that was in the peer advocacy program was walking around campus and they’d been trained up just for not very long, maybe a month and a half or so. And this student from the peer advocacy program overheard two other students, and one was making fun of the other for his hygiene and the way he smelled. And the peer advocate with very little training stepped in and essentially said, “Hang on, we don’t need to be doing that.” Broke up what was going on and then grabbed the student who was being made fun of aside and just chatted with them and said, if you need some resources like laundry, we have those things on campus.
And it came to pass that this student that was being made fun of did need those resources. This student was not able to wash their clothes because their water had been turned off and was dealing with all of this on a personal issue. So just our peer advocate paying attention to what was going on on campus at this continuation high school, being able to step in. To me, immediately again, it reminded me, this is why we’re doing this program. It’s a way for students to step in, not just to break up what’s going on, but to actually provide resource to that student. And I don’t think it’s too hyperbolic to say that that’s the type of life-changing experience for students, both the peer advocate and the student that he was helping.
One other story I would love to share, and it’s actually from these last two weeks. I don’t know if anybody’s heard, but we’ve had a pretty difficult two weeks in El Dorado County. We had a student in one of our schools died by suicide about a week and a half ago, so very tragic. That was on a Friday. This was at one of our high schools, and it’s a high school that has a peer advocacy class. This peer advocacy class is about a month and a half into their training, and they were able on a Monday morning to meet with our wellness center on that campus and talk about what resources needed to be on the school campus.
Then they opened up a room in the library for students just to come throughout the day if they needed some resources, if they just needed a place to sit. They had over 100 students come through that room and they provided a safe space for them to hang out, that the advocates were trained enough to know when they were a bit in over their heads, and then they were able to take those students over to our wellness center to meet with some therapists. And I heard that about a week ago that this was going on. And again, it kind of came home to me that this is why we do this work because we have students that are eager to be a part of the process, to be a part of helping each other, and with some training and with some guidance, they’re completely able to go do that work.
So that’s a little bit of the why. If you go to the next slide, some of the other parts that play into that for us are we started this program two and a half years ago. Part of that why was we have an El Dorado County Youth Commission, which is a commission of about a dozen high school students throughout our county that’s commissioned by our board of supervisors. And the Youth Commission essentially said, “We want this. We want peer advocacy in our schools.”
They were telling us the same time as we received a grant as a county office of education called the SBHIP grant. Some of you may have heard of that. And we decided that this is what we’re going to do with one of our SBHIP initiatives. The Youth Commission is asking for it. We know that it can work, and that’s why we went forward with this work. So we had some funding. We had students saying, “Let’s do this.” And probably more importantly, we had Larry Bryant and his students who have been running this program for 15 years, being able to say, “Yes, this works. We will teach you, we’ll train you.” And they’ve been great partners in that work.
We we see peer advocacy as a way to address the need too that I think a lot of administration and school staff would probably see as the needs of the campus. So we’ve really targeted with our programs addressing issues like chronic absenteeism, alternatives to suspension, and I’ll talk a little bit about what these look like in a moment. And then increasing school climate and school culture. So those are the areas that we’ve focused on as we’re talking with admin and the areas that we’re looking to train students on.
If you go to the next slide, we’d love to get into a little bit more of this. What does it actually look like in El Dorado County? So for El Dorado County, again, we’re a pretty small county. We have one large high school district and we have a few unified school districts, but otherwise we have a lot of elementary school districts and then a large high school district. And we saw this as a way to create a common language throughout the county. Not every context was the same, but we figured if we could bring a language to this that’s the same and an ethic that is the same to all of our schools, really from kindergarten all the way through high school, peer advocacy could be a really good pathway to doing that.
So we’ve focused on getting peer advocacy programs started in high schools. This year, the focus is on getting more middle schools with programs, and we have some visions for what it might look like to bring us to elementary schools as well. So we see this as a unifying force where everybody can get behind it, the students and the staff.
