It’s called “The Corner” at McAuliffe Middle School. At Oak Middle School, it’s “The Den.”

These are the names of new campus WellSpace centers established to help Los Alamitos Unified School District middle school students learn skills to improve their social, emotional and mental well-being.

The WellSpaces look more like lounges at a day spa than a public-school classroom and that’s the point. They are intended to offer students a peaceful place to focus on wellness while at school. The repurposed classrooms are furnished with relaxing furniture, filled with serene décor, and packed with activities that are meant to calm and help kids manage stress.

The district’s mental health professionals staff the WellSpaces.

With a teacher’s referral or by request, students can stop by during the school day for a ten to fifteen-minute break and connect with a counselor or psychologist.

Built last school year, the WellSpaces are the first of their kind in Orange County. They were developed through a pilot program with the Orange County Department of Education and Children’s Hospital Orange County.

“This is a way for us to teach students at an early age stress management strategies,” Mayu Iwatani, OCDE’s manager of Mental Health and Wellness Care Coordination said in a June story from OCDE.

The district’s non-profit partner Los Alamitos Education Foundation has also committed $60,000 to the WellSpaces and plans to continue supporting the mental health efforts.

“There is so much work to do for our students’ mental health,” LAEF Executive Director Carrie Logue said in a press release. “Our next step is to partner with the district to build and furnish a Well Space at Los Alamitos High School. We welcome donations from the community to make this space a reality.”

“‘The Corner’ has been a welcome addition to the McAuliffe campus! This space has given our students an opportunity to decompress and address issues around their own mental health,” McAuliffe Principal Dr. Ryan Weiss-Wright wrote in an email message this week. “We are very thankful for the partnership with CHOC, OCDE, and LAEF to make this possible!”

“I really do believe that wellness spaces are going to become a thing that is on every campus for every student,” Oak Principal Erin Kominsky told OCDE.

‘Mental health needs have grown’

Giving kids a space to take a mental rest is just one example of how educators in Los Al Unified and statewide are focusing on students’ mental health. The effort has taken on new importance as kids return to full-time in-person instruction after a year of remote and hybrid learning caused by the pandemic.

“There’s a clear connection between mental health … and academic performance,” Grace Delk, LAUSD’s Director of Special Education and Mental Health, said during a Board of Education workshop in April. Students in psychological distress have difficulty concentrating on schoolwork; children with anxiety or depression have lower grade point averages, she explained.

“Mental health needs have grown,” Delk said in an interview earlier this month noting student referrals for mental health services have been on the rise since before COVID-19. “We have to respond to that.”

The OCDE cites the 2019-20 California Healthy Kids Survey that showed “25 percent of Orange County’s seventh-graders and about 35 percent of 11th-graders said they felt chronically sad or experienced feelings of hopelessness over the previous year, and more than 10 percent reported having suicidal thoughts.”

Things got worse after COVID-19 appeared in early 2020. “It’s almost like the pandemic threw gasoline on embers that were already glowing,” Heather C. Huszti, chief psychologist at CHOC, told The New York Times in a story about the rise of mental health emergencies among kids. “We’ve never seen it this bad.”

In district surveys, LAUSD staff from all campuses rated children’s well-being as a top priority. Among high school staff, 76% of those surveyed indicated their primary concern for parents for the 2021-22 school year was supporting their child’s mental health and well-being.

For LAUSD Board of Education President Marlys Davidson, along with her fellow trustees, improving mental health services ranks high on their list of District Priority Goals.

In an interview last month, Davidson reflected on her many years teaching middle school in the district. Many of her students were thriving but she also noticed a competitive environment where students seemed defined by their outward success.

“It was all about labels and numbers and positions,” Davidson said. She shared the story of one former student who is now training to become an emergency physician. He told her he never had one moment of fun in high school. A few of Davidson’s students had more tragic stories, losing their lives to drug abuse and mental illness.

“We’re not allowing kids to be vulnerable,” Davidson said. “It’s taking away their ability to develop as a human being.”

Davidson said the district is working to focus on the “whole child” in its future efforts.

LAUSD’s Focus on Mental Health

When it comes to mental health, that effort includes hiring more mental health professionals, implementing new curriculum and being more proactive about addressing students’ well-being issues earlier.

This year, LAUSD approved $320,000 in funding to increase its mental health staff to five full-time positions, including licensed clinical social workers. That’s in addition to the district’s nine school counselors and nine school psychologists.

The hope is the increased staffing can help in a more targeted effort to support students at the prevention level.

Delk said that LAUSD is also taking proactive measures to infuse wellness into classrooms giving teachers tools to talk about mindfulness, growth mindset and wellness. That includes using new specialized social emotional curriculum such as Second Step in elementary schools and Base Education at the middle schools.

Another layer in the mental health effort is Securely, a program that monitors LAUSD students’ web browsing. A student searching for something unsafe or potentially harmful triggers an alert that is immediately sent to LAUSD officials. Examples include a search for running away or something more severe like suicidal thoughts. In some instances, local law enforcement has been called in, according to LAUSD Supt. Dr. Andrew Pulver.

Los Al Unified also partners with CareSolace, a live 24/7 online concierge service that helps families connect to local mental health programs and counseling services.

While the government released COVID-19 relief money for schools to pay for expanding mental health services, Dr. Pulver said the one-time funding would not be used to pay for the new mental health staffers.

“This can’t be a Band-Aid,” he said in an interview last month. He said the district is fully committed to dedicating money to the expansion of mental health services for the long-term. “The needs aren’t going away.”

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Nearly 18 months into the COVID-19 pandemic and mask rules continue to spark debate.

