Name: Melissa "Mickey" Gant
Position: Milieu Supervisor
What led you to your current position? o This position honestly kind of just fell into my lap at the right time. For so long I didn’t really have a plan for my career but knew that I needed to at least gain some work experience – and that was the mindset that I had. I worked as an MHC at the elementary level and after a year I started floating to other sites within my program with older age groups.  Still wanting to gain some experience and explore different environments to work in with youth, I started taking shifts at some of the NPS’s, Willow Rock & the Petaluma Compass program and was able to gain a lot of knowledge.  I think the missing piece for me was feeling comfortable, confident, and capable in holding a leadership position.  I really took advantage of my supervisions and voiced my personal development goals, as well as had the support of the MHCs and the clinician at my school site to strive for more.  So with everyone’s feedback, I participated in the Lead-In series, began the process to become an Equilibrium & Suicide and Prevention Trainer, as well as now holding a spot on the Leadership Council. In the short answer, I just continuously wanted to become a better “counselor”. I was determined to not be stagnant within my position, so I took advantage of all of the available opportunities for personal and professional growth.
What inspires you to do this work? o I think about my younger self and the friends I grew up with and how much we all could have benefited from extra support and love from adults. So my hope is to help the kids out there, the way that I would have wanted to be helped. I know there’s so much un-tapped potential in our youth, and just helping them discover that is what motivates me.
What is a recent highlight you’ve experienced in the work or an important lesson you’ve learned in this role? o An important lesson that I’ve learned in this role is that time management is key.  I think I get so caught up in this work that I forget to enjoy time when I’m off. So I’m currently learning how to spoil myself more often.
Share your life motto or something unique about yourself: o Not really a life motto, but my favorite quote that pushes me daily: “Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of, who do the things that no one can imagine.”​

As I sit down to write this, I glance out my window at the sunlight as it trickles through the neighboring trees of Community Day School, one of the schools set to be closed in Oakland by the end of this school year. Surrounded by trees in the Oakland hills, CDS is a small alternative education campus for students that have been expelled from their general education campuses. CDS provides space for restoration, repair, and deep relationships for students that have recently been rejected from their home schools. Because of the small class sizes and intensive therapeutic and behavioral support here, CDS creates an environment where students often feel free to be seen, heard, and vulnerable in a way that isn't always possible in a larger school context.

Over the past few weeks, the Oakland community has been catalyzed into action, as students and families caught news that the Oakland school board would vote to close a handful of majority Black and brown schools, including Community Day, at the end of the 2021-2022 school year. This news came after OUSD passed the Reparations for Black Students Resolution last year. Part of this resolution included protecting and investing in historically Black schools and involving an equity impact analysis of any proposed school closures. The board continued to go ahead with this vote to close schools despite not completing an equity impact analysis, and despite thousands of students and parents opposing these closures. Many of these students delivered powerful testimonies against these closures at the school board meetings, including a 13-year-old from Bret Harte Middle School:

This was just one of hundreds of testimonies, pleading with the school board to change their votes and instead discuss community-based solutions to their budget deficit. While the school board went ahead with their vote to close two schools at the end of this year, and five schools at the end of next year, the community has not let up in fighting back. 

Four members of Oakland City Council have introduced a resolution that recently passed through city council and would eliminate OUSD’s remaining debt. Students and teachers have planned walk outs, marches, and recall campaigns of the school board members who have voted for these closures. The fight to keep schools like CDS open is far from over, and the community is calling on folks to get involved in the campaign for the long haul.
 
For up-to-date information on how to take action and get involved in this fight, follow @rep4blackstudents on Instagram!

​There are some exciting changes happening in California’s Medi-Cal system of care! The initiative, California Advancing and​ Innovating Medi-Cal (CalAIM) represents “a long-term commitment to transform and strengthen Medi-Cal, offering Californians a more equitable, coordinated​, and person-centered approach to maximizing their health and life trajectory.” CalAIM lifts up prevention, wellness and person-centered care. 

​For Seneca’s school partnership programs, this is really moving.  Much of our work is funded through Medi-Cal, but the eligibility criteria for Medi-Cal services can be quite restrictive and has made it harder for us to establish truly sustainable early intervention and prevention services.  Such prevention services usually require a separate funding source, which can be hard to count on year after year. With these groundbreaking CalAIM policies, we see the possibility of serving more youth earlier, intervening at a time that is often the most effective, before a crisis. We also will be able to serve many youths who have experienced trauma without ever having to label them with a diagnosis. It’s truly a paradigm shift!  ​

Advancing Equity
CalAIM is about building a healthier and more equitable state, with an emphasis on “whole person care” and looking at social drivers of health. From the DCHS website, the message is clear:

“Black and Latino Californians have long faced health disparities that are the result of longstanding, structural racism in the health care system, housing, and employment. The pandemic exacerbated these inequities and underscored the need for CalAIM’s investment in Community Supports, and home and community-based services, including interventions that address social drivers of health. These lessons learned are at the heart of the CalAIM system transformation.​”

The social justice tenets of these policies are more than just words on a website; we’ve already been able to expand our services to work with new clients more quickly.  As counties build out their systems to support these changes, we expect to see increasingly flexible and expansive opportunities to serve youth in ways they need and want to be served. 
 
Riding the Waves of Change
The direction that California is going fills me with so much hope.  It’s not often we find ourselves announcing that access to services might actually be getting easier. This is truly something to celebrate! As we adapt these big ideas into our practice, there will undoubtedly be a period of uncertainty. So far, it seems clear that the ultimate payoff for our clients and practitioners will be absolutely worth it.  ​

​You can read more about the CalAIM policies at the DHCS website by clicking here!  
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Or, see below to watch this short video:

​After nearly 2 years of working tirelessly to stay in community with each other behind screens and over the phone (which our team and students did an AMAZING job of), our Berkeley High School Counseling Enriched Classroom (CEC) program is finally finding some normalcy by connecting in person through a variety of group activities!