The other thing that we see as really important in this work and what it looks like is taking a representation of the student body and bringing it into this program. There are several programs that do things like this, but we really see the value of peer advocacy, partly because we’re enabling and equipping students that don’t always get those opportunities. As I mentioned, even in our continuation high school, we have a program and they’ve been doing amazing work. I’ll tell you a little bit more about some of the trainings that they’ve received, but we think that peer advocacy can be a way to really create equity within our schools by inviting people into these programs.
What it looks like in practice, if you go to the next slide, is that we have trainings. The County Office of Education has hosted a training each of the past three years with Hilary Roberts of Peer Advocates Training and Consulting. Hilary is fantastic. If you haven’t had a chance to meet her, I would highly encourage it. I would love to tell you more about that if you have questions. But she’s created a curriculum. Hilary was a peer advocacy teacher for about 20 years in California. She wrote this curriculum. So she’s been able to come in and really educate and train all of our peer advocacy coordinators and teachers and from that training give them a ready-made curriculum so they can go into a class and have an entire year laid out of what the curriculum looks like. So as a county office of education, we are providing that curriculum, we’re providing that type of training.
And in that training on the next slide, it shows some of the service options our schools are providing. I won’t read through all of these, but I do want to highlight a few of them because I think they’re worthwhile to know about. For instance, peer orientation and transition assistance, the first service option here. This service option list, by the way, is not exhaustive, but these are some of the things our peer advocates are doing and that a peer advocacy group can jump into. There’s as many options in peer advocacy as students can think of to help their schools. So this certainly is an exhaustive… What some of these things look like in El Dorado County, again, peer orientation. We have a school that their teacher does a lot of cooking, the peer advocacy teacher, and so he’s brought that into his classroom and he’s taught the students how to cook, and they’ve actually utilized that for peer orientation.
It’s a rather small school and it’s pretty transient. There’s a lot of students coming in and out throughout the year and every quarter they bring all of the students that are new to that school that quarter, and they invite them into their classroom and they cook them a lunch and just sit down and eat that lunch with them as a way to welcome them onto the school campus. And this is something that really increases the climate and culture of that school, provides the students for an opportunity to connect with people that might otherwise feel a little bit left out.
So that peer orientation is an option. Peer education is an option. All of our peer advocacy groups are in other classes giving presentations around things like substance use and violence prevention and so forth. This year, my expectation is that our peer advocacy classes and programs in a county of 3000 will be able to go in and provide education to about 3000 students. And that 3000 would just be about substance use and vaping. There’s a lot more education that goes on. Some of Larry’s students, hopefully, will give a chance to explain a little bit of what they do in that area.
The last thing I would mention on here is peer tutoring. We do have one school that thought they did a brilliant thing. As they started their program, they connected with our local community college and offered every student in their class an asynchronous one unit peer tutoring course through Folsom Lake College, which is our local community college. Every peer advocate, a group that’s representative of the school, walked out of that class that year with one unit of college courses. They also got to be trained on tutoring. And so they went into some of our intervention classes, classes where students are struggling with some of their grades in tough subjects like math and science.
And the peer advocates went in intentionally and relationally as tutors. And I’m really proud to say I thought this was some amazing work that of the students that they worked with, it was about 60 students that they worked with. Of all of those students, there was one failing grade. I think that has a lot to do with the fact that these were peers tutoring peers, and so it created an environment where the students wanted to be doing well.
To me, I see that, and I think that’s an incredible success story, both for the peer tutors but also for the school. As we talk about things like chronic absenteeism and climate and culture, students that are succeeding in their classes want to be in school. So we see this trickle-down effect of a peer advocacy program really doing good work.
So those are a few of the different types of options that we have. Again, there are many more. There’s things that we’re training our students in that are also on this list that I won’t have time to mention. To really get a good sense of what students are doing and the different program options they have, it’s probably best that you hear from our students and from Larry Bryant. So I’m going to pass it over to our Golden Sierra folks, if you guys want to take it away.

