​Many of our school partners have challenged themselves to push the limits of distance learning for their staff and students. Our partners at Summit K2 and Summit Tamalpais are no different. I am excited to share some of the innovative ways that our staff have collaborated with these Summit schools to implement the vision of Unconditional Education in the virtual world. 

Summit K2 and Summit TAM serve a diverse population of middle and high school students from the West Contra Costa County School District. We have partnered with K2 and TAM since their openings, in 2014 and 2016 respectively, to provide Educationally Related Mental Health Services (ERMHS) and other Special Education supports and consultation. Currently, we have three clinicians providing ERMHS to the K2 and TAM school communities: Hannah Hernandez, Doug Woodson, and Shannah Roston-Cooper. Laura Lin oversees the Summit Partnership and I provide clinical supervision and consultation. The work of an ERMHS provider is usually limited to serving only students on the ERMHS caseloads. Our team has expanded the impact of our role by creatively partnering with Summit to support the needs of their larger school community as well. 

​Since the shelter in place order went into effect in March 2020, our staff have collaborated with Summit leadership and special education teams to come up with ideas to address some of the most pressing issues facing students, families, and staff: equity, empathy, and connection (to the work and to each other). Here are some examples: 

I am appreciative of the strong relationships that we’ve built with our partners at Summit K2 and Summit Tam and of ways that our teams center the voices and experiences of students, families, and the community.

​Some partnerships are built to last. Daniel Webster and Starr King began their Seneca All-In! partnerships back in 2014 under the Investing in Innovations (I3) Grant and began with the full UE model. Our exceptional UE coaches, Laura Lin and Trevor Burns, helped the schools build out their PBIS systems, SEL curriculum, and other elements of school culture and climate. We were able to add mental health services through Medi-Cal and provide tier 3 services to kids and families at each school. 

When the I3 grant came to an end, we were able to maintain our relationships with Daniel Webster and Starr King, and continue the Medi-Cal-funded mental health work. Now, our amazing clinicians, Jill Salak and Mark McKillips, continue this legacy of high-quality socio-emotional supports at our Potrero Hill partner schools.

In addition, we are able to provide consultation around tier 1 systems so that both schools can maintain the beautiful work they did under the I3 grant.

Due to these successes, we were able to add 3 new SFUSD schools to our list of partners this year!

Go, All-In San Francisco!

Seneca launched a new partnership with Malcolm X Academy, an SFUSD elementary school, in the midst of a pandemic; and despite the fact that the team is redefining elementary school for this virtual age, they have also hit the ground running in their MTSS implementation. Here are two examples of how this small but mighty school is taking the tiers online...

Virtual School Store
​With a renewed focus on their Class Dojo system, teachers have been shelling out points to students for showing up to class on time, presenting with the required materials, keeping their camera on and mics muted, and participating in class discussion. In just one week, Malcolm X teachers awarded a whopping 3600 points to students across the school. Wowza! But what do students do with those precious little points anyway, you ask? That's where the new and improved Virtual School Store comes into play. Each week, students select from an updated virtual menu. Using their Dojo points, they can preorder snappy school supplies, fidget tools, and cool Warriors gear. There is a weekly pickup time where kids and families swing by campus to collect their purchases. This also creates an opportunity for in-person connection between families and school staff, and it's all centered around celebrating positive behaviors. Way to go, Malcolm X!

​Strengths-Based Socio-Emotional Screener
Along with a few other schools in the All-In SF family, Malcolm X is part of a small pilot this year. Our Strategic Initiatives Team designed a strengths-based version of our Socio-Emotional Screener adapted for the virtual classroom. Teachers took 15-20 minutes to rate their students across ten strength areas, including positive interactions with peers, positive or stable mood, and developmentally appropriate organizational skills. This data is then aggregated into a fancy Tableau report, which enables the school team to analyze socio-emotional skills across grade levels, individual classrooms, and the entire student body. Starting next week, Malcolm X will engage in the "Classroom SST process." In these meetings, our fabulous UE Coach, Marianne Clark, and the school social worker will meet with each teacher to review their classroom data. From these meetings, teachers can identify themes to be addressed in their socio-emotional learning lessons and identify students to refer to CCT (an SFUSD process that is similar to COST). The data will also be taken to the School Climate Team to identify tier 1 goals and interventions. We cannot wait to see all of the fantastic supports that are put in place as a result of this work.

Unconditional Education is about partnering with schools to create innovative programs that serve high-needs students in effective, inclusive, and individualized ways.  It’s about disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline whereby students are pushed out of “mainstream”/general education spaces and into more restrictive settings, or where students internalize a sense of hopelessness regarding their ability to succeed academically and leave school altogether. It is providing more and more opportunities for students to be integrated into their greater school communities instead of being segregated, “othered,” marginalized, or left behind.  It is working intentionally to undo the biases that drive and perpetuate the enormous gaps in educational opportunities and achievement that exist in our country’s schools across identity groups.

One of my favorite parts of this work is starting new school partnerships where we co-create programs and supports that operationalize those ambitions and intentions.  This year our program is grateful to have that opportunity to co-create with the school leaders and staff of KIPP Bridge Rising in West Oakland.  This is a school community that holds their location with pride, near DeFramery Park (aka Lil Bobby Hutton Memorial Park), where the Black Panther Party so often gathered to organize, innovate, and envision during their era.

Student supports and programs in the fall of 2020 are, of course, unique and distinct from any other chapter of history.  Now more than ever school communities must take a holistic view in supporting students and families.  In our KIPP Bridge Rising partnership, Clinical Intervention Specialist Makalah Fleming-McElroy is emphasizing the importance of considering the hierarchy of needs as we design supports and interventions for students and families.  Across our Bay Area partnerships, we’re committed to expanding the range of our services as much as possible in this uniquely challenging time, to increase vital case management services and resource support to families experiencing food insecurity, housing instability, lack of access to technology, and challenges with other foundational basic needs.  With resonance and respect to the Ten Point Platform of the Black Panther Party (as relevant in 2020 as it was when Huey Newton and Bobby Seale wrote it in 1966), we’re working to braid together the threads of physical, economic, and emotional wellness - all of which are required in order for academic engagement and success to occur.

​Community Day School (CDS) is a small, intimate alternative education campus nestled in the Oakland hills. The usual serene environment, combined with smaller class sizes and a variety of staff supports, help students to focus on achieving individualized behavioral and academic goals, and prepare to be readmitted to general education campuses. This fall has looked a little differently amid the pandemic, and the resulting distance learning platform. Despite the challenges of working remotely, our students and staff have not missed a beat. The staff have found innovative ways to implement our behavioral phase system, including an online store once a month, where eligible students are able to “shop” in a breakout room on Zoom using the points they earn during the school day. The staff then deliver the items to the students and use the time as a chance for a socially distanced check in with the students.

One of the strengths of CDS is the staffs’ ability to create a nurturing environment for our students and engage them in the process of developing a strong sense of community. CDS is the expulsion campus for Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) and students are referred through the Disciplinary Hearing Process (DHP), when they have been expelled from their home school campus.  The ultimate goal for all students is to work on their individualized goals and be readmitted to a mainstream campus. Despite the challenges our students & staff are currently facing, the CDS administration is recommending 6 of the 18 students for readmission this December, with the possibility of that number increasing to 8 students.  This is a huge testament to the dedication of the students & staff to maximize learning potential amid a global pandemic.

​This week, we take the opportunity to highlight our long standing partnership with Cox Academy, a school dedicated to “empowering every student to go out and change the world!”

​Cox Academy is in the Elmhurst neighborhood of East Oakland and serves grades Pre-K - 5th grade by providing rigorous instruction along with critical thinking and problem-solving skills to set the foundation for success in higher educational settings. With a heavy focus on the whole child, Cox has strived to develop a robust multi-tiered system of support and interventions to not only engage students, but their family and ecological systems as well. This is where our partnership thrives!

