School Culture & Partnerships
Fostering Healthy Spaces for Learning
School Culture & Partnerships
The School Culture & Partnerships division specializes in improving campus safety and culture and includes SCOE’s Behavioral Health & Well-Being department. A growing body of research, both nationally and at SCOE, shows the most successful schools engage with school families, have clear and consistent policies for student safety and discipline, and prioritize students’ mental health and sense of belonging. The division also works to expand high school students’ access to early college credit and career technical education (CTE) programs.
Taking the Pulse of a School
YouthTruth Surveys Help Guide Improvements
Each year, SCOE helps nearly all of Sonoma County’s public school districts survey students, families, and staff about how they are experiencing school. The results of these anonymous surveys, conducted in partnership with nonprofit YouthTruth, are used to help formulate state-mandated educational plans and make other improvements at campuses. This January, nearly 60,000 people representing 143 schools completed the surveys. School Culture & Partnerships supports implementation of the survey and follows up with districts and schools to help evaluate and take action around their data. In 2023-24, the team analyzed data and conducted follow-up interviews to help identify best practices at Sonoma County high schools with the highest reported rates of belonging and perceptions of safety.
Learn more about YouthTruth
Creating Expectations of Safety
How Clear Procedures Can Improve Campus Culture
Every school in Sonoma County has a detailed campus safety plan, and school officials work closely with law enforcement and first responders. But with dozens of school districts and responding agencies, procedures and terminology can vary significantly. That can create confusion for students, staff, and families during a crisis when clarity, understanding, and attention to proper procedure is paramount. To help provide clarity and predictability during emergencies, the School Culture & Partnerships team has worked to standardize the Essential Five at schools across Sonoma County. This framework, adapted from a successful initiative in San Mateo County, recognizes five types of campus emergency responses and outlines the situations in which they are to be used.
Supporting School Communities’ Well-Being
Crisis Response and Infrastructure-Building Culture
The Behavioral Health & Well-Being department strives to improve the mental health, well-being, and educational outcomes for our region’s students and school staff. It provides direct counseling and intervention services and works to build capacity regionally by improving coordination among providers and improving access to funding streams for mental health care. The department employs mental health clinicians who can quickly deploy to schools in a crisis, and oversees a team of mental health interns who assist districts.
Building Our Mental Health Capacity
Bringing Together Providers and Identifying Funding
Sonoma County is home to an array of agencies, nonprofits, and health providers who work to meet our region’s complex mental health needs. SCOE plays a valuable role in bringing together members of this diverse coalition. At regular meetings that began this school year, they share strategies, coordinate support, and increase access to mental health services both at schools and within our wider community.
The Behavioral Health & Well-Being team works to train school staff and community members on how to identify the warning signs of suicide and intervene to connect people in crisis to mental health supports. It also operates a non-crisis, bilingual hotline and creates resources for helping families find care and navigate therapy referrals. It offers several countywide collaboratives aimed at increasing the capacity and knowledge of school staff in a variety of roles, from mental health counselors to classified staff.
State and federal funding of mental health in schools often arrives as a one-time infusion of money or a grant connected to a specific event or program. For example, Sonoma County schools received extra funding to attend to student mental health in the wake of federal disaster wildfires and the
COVID-19 pandemic. With many of those funds having expired or set to expire, the Behavioral Health & Well-Being team has helped identify and secure additional funding so that critical programs that students have come to rely on can endure. That work includes identifying and working to secure additional grant-based funding. To help create sustainable funding streams, the department also is building expertise and training school officials how to bill insurers for mental health support provided at school.
Improving Belonging with Welcoming Schools
Strategies for interrupting bias-based bullying
Students and families often request that adults at schools do more to stop bias-based bullying. And Sonoma County school staffs are on the same page, frequently asking for strategies and tools they can use to interrupt incidents of discrimination. Research has shown that students who are bullied as well as their bullies typically have lower academic achievement in school, underscoring the importance of direct intervention. In response, SCOE has partnered with the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Welcoming Schools program.
Welcoming Schools supports LGBTQ+ students and families and is the most comprehensive program aimed at preventing bias-based bullying in the nation. LGBTQ+ students are among the most frequent targets of such bullying and report high rates of related mental health challenges, including suicidal ideation. Although the training is focused on discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation, many of its strategies can be used to shut down bullying fueled by racism or other factors.
SCOE began to roll out Welcoming Schools in 2023-24 by training a cohort of trainers at SCOE and in Sonoma County districts. This school year, more than 1,200 administrators, teachers, and classified staff including maintenance workers and bus drivers are receiving training. Each two-hour module is designed to give school employees easy-to-implement strategies they can begin employing the very next day. Staff are encouraged to identify steps they are already taking, actions they can start implementing immediately, measures they can take soon but with some planning, and bigger, longer- term goals that will require a higher level of support
“Saying nothing has an impact.”
– school employee on the importance of speaking up in response to
bias-based speech