Sarah Parr:

Okay. So I’m going to go over our Peer Advocates mission for our school. Our program works with students and staff to create a safe environment and culture helping students to be successful at Golden Sierra. Peer Advocates are a group of upperclassmen that act as a mentors for underclassmen students that need support in any way. And they are here and we are here to listen to their mentees and provide support and help them connect to community resources if they need those resources. In addition to our mentoring roles, they also act as teen health educators and facilitate communication between students, staff and administration if needed.

Dakota Flaherty:

All right. So our Big 3 for being a peer advocate here at El Dorado County, our first one would be the peer-to-peer support. So the peer-to-peer support is where you’re available to talk while students wait for Wellness Center support. Oh my gosh. And available when students need to vent or to be heard, advocating for students with teachers and administration. So we could help the students communicate with other teachers as well as showing them where our wellness center is as well, just bringing them to that as well. And then our second one is connecting students to resources and supports. So we have a wellness center down at our campus, and we could bring them to that or connect them towards that if they need, not only to know where it’s at, but we could bring them to it, just connecting to them.
And then we also have our Golden Sierra Community Resource Center for all the resources that’s also down at our campus, and we could bring them to that if they need it. Same with community nights. We have community nights at our school, and it’s every start of Thursday, every Thursday of the month. So they could also locate the Wellness Center, they could locate the community center down our campus too, just for that.
Our peer education is our last one, which is social emotional learning and teen health issues. So peer advocate, we could help them with anything, help them and support them with things they need for not only just their social emotional learning, but even academically as well, we could bring them to their teacher if they need help, not only just their mentality, but anything else, we do that too.
The reason why I joined Peer Advocates because I want to be someone who’s there for somebody when they need support or someone that could talk to as well as someone who will listen. I want to make a positive impact on my school’s community by giving those more support and care that they might need, and I want to be there for somebody.

Sarah Parr:

Okay. Oh, so why I joined Peer Advocates is because I wanted to have opportunities to help support my community and be involved with my community more and help anyone who needed help. And then what I’ve done in Peer Advocates, I would say a pretty big thing that we do is empowerment and events where we talk to other schools about their programs and help them either start up a program or help improve their program. And then how I’ve grown as a peer advocate, I’d say I’ve grown a lot in this program, but most specifically, I would say I’ve grown a lot in communication, not only within the Peer Advocates program or with my peers, but also outside in my personal life with my family and friends.

Elena Vandervoort:

Hi, I’m Elena Vandervoort again, and the reason why I joined Peer Advocates is I remember when I was a freshman and I was scared and I was new and I was just kind of freaked out as a freshman is during school their first day. And I remember getting my peer advocate and she came to me regularly and talked to me and helped me get used to the campus where I feel that sometimes freshmen can be overwhelmed about that. And so I felt like I got calmed down. And so after I had a peer advocate, I realized that I was like, I want to do that for someone. I want to be able to be there and really care about someone and show that I care. And I felt that peer advocacy was a really good way for me to do that. And it helped me connect with my community as I was new to the area for a couple years. So I wasn’t as involved as other people were. So this helped me get involved with my community.
And specifically things that I have done as a peer advocate, since it’s my second year, I have done Grizzlies United. So for Grizzlies United, we go to the elementary schools and we talk about bullying. And we do the same thing with peer advocates. So we go to our local elementary schools and we give them talks. We do community circles and we explain to them why it hurts other people and why we should… How it helps connect the community when we’re kind to each other. And that way when they get to high school, they have a better understanding on how equal and nice community works in that way. We can grow how we’re supposed to be. So yeah. And then I would say that’s the reason why I became a peer advocate.