​Recently, Cox Academy has welcomed their new principal, Omar Currie. Omar joined Cox after a year living abroad in Mexico City, Mexico, and he brings quite a bit of experience teaching and leading in schools from North Carolina, to Washington DC, to the Bay (YAY Area). He is a huge college sports fan, and in his free time he enjoys basketball, reading, and dancing. Omar lives in San Francisco with his partner, Ryan.

Although the world has been forced to shift learning practices and teaching skills online, Team Cox and the entire MTSS Team have collaborated to provide relevant and meaningful ways to do this thing called “Distance Learning.” This impacts so many extraordinary kids, considering special education at Cox is based on a full inclusion model (meaning, students with specific and/or specialized needs spend the majority of their time in general education classroom settings), which ultimately result in secondary benefit in general education classrooms. Through tons of teamwork and collaboration Team Cox has been successful in implemented the following IEP accommodations, which result in supporting the entire classroom:

• Co-hosted zoom classroom (with para support) to provide a virtual co-teaching model
• Visual schedule links for easy access and visual support
• Visual prompts with zoom button images (shared with all team members) for non-verbal cues
• Use of breakout rooms to replicate break spaces (as much as possible) for students to take breaks (structured and unstructured) inside classrooms
• Use of breakout rooms for teacher or para check-in’s
• Use of breakout rooms for movement and space breaks
• Use of breakout rooms to provide incentives, reminders and/or redirections
• They have also been creative in how they provide socializing opportunities for peer to peer interactions and created “Friday Social Block”. Friday social block is a block of time added to all student schedules where each grade level, facilitated by a member of the SSA team, just gets to have fun. They watch videos, socialize about how they are doing, play Kahoot!, and spend time virtually hanging out together.

​Distance Learning at Cox Academy has highlighted the creativity and resilience of the collective MTSS team. ​

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.

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.

Seneca’s All-In! Partnership Program is in its fifth year partnering with Horace Mann Elementary School in Oakland Unified School District. This year has been unique, as we have started the year providing all services virtually. This has presented some challenges, as well as some opportunities, to connect more with parents and caregivers. 

Our partnership with Horace Mann has also grown over the years into a true collaboration. Seneca staff are integrated members of the Coordination of Services Team (COST), and hence collaborate often with teachers and participate in restorative practices with school staff, students, and families. Particularly during remote learning, Shakera has been instrumental in helping her clients and their families to access not only their educational and academic resources, but basic resources as well, such as food provision and internet access. As our work has shifted during the Shelter-In-Place (SIP), we have been reminded that basic needs are an important part of overall wellness, including mental and emotional wellness. 

​We are grateful for our partnership with Horace Mann and are looking forward to our continued collaboration and all the many adventures that lie ahead!

As we know, school and learning has gone through a lot of changes during the time of shelter in place. It is now more important than ever for schools to follow PBIS guidelines and have consistent expectations as well as positive behavior supports for students in their distance learning classrooms.  Under the guidance of their Unconditional Education Coach Tiana Dudley, Montalvin Manor K-8 hasn’t skipped a beat in continuing to directly teach their students the expectations for being in class.  Check out their amazing video by clicking below!

​In addition, Tiana has been able to leverage the school’s online platform to deliver Social Emotional Learning lessons to all grades and classes.  If you have a Seesaw account, you can check out a sample video by clicking on the video below.  If you don’t have one yet, it’s free to sign up!  Register at https://web.seesaw.me/. 

​Lastly, it’s important to remember the value of recognizing positive behaviors. In collaboration with the school’s Culture and Climate team, Tiana has been able to continue with a version of Montalvin’s positive referral system. Staff members proactively shout out students who are showing examples of Montalvin’s Core Values by filling out a google form which school leaders compile into highlights to share with the whole school community via their weekly newsletters and Seesaw notifications!