School Counselor Role

Learn More About Schools as Centers of Wellness

What is Schools as Centers Of Wellness?

Schools as Centers of Wellness is a groundbreaking tool developed by the Sacramento County Office of Education to accelerate the onboarding of County Offices of Education (COEs), school districts, and individual schools in transforming the approach to mental health and well-being in education.

This innovative model empowers COEs, districts, and schools to establish full clinical teams on campus in a financially sustainable way, through strategic partnerships with their local Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), enabling access to Medicaid funding.

By bringing a full team of mental health professionals into each school, we are creating a new culture around mental health. No longer do students need to be in crisis to receive the mental health support they need. This approach acknowledges that everyone can benefit from mental health support,and emphasizes the importance of accessing these services before a crisis occurs.

We Are Reframing Mental Health

Our vision is to create a statewide movement to transform California schools into Centers of Wellness using sustainable funding models built upon deep and enduring partnerships with health systems.

It’s All About Relationships

The presence of at least one caring adult in the life of a young person can be the difference in how a young person successfully navigates significant adversity (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2015).

It is essential to build a trusting relationship and a secure environment within which students feel free to express themselves, explore their thought processes, and identify goals, as well as barriers to achieving those goals.

DEVELOPMENT

It’s All About Relationships

In the work of building trusting relationships in schools, we know that the essential components are:

Empathy
The first critical component to building trust is the ability to convey empathy.

  • Empathy, as defined by Heinz Kohut is “a fundamental mode of human relatedness, the recognition of the self in the other; it is the accepting, confirming and understanding human echo” (Kohut, 1978; p. 704-705). Human echo; in other words, the ability to adequately and accurately identify, and reflect back to the other, that which the other is feeling. In a clinical relationship, empathy allows the client to feel seen and heard, as well as validated. Further, empathy is the first step towards forming a trusting relationship, or the therapeutic alliance.

  • The means by which teachers convey this unconditional positive regard is through empathic communication. However, there must be sufficient self-awareness on the part of the teacher to determine how effectively he or she is communicating positive regard and empathy. The teacher must be able to see what is going on with the students, but also what role he or she is playing in what is happening to the students.

Unconditional Positive Regard
Unconditional positive regard, or respect for the “dignity and worth of the person” as indicated in the Social Work Code of Ethics, is central to the practice of a helping profession (2008).

Continuity
Within the context of the therapeutic alliance, continuity refers to the ability of the clinician to maintain objectivity and consistency.

  • The clinician must have some ability to be objective while also empathically communicating to the client. This is what provides the final component of the helping relationship, continuity. The clinician must be objective to be able to notice patterns, as well as accurately and adequately reflect what students are experiencing; all while maintaining consistency. This all adds up to an ability to foster continuity.

Collective Impact Model

The collective impact model is a network of community members, organizations, and institutions who advance equity by learning together, aligning, and integrating actions to achieve population and systems-level change. This definition identifies equity as the North Star for why and how collective impact work takes place, specifically names community members as key actors along with other stakeholders, and emphasizes the importance of systems change in this work. All five segments (leaves) together contribute to creating school-based mental health and wellness.

Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS)

California's Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) is a comprehensive framework that aligns academic, behavioral, social and emotional learning, and mental health supports in a fully integrated system for the benefit of all students. MTSS offers the potential to create needed systemic change through intentional design and redesign of services and supports to quickly identify and match to the needs of all students.

The MTSS Framework includes domains and features. The needs of the WHOLE child are met when all domains and features are effectively implemented.

A Whole Child Approach

Equitable Access to Sustainable Care

All children deserve sustainable school-based mental health and wellness services irrespective of any background. Too often, funding for these services is dependent on grants or one-time dollars. Our model is bridging healthcare and education to utilize reimbursable Medi-Cal dollars for ongoing sustainable mental health services.

We are extending the County’s Federally Qualified Health Center status to school sites, creating satellite centers of the Federally Qualified Health Center. Using Schools as Centers of Wellness, it is possible to generate enough revenue from billable hours to cover all costs.