Larry Bryant:

So you could go to the next slide if you wanted to do that, but we’re going to talk a little bit about recruitment and training. And we have a sign-up process so students can sign up to be in the class. And then we also invite students, which I strongly encourage people to do. We send out applications, we encourage people to apply, they turn in their applications, and then we have an interview process and we interview them and we pick our team. And one of the stories that I hear a lot is that students will want to be peer advocates because, like Elena said, they had an amazing peer advocate and they want to pay that forward. They’re very excited about having the opportunity to do for somebody else what somebody did for them. And one year I had a student come in and said, “My peer advocate changed my life and it was really important, and so I want to be a peer advocate.”
And I said, “It’s interesting because I spoke with your peer advocate and they said that mostly they check in with you and you just say everything was great and you leave it at that.” And that student looked at me and they said, “But somebody checked on me every month of my whole freshman year and wanted to know if I was doing okay. And that made all the difference.” So that’s another one of those examples of how those small things can make a huge difference having those students be there for the other students and be available. If you want to go to the next one. I like to put this slide in because I don’t turn my peer advocates loose without a whole lot of training and preparation and discussion and getting them ready to go out there. So there’s a whole lot on there because we do a whole lot of preparation.
I use Hilary’s curriculum. Her and I actually trained originally under the same mentor. So we have roots in the same program, but then I’ve grown it out and made connections in the community, and I bring in a lot of community resources to train the students and connect them since that’s number two of our Big 3 is that they become experts in connecting people to resources. So we have those resources come in and present. We have those resources come in and educate them and let us know what things are available. We have professionals come in and talk about mental health and talk about communication. We spend a lot of time talking about communication specifically. We spend a lot of time talking about confidentiality. Those are our big supports.
And then we do a tremendous amount of time on all the educational topics that they do. When they go out and do presentations on various teen issues, they have to do all that research and prepare the presentation and do those presentations in the class. And that takes a lot of preparation and work as well.
One of the strengths of any program is being able to adjust to the needs of your community and your school. And I would say not only is that a strength, but I mean you absolutely need to shape your program to match the needs of your community and your school. So as Tim went over those different possibilities for what a program could look like, you want to find the need that needs to be addressed in your school and community and start there. We do tons of stuff, but we do tons of stuff because we’ve been doing it for a long time. Start small. It’s eating an elephant but one bite at a time, right? Sorry.
Like I said, we’ve had years where things have happened and we’ve pivoted to help address very specific concerns. Tim’s example of dealing with the suicide was a good example, having to pivot and help and support that way. Bullying, we’ve had years where the administration has come to us and said, “We need to address bullying.” And so we’ve shifted our focus and focused on that.
So being able to adjust and shift the focus of your program and what you’re addressing is a strength, but it’s also at the heart of building the program and make it fit your community and make it fit the needs of your school. So I think that’s it for that slide. If you want to click there. Tim, I think this is you.

Tim Hooey:

I think it is, but can I ask you something if we go back to the last slide?

Larry Bryant:

Oh, I’d love to, yeah.

Tim Hooey:

Okay. And I think it’s really important to know, I’m glad you mentioned, Larry, that this is a lot of work and it is only possible because you guys have been doing this for 15 years and you’ve built up capacity to do this, but still, you have new students coming in every year that have maybe seen this, but it’s new to them. I just wanted to mention that, and Larry, I’d love to hear your thoughts about this, but in terms of the curriculum that our other classes are using, and I know that you utilize, it’s about half of the curriculum is about understanding what’s going on in yourself as you’re helping other people. So I know a lot of times admin get very nervous when we talk about a new program because of all of the liability that they see. And I just wanted to maybe say, Larry, if you could talk a little bit about how your students are trained just to understand what’s going on in themselves, how much a part of the class is that?

Larry Bryant:

Well, I mean, it’s a huge portion of the class, and I had to think that my students get as much out of the program as they’re giving out to their community as well, that they grow as people and they gain these life skills, communication, presentation, listening non-judgmentally, being able to support people for anxiety or depression or stress or all these things. And then we have to support our students too. We do a lot of work supporting the peer advocates, helping other people, it has a real cost. It takes a lot of energy to do that. So we have to support them as people to do that as well. And it has taken a substantial amount of the years of the program to allay the fears of parents and administrators that we really do train them and they really do know what they’re doing, and we really do build their skills before we throw them out there to help those other people. Is that kind of what you…

