Learning to Support Student Success through a Whole Family Approach

Over the past decades, SCOE has developed and aligned various programs to ensure all students receive the education and healthcare they need to thrive. One such program is called Community Connect, which provides mental health support to students and families through their local school. Yet, the benefits of Community Connect extend beyond the Pre-K through high school students and families it serves. Our Youth Research feature centers the experiences of the graduate students who complete their clinical training in the Community Connect program. Guided by Clinical Director, Jeannie Jacobs, Danielle Wulfestieg, a current graduate student trainee and Traci Allen, a recent graduate and current Associate Marriage and Family Therapist, discuss their work with SCOE students and families and the value it has added to their training.

In addition to its direct impact on student well-being, Community Connect acts as a vital pipeline for fostering a new generation of mental health professionals well-versed in the unique dynamics of school-based services. By engaging students and newly licensed clinicians in delivering care within community schools, the program not only provides essential services but also serves as a critical sustainability strategy. These placements allow emerging professionals to gain firsthand experience and understanding of the specific needs and challenges faced by students and their families, thereby ensuring a continual renewal of the workforce equipped to support the integrated services and supports framework essential for thriving community schools.

Jeannie Jacobs: I’m Jeannie Jacobs. I’m a licensed clinical social worker and I am the Clinical Director. The Office of Ed (Shasta County Office of Education, SCOE) got a small grant to do something around mental health in young children. If you’re going to help children, you have to include their adults. Around early 2000, we started the Bridges Program. What we did was, we are still doing it, it’s called the Bridges 8 Week Model. Danielle does it, Traci’s done it.

Traci Allen: Traci Allen, an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist.

Danielle Wulfestieg: Danielle Wulfestieg. So, I am a trainee right now, so I’m just finishing up grad school, and so I’m doing my practicum through Bridges.

Jeannie Jacobs: It’s a program where we do, we intervene, we include the teacher, consult with the teacher, observe in the classroom. We do assessments and home visits with the parents. We put that together to make a plan. If there’s other community providers, we pull them in. We case that for eight or so weeks. We meet again and get our post data and what we find is that 40% of the kids that are currently in that program don’t need more than that. The ones that do, we have added additional evidence based things as we’ve grown.

“What are the most important lessons you’ve learned about improving schools in the community?”

Jeannie Jacobs: I think schools have kind of drifted towards a siege mentality. “Okay, we’re just gonna, we got the kid and we’re gonna do everything we can and those pesky parents are kind of just trouble.” That just makes every child with an issue worse. So just working to develop those relationships because we’re consultants to them when we’re therapists, we’re not…parents too, really, we don’t have power. We don’t get to say, “Teacher, you must do this,” because you’re not doing that. All we have is relationship.

“What can it look like when a child is in need of mental health professionals?”

Jeannie Jacobs: It could be behavioral issues, it often is, because those are the kinds of problems that really bother teachers and parents. But it’s, they also develop, even from a very early age, diagnosable things: depression, anxiety. And in this county we have a really high, one of the highest rates of trauma in the state in fact. 

We work intensively with them and they can refer through our community connect program and then they have access to a variety of services in the community and in house.

“Could you talk about the Community Connect Program?”

Jeannie Jacobs: I would love to, I’m so proud of it. Community schools, first that we work with: all of them have a Community Connector that is associated with their school to connect kids and parents to services they need. Our focuses are, for all of our programs, are kids in our schools that are either homeless, struggling with homelessness, who are struggling with attendance, or who have behavioral issues. The Community Connect program that Traci’s in also serves the rest of the schools in the county.

Traci Allen: The referral came in for two middle school kiddos, and both of them were for attendance, so they hadn’t been attending school in quite some time. We just found out that there was so much more than meets the eye and mom had recently left, dad’s car had broken down, and that led to him losing his job. What we were able to do was help connect dad to CalWORKs, which helped him get stable income then he was able to get his car and take the kids to and from school.

Danielle Wulfestieg: I established a relationship with the mom, went in and observed in the classroom, talked with the teacher, found out what was going on with this kiddo. The kiddo’s blowing out in the classroom. And we come up with a plan, and usually about three or four points of things that the teacher can do differently in the classroom, parents can do at home. And so then I also started doing counseling with the mom, and she has a lot of her own trauma. We meet once a week. This is, it’s been really meaningful to me to be able to be part of it and give back.

Jeannie Jacobs: The one person you don’t need in the therapy room to be effective with a kid-presenting problem is the kid. Too often everyone’s kind of (makes noises) you know, I think it’s because we have high trauma and there’s a lot of disregulated people. So it just makes accessing services, the limited services we do have, even harder. It’s heartbreaking. We have, we all have really heartbreaking stories. Most often, I think, is multi generational trauma. We’re able to treat that adult. The family Danielle was talking about, that kid was going to be another generation of trauma if mom didn’t have her trauma treated.