That was the case at the August 17 Los Alamitos Unified School District Board of Education meeting, the first since the 2021-22 school year started at the district’s nine campuses in Seal Beach, Rossmoor and Los Alamitos.

Speakers took aim at the California Department of Public Health’s universal indoor mask requirement for K-12 schools during the public comment period. The mandate was not on the meeting agenda.

The LAUSD is tasked with enforcing the rule requiring all students and staff to wear masks inside classrooms regardless of their vaccination status. Masks are optional outdoors. The district welcomed students back for full-time in-person instruction this month.

Universal indoor masking is recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics as an important measure to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in classrooms.

While some parents agree with the mandate, others continue to push to get rid of masks, or at least make them optional for students. They argue young children are at lower risk of serious complications from coronavirus and worry students’ mental health could suffer by wearing masks in class all day.

That includes LAUSD father Jerry McMillan, one of the 20 total speakers at last Tuesday’s Board meeting.
He said he thinks the mask mandate might meet the legal definition of child endangerment and suggested giving teachers forms to report abuse to local law enforcement. “I’m not currently accusing anyone of abusing my children but I will be providing my [children’s] teachers with these same medical reports so they can see what I see,” he said.

McMillan also said the district has more power to lessen the mask rules locally. Last month, Los Al Unified Supt. Dr. Andrew Pulver publicly supported making masks optional while admitting he does not have the authority to do so. That’s the message Pulver got from the Orange County Department of Education and the Orange County Health Care Agency who emphasized school districts must follow the state’s rules.

“I don’t do masks,” a mother of two told the Board, explaining that she thinks masks don’t work, unless it’s a medical grade N95 mask, but she said even those have limits. She said she pulled her kids from McGaugh Elementary and is homeschooling them now because she believes masking children does more harm than good.

“I’m not an anti-masker, an anti-vaxxer and I’m here to advocate for my kids,” father Daniel Brant told board members. He said one of his kids suffers from social anxiety. He suggested creating outdoor learning spaces on LAUSD campuses, especially for the TK-2 graders.

“We can put some outdoor shelters or something so that we can do less time in the classroom with masks on and more time outdoors and come to a compromise so we don’t have to have this divided community. We can work on both sides,” Brant said.

Other speakers showed support for the mask mandate and thanked board members for enforcing it.

“It’s a scary time and I think you’re doing a fabulous job, taking the science and the standards into account and I appreciate that very much,” one woman said.

Los Alamitos High School biology teacher Drew Sells told the Board that of the hundreds of students he sees daily on campus, nearly none have problems wearing a mask.

“When they see me and they see the other people who are standing there who politely ask them to put their mask on, guess what? They put their mask on and they leave them on for the rest of the period,” Sells said.

In an interview following the meeting last Tuesday, Dr. Pulver said that there were no instances of anyone refusing to wear a mask on an LAUSD campus. According to LAUSD’s COVID-19 Safety Plan, students who refuse to mask up could be placed in an alternative learning setting. Pulver said a “very small” number of students were approved for mask exemptions.

As of August 23, Los Al Unified’s dashboard showed a total of 31 current confirmed COVID-19 infections among staff and students.

This month, Dr. Clayton Chau, Orange County’s top public health official said if the mask mandate is not enforced at schools, COVID-19 cases will rise. The Delta variant continues to dominate, infecting unvaccinated people at a much higher rate than inoculated people.

According to the Orange County Health Care Agency, as of August 14, the 7-day case rate for unvaccinated people was 43.8 per 100,000. For the fully vaccinated, it was 7.8. Kids 12 and younger are still ineligible for a COVID-19 vaccine.

CDPH says it will decide whether to update the mask rules no later than November 1. Last week, the California Supreme Court denied the Orange County Board of Education’s petition seeking to overturn the mask mandate. A lawsuit launched by the parent group “Let Them Breathe” is still pending, according to its website.

‘The Community isn’t just one voice’

While there were some groans, laughter and applause in the audience during public comment, last Tuesday’s Board meeting remained under control.

In her comments toward the meeting’s end, trustee Diana Hill explained that the Board is not able to get into a dialogue about items that are not on the agenda but she wanted the public to know that trustees are always listening.

“I think sometimes it’s hard for people that are so passionate about whatever position they are taking to realize that there’s probably an equal amount of people that are equally passionate about perhaps the other side. And we as Board members hear all of that,” Hill said explaining that they also get emails and encounter people in the community.

“Our job is to represent the community and the community isn’t just one voice,” Hill said emphasizing that means not involving politics in her nonpartisan position and even putting aside her personal beliefs.

“Believe, please believe, please trust that we are looking to be better tomorrow than we were today. That we will take in all that information and do the very best we can for all of our students,” Hill said.

In Other Board Meeting News:

• Los Alamitos High School senior and new Student Board Representative Will Brandenberger gave his first report. Cheered on by his fellow ASB members in the audience, Will shared stories of Griffins returning to campus for a full school day. “I’ll be the first to say, it was weird to eat lunch at school for the first time in two years but that went away quickly for many as everyone was reminded of the good times they had sitting with their friends,” he said.
• The Board recognized the new leadership team at Los Alamitos High School. Principal Christiana Kraus, in her first year in the position, praised new Assistant Principal Cara Vienna and new Assistant Principal Eddie Courtemarche.
• The Board approved a new contract for $14,200 with Danielle Nava Consulting to continue her work with LAUSD’s Human Relations Advisory Council. She was first hired in late 2018 to serve as the facilitator for what was then called the Human Relations Task Force. Around six speakers during public comment spoke in support of her work with the district. At least three others were critical.

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