Tim Hooey:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think I probably have one more question for you, but I just want to piggyback off of that one. And I think the thing we often talk about in the training and as we talk about peer advocacy is that some staff often are worried about this liability issue and that students aren’t equipped to go out and talk about some of these things that you’re seeing on this list. I think it’s an understandable fear across my mind too. And the training really does equip students.
The other part we talk about in the training a lot is that whether we train them or not, students are talking with other students. So if a student is feeling suicidal, they’re probably more likely to go to a peer and drop some hints about that than they are to you or to me or some other staff person. So I always think it’s important to recognize this, that we’re training students to do what they’re already… they’re already talking with each other. So giving them some tools to know what to do with that and the resources where to send people, that’s really important.
I want to touch on that really quick, Larry, and then I think that’s probably the last thing for what I wanted to ask you, but you have suicide prevention listed on here. I just wanted to mention some of your data around this. So at Golden Sierra, it’s fair to say there’s about 400 high school students give or take?

Larry Bryant:

Yeah, on any given year between 4 and 500. Yeah.

Tim Hooey:

And I’m thinking back to some of the data you showed me that I think it was two years ago, the suicide intervention. So these would be your students who had a peer essentially tell them that they maybe had some suicidal ideation, not using those words, but in so many ways. If I remember correctly, two years ago your students had eight of those interventions. Is that the right number?

Larry Bryant:

Yeah.

Tim Hooey:

So this is, to me, it’s just this sign that in a school of 400, we had a peer advocacy, peer-to-peer group that had enough trust from their peers that they received eight of those interventions out of 400 students. At least for me, that feels like a pretty staggering number. I don’t know, Larry, if you got anything else you wanted to mention about that, but I always think it’s worth pointing out that statistic from you guys.

Larry Bryant:

No, it’s a powerful one. And one of the things that drove us to start the program was that all the data shows that students are way more comfortable talking to other students than they are adults. And so that’s a huge piece of why we do what we do. And that’s also why that guiding to resources is in our top three. And that number two spot is my fabulous peer advocates aren’t solving these problems for students, they’re helping them get to the professionals that they need. So I mean everything from do they need food? Do they need clothes? Do they need counseling and support? So we’re not taking the place of those community resources, we’re guiding students to those.
And I do have, last year I had a peer advocate who in their interview said that… I knew that we had done a suicide intervention with them, and they said that, “You know what? I think that saved my life and I really want to pay that forward.” And I always tell the students that if that’s the only student we’ve ever saved, the program’s totally worth it. That’s a meaningful data point and a person that we get to have now that we wouldn’t have had otherwise. I [inaudible 00:37:26] a little on your question there, but.

Tim Hooey:

No well worth hearing. So yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. It is all part of, again, the ethic of this course and it’s taking people that have had these experiences that may not have other platforms to show their empathy and their leadership and train them to really go do that. So I think it’s, yeah, Larry, I could listen to these stories from you all day. I appreciate it.
I’ll mention one other thing, which is Larry and the students mentioned in terms of the recruiting and training that, and I love this idea, that students apply to be part of that program and then they interview with one of the current peer advocates to be in the class for the following year. I just want to say that’s happening in our high schools, but that’s happening in our middle schools as well. So peers interviewing peers, and maybe there’s some more guidance around that.
But in our middle school programs, we’ve seen it where the eighth grade students will have interviews with sixth graders who want to be part of the program the following year. So that can go across all sorts of ages, and it is exactly what this program is for, training up students to be able to work with each other. So Larry, thank you. And your students, thank you. We really appreciate you guys.
So there’s a lot going on in this slide here. It kind of brings me to what our next slide is, which is how in the world do we pay for these programs and grow them and sustain them, as I mentioned earlier, in an environment where most every school I know is dealing with declining enrollment and declining funding. So I want to mention a few of the ways that we are working on that. Thank you.
Here’s a long list. I’ll point out a few of these things, but essentially what this list is saying, search anywhere and everywhere for funding. A lot of these programs probably are currently on your campuses if you’re working on a school campus right now. We started this work with, as I mentioned, our SBHIP grant. That’s essentially run out by now, but that’s what started the work for us. That connects in with one of these bullet points, which is your managed care partners, and these are the insurance companies that provide Medi-Cal in your counties. Managed care partners, they want to be supporting programs like this. I really believe that because it’s really good for students. So I would encourage talking with the managed care partners that you have.
Two areas that we’ve really focused in on. One would be we’ve connected this with our TUPE funding. So as a county office of education, we get some county technical assistance, TUPE funding. A lot of your school sites might get, if you get a TUPE Tier 2 grant, then it’s even better. But one of the things we’re requiring starting this year of our peer advocacy groups is that they are doing some peer education around vaping and substance use. And so then we can use our TUPE funding to help fund the teacher’s time.
So there’s places like this on your campus that are already doing work that’s very in line with what we’re talking about with peer advocacy. I would encourage you to look for these things. I just see in the chat, somebody mentioned something about the LCAP. Absolutely every goal behind peer advocacy aligns with an LCAP goal, so I would encourage you to share that with your school board, share that with your admin that this is one way that we can meet those LCAP goals.
Community schools would be a great place if your school has that grant to pour some of that funding into the teacher time. And just to give you guys a sense of what that’s actually looked like for us, because we’ve pushed peer advocacy classes, not just clubs or programs, because we really believe that classes are going to be the way that we have the biggest impact. We’re really talking about taking, in terms of funding, an entire section, so a period of a teacher’s day, and that’s kind of the base amount of funding. So for any given school, that can be anywhere from 20 to 40,000 dollars for the teacher to teach that class. That’s what we are looking to build in. And then there’s the programmatic costs as well. So that’s what we’ve been dealing with. That’s where we’ve been, the need that we’ve been trying to help meet. I’m going to talk about the CTE pathways in a further slide, but that’s a place where we’ve found a lot of success in terms of sustaining this program.
The other place that’s not a grant but with sustainability that I would really encourage is in this last year we had each of our peer advocacy classes or schools that were planning on starting a class this year apply to have an A-G certification for their class. If you’re not familiar with that, A-G is essentially, it means that as an elective, this would be recognized by the Cal State schools and UCs. And so it’s an elective that students can take that actually count towards those state schools and UCs when they’re applying. That was really important for us and important for the high schools that we’re bringing this program to in order to get students to sign up, especially in some of our really high performing schools, students wouldn’t take this class if it wasn’t A-G, so that was a big priority.
What we’ve been able to do in the last two years and jumping into this year, if you go to the next slide, is see a lot of momentum and it’s been helpful to have a collaborative of schools that are working on this together, but where we’ve gone from Larry’s class those first few years, up to nine different programs or classes last school year with a few more this year. And then what I really want to emphasize in these slides, it’s not so much the numbers or how we’ve been able to build a program, but this to me shows going from 25 students or so in Larry’s class to 243 students in a program. This is an indication that students want this and they have a passion for working with each other, and if we can put the platform out there for them to do that, people will sign up.
It’s the classic, like Field of Dreams. As long as we build it, they’re going to come. So that’s really what we’ve seen. We’ve had no shortage of students that have been interested in this. We have three different classes, peer advocacy classes that started this year. I was very concerned that students weren’t going to sign up. All three of those classes are maxed out. They can’t accept any more students because students want to be a part of this program.
If you go to the next slide, I’ll mention in terms of sustainability and how we grow this program. The other really big thing for us this year, again in a lot of our high-performing schools, students didn’t want to take this because it felt a little bit like empty calories, so to speak. This year we started a career pathway, so we’re working with Folsom Lake College. For us, it’s a county-wide mental health career pathway. The entryway into that pathway is that a student be in a peer advocacy class.
They had a chance once they were in the class to apply to be a part of this pathway, and what it looks like this year is that in this fall semester, students work with Folsom Lake College to take a completely asynchronous intro to social work class that’s part of Folsom Lake College’s Social Work AA program. And students who complete that class will have an opportunity in the spring to take a social work practicum class.
They meet one night a week with the professor online and in that practicum class, I believe they need 108 hours to get their Social Work AA, but they’ll be able to count all of their work as peer advocates toward that AA. So we’ll have students graduating this year with six units toward the social work AA at Folsom Lake College and all of the hours completed for that AA. Meaning that if they go to Folsom Lake College next year, they have a huge chunk of that program already taken care of.
We plan on hopefully increasing that as next year rolls around. This year’s a bit of a pilot year for us to do this. What we found with this is number one, it met a huge need in our community because we don’t have enough direct service providers to begin with. We wanted to find a career pathway. Peer Advocates was this great entryway into this. And again, in some of our really high performing schools, offering a pathway where students are getting college credit as they’re taking the peer advocacy course was what helped get the admin over the line to be able to offer the class. I think students would’ve taken it, but admin and some parents was really helpful for them to know that this existed.
We plan on providing some opportunities as well to align with Folsom Lake College’s Certified Wellness Coach program. And that’s probably the last thing I’ll mention about sustainability is that we are in our middle schools especially, we are utilizing certified wellness coaches to help run peer advocacy programs. It’s getting a little bit in the weeds, but the CYBHI Fee Schedule allows wellness coaches to bill for their services as long as they’re related to mental health. So our wellness coaches, because of the work that we’re doing in these classes, we believe we’ll be able to bill for the work that they’re doing in the classes. It is all completely related to mental health, so it helps us sustain as a county, but also then provide staff that are able to do these services.
One last thing on the wellness coaches I’ll mention is that Hilary Roberts has this incredible classroom curriculum and she just put out a free curriculum. I believe it’s on the Padlet, the link to it, but it’s a free curriculum for non-classroom teachers to run a peer advocacy program. So it’s for people like wellness coaches or wellness center staff that might be interested in running this program. It gives them a book that they can take. It’s a completely free resources through the California School-Based Health Alliance. So really encourage people to check that out. That’s a free curriculum. Anybody can go get it. If you’re interested in what the curriculum looks like, even the classroom curriculum, this will give you a good sense of what it looks like.
You can move on to the next slide. Larry mentioned that this didn’t happen overnight. This took a long time. And so I love this story. I’ll end with this story of this gentleman named Micah True who went by the name of Caballo Blanco. Micah True was a runner who moved, I think in his forties, to the Copper Canyons in Mexico and lived with this people group called the Tarahumara. And the Tarahumara were, still are, this people group that can run incredibly long distances, 100 miles and seem to be able to do it very fast and are doing these amazing things in terms of running. He moved there and he started just to learn from them about what they knew about running. And he said it boiled down to these three things that equal the last thing. The Tarahumara lived this life, in life and in their running of doing things easy, light and smooth. And when they practiced those things of easy, light, smooth everything then went fast.
I think of that like what Larry’s talking about implementing a program. We can’t expect everything to move incredibly fast right away, but as you go in and you learn how to meet the needs that your admin might have and meet the needs that your students have and invite students into that process, it can be easy, light and smooth. It shouldn’t be headbutting. It should be a collaborative effort. And as those things have started to happen, at least what we’ve seen in our programs is that then suddenly you see that things have started moving fast and our programs are doing so much work, more than I expected or anticipated when we started this work. But it all kind of really had to start with in a relaxing mode, in a relaxing manner of doing things really easy and then letting it go fast along the way.
So we really appreciate the time to share with you guys. Larry, again, thank you to you and to your students. Rebeca, thanks for giving us the opportunity to share a little bit about our program. I know, I think our contact information is in that Padlet as well. If not, I’m sure you can give it out to people. We’d love to answer any questions. Feel free to email me anytime. I love talking about what we’re doing as well as helping other people figure out how they can implement this. So we appreciate it, Rebeca, thank you.

