Seeking mental health care can seem daunting at any age. For the students of Tracy Unified School District, a new wellness center hopes to make the process easier with services that could extend to the whole family.
The TUSD Student Wellness Center opened in October on Grant Line Road in Tracy, providing counseling and therapy to all students at no cost. This March it expanded its hours to five days a week with future plans to offer more comprehensive health and medical services.
The center is a partnership between the Tracy schools and Community Medical Centers, a federally qualified nonprofit health provider in San Joaquin County which works largely with Medi-Cal clients. For the last five years CMS and the district have partnered to provide on-site counseling at Tracy schools.
Tracy Unified is not the first to open a wellness center with behavioral health services in the Central Valley. Golden Valley Health Centers, a federally qualified health provider that operates in Stanislaus and Merced counties, has school-based health centers at sites in Modesto, Patterson, Riverbank and Empire.
Michelle Coble, CMC director of behavioral health, said creating a student wellness center for mental health services took on even more importance after the pandemic. A CDC survey in 2021 found that more than a third (37%) of high school students experienced “poor mental health” during the COVID-19 pandemic with 44% saying they “persistently felt sad or hopeless during the past year.”
“With COVID and changing from in-person to remote and coming back to in-person we’ve seen a different set of concerns,” Coble said. