As we enter October, I want to highlight our mental health service delivery model at ASCEND K-8, one of our Education for Change charter partner schools in Oakland, California. Our clinical team at ASCEND is in the exciting process of expanding their reach by providing short term therapy for students that the school has historically struggled to serve. These are students who do not meet the strict eligibility criteria of our two primary funders: MediCal and Special Education (Educationally Related Mental Health Services, also referred to as ERMHS). This shift in service was inspired by the shared vision of Principal Lindzey Tassano and our clinical team who are all committed to increasing equity and accessibility of services for all students and families. When describing the vision for creating this service and the clinical team’s contributions, Principal Tassano shared:

This current level of collaboration reflects All-In’s long history with ASCEND, where we have partnered over the last several years to build out a coordinated system of tiered academic, behavioral and social emotional supports. ASCEND was part of a pilot set of schools that integrated the Unconditional Education Coach role, which provided the opportunity to implement clear structures for assessing and improving schoolwide culture and climate year over year. Intentional capacity building efforts have allowed ASCEND to take on the special education, behavioral and culture and climate services in-house, while Seneca continues to partner to provide clinical supports via county mental health and special education contracts. Our current Seneca team consists of three full-time clinicians who strive to provide a broad array of tiered social emotional supports, which, on top of traditional individual and family therapy, includes: regularly contributing to structured collaboration time with teachers, participating on the Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) team, partnering with the administrative team to develop intervention plans, participating in school wide efforts such as Intersession (a week where students have experiential offsite learning), providing Trauma Informed Education training, and supporting ASCEND’s desire to establish a stronger culture around receiving and providing direct feedback. 

This level of integration has not always been easy for our staff and has required communication and collaboration with the administrative team around staff capacity and boundaries. As we fine-tune the process for providing short term therapy this level of collaboration will continue, ensuring that Seneca staff have the opportunity to co-construct the process for services delivery with their capacity in mind. Overall, it is great to see our clinical team valued as members of the ASCEND community and we look forward to continuing to evolve in our partnership to provide the most responsive supports for this school community.

​Name: Adrianna Delacruz
Position: Bilingual Clinical Intervention Specialist
What led you to your current position? The desire to work in this field was a direct result of my upbringing and experiences in life. While in foster care, I met so many loving and devoted people who were there to help me; their titles ranged from my foster mom, psychiatrists, social workers, case managers, and therapists. Each one made an overwhelmingly positive impact on my life. The footprints imprinted on my heart instilled an intense admiration and respect for the clinical work in community mental health.
What inspires you to do this work? Life was rough growing up, I endured many traumatic experiences at a very young age that led to childhood and adolescence colored by survival and coping. I ended up in the foster care system for a few years and my clinical team paved the way for healing the trauma that was left unaddressed and unhealed from my early days. Over the years, I have experienced the powerful and transformative impacts of therapy, giving me a second chance at life despite early adverse beginnings. My driving purpose of this work is to provide a safe healing space and support my clients and their families through their healing process.
What is a recent highlight you’ve experienced in the work or an important lesson you’ve learned in this role? In my journey to becoming a clinical therapist I have grown through my own empathy, resilience and acceptance.
Share your life motto: "Every day is a fresh start."

In this week’s post, I’d like to highlight our continued partnership with Alliance Renee & Meyer Luskin Academy. Luskin Academy opened in 2012, and currently serves 488 students for grades 9th – 12th in Los Angeles’ Hyde Park neighborhood. It is one of 25 middle and high schools that make up Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, a network of Los Angeles charter schools serving communities that have historically faced systemic oppression, marginalization, and—as a result—were underperforming schools.
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Seneca began this partnership with Luskin last school year after Alliance came to tour our Bay Area programs in early 2019. Alliance’s home office team connected us to Luskin’s principal, who had led his previous school to implement a full inclusion special education model—and it became quickly apparent how aligned his vision was to the goals of the UE model. Toward this end, Luskin had recently “staffed up” a robust and experienced student support team of deans, counselors, and special education leads, and our central partnership goal was to figure out the best ways to coordinate and collaborate efforts across these teams.

Through the support of grants from Los Angeles Unified School District, our own Geoff Nuñez is now serving his second year at Luskin as a Behavior Interventions Coach. After supporting multiple Alliance schools last year, we were lucky to establish Geoff full-time at Luskin this school year. His expanded role now includes:

• Individual Staff Coaching on (virtual) classroom management, individualized student support, and staff professional development goals.
• Monthly School-Wide Professional Development, ranging from UE’s Foundations Series to more tailored PDs, including over 10 hours provided during Luskin’s back to school orientation week.
• Supporting the Counseling, Deans, and Special Education Teams through weekly meetings to develop school-wide behavioral and social-emotional supports.
• Facilitating Collaborative Student Support Team Meetings for students receiving support from multiple teams.

In his second year, Geoff has become an integral part of the Luskin team, and has led many of the school-wide discussions on school culture and community-building as staff grapple with the challenges of distanced learning. As Luskin’s leadership team leads monthly professional development on anti-racist educational practices—working primarily from Mica Pollock’s Everyday Antiracism—we are collaborating to find overlap and more opportunities to integrate this stance with Geoff’s monthly PDs, in an effort to truly make antiracism a part of our everyday work as educators.

This is one of the first and most common questions I receive as an occupational therapist. Generally speaking, occupational therapy is a healthcare service which helps people participate functionally in the occupations or activities that are necessary or meaningful to their life. Depending on the setting or the client, those meaningful occupations can vary. For children and adolescents, one of their primary occupations is being a student.

Occupational therapists adapt activities and create modifications to provide a “just right challenge” for students. This allows the student to feel successful in their schoolwork and activities while simultaneously continuing to build their skillsets.

In distance learning, we continue to do just that! Instead of using sensory tools at school to self-regulate, we are building a “tool-box” of sensory items at home (i.e. blankets, squishy balls, play doh, etc.). Instead of practicing copying sentences from a real whiteboard, we are practicing copying sentences from a virtual “Zoom whiteboard.” And instead of promoting socio-emotional skills through peer interactions on the playground, we are playing turn-taking virtual games and role playing how to react and respond to what a peer said over a Zoom. For me, this has been one of the more fun challenges of virtual occupational therapy, finding games that translate easily to Zoom like Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect Four, or “Snakes.”

True, the environment and resources have changed, but the service goal is the same: to help students access their curriculum in spite of any obstacles they face, including and not limited to, a pandemic.