Rebeca Cerna:

Thank you. Thank you to all five of you. Really, it was a lot of great, rich information that you shared from the why you started this to the why from the students of why they wanted to become peer advocates, to the recruitment and the rollout, from the practice, thinking about sustainability. So there’s so much content and information that is going to be helpful for us to be able to share with those of you who are here present and also to be able to share the recording in the future.
We want to do one quick question. Maybe Larry and team, I don’t know if the students might still be there, but we want to maybe ask one quick question, if possible. What might be some words of wisdom that the students or you, Larry, would be able to offer for any adults or schools who might be wanting to build and promote a peer advocacy program? What would be some words of wisdom that you would offer? And then Tim, you can go after them as well.

Larry Bryant:

So I mean, find that person on your campus that is committed to supporting the students and has that buy-in, and then build your program to address specifically your school, your community, what those needs are, and involve the community, right? It needs to be a community thing. Do you guys have? Yeah.

Elena Vandervoort:

Like Tim Hooey was saying, it can be hard to start a program because of administration and the parents are worried about how the students are going to react. I think it’s important to never stop trying and believing in the students in your community is really important and is crucial to how this program works. So I feel that that’s really important.

Larry Bryant:

I guess that’s us, Tim.

Rebeca Cerna:

And thank you. Never stop trying. I like that. And Tim, any final thoughts from you?

Tim Hooey:

I would just add, I definitely agree with what’s already been said. The thing I probably would add is it really has to start with student voice. If it’s a bunch of adults that are trying to push this, we’re only going to get so far. So I would say really we had the great opportunity and privilege to start with our Youth Commission in El Dorado County. And without them pushing it, we wouldn’t have gotten here. So I would say if you have something like that, utilize those groups. And if not, maybe start with some listening circles and seeing what students want, how do they want to be working, and make sure that they’re the ones that are really pushing this.

Rebeca Cerna:

Thank you. So we heard some last final nuggets of wisdom about community partnerships, student voice, never stop trying, like you mentioned. I think that all of those are very great points to really think about as we’re moving forward. We want to thank all of you once again for all of the insights that you shared. And we’re going to do a couple of final slides. As a reminder, we are going to be inviting all of you to attend our office hour on October 3rd for those of you who attended to do a deeper discussion on the topic, it’s at 11:00 until noon. So if you’re free to simply come by to ask one question and you want to stop by for five minutes, you’re welcome to do that. Or if you want to have a longer conversation with us, you’re welcome to do that. So that is going to be on October 3rd.
And we are going to do a quick brief Zoom poll feedback that we would ask if you could please fill it out. The window should have popped up on your Zoom window right now, and it has, I think, three questions. So if you answer each of those three questions and you just scroll down to answer those, that would be very helpful. We’re able to use that information to plan for future sessions. This session was recorded. We’ll send you a notification when it is posted.
I want to share two more things about something that is upcoming. So at the beginning I mentioned that this work is part of our Stronger Connections grant. So we will be having a couple of more webinars this fall. And as we have the registration Links open for those sessions, they will be posted on our website. But we’re also kicking off a series of monthly wellness mini-sessions. And the first one is in October. So we hope that you can join us. It’s on October 8th. These are 20-minute sessions that will provide a brief practice. And so each month it’ll be a different person from a different county or district or partnering agency that will guide us through a practice. And then we’ll also share a little bit about how you might be able to implement these short useful practices in your own setting. So please register for those. October 8th and the 12th are the next two coming up.
We also have another offering that we’re very excited about. These are all at no cost. This is a peer network for districts on participatory data use practices to improve school climate, connectedness, safety at school, and you can apply now, the application is open and we will be closing those on October 15th. So there’s just a couple of questions if your district is interested in participating.
You could learn more about all of this information on our website. It’s also on the Padlet link that we provided. You can use your phone to scan that QR code, and we hope that you’ll sign up to get alerts so that you are aware of upcoming sessions that we’re hosting as part of the Stronger Connections Technical Assistance Center.
And we want to thank you. You have our email where you could reach out to us at [email protected]. And again, we want to thank Tim, Larry and our student presenters and everyone who attended this afternoon for our session. And have a great rest of your day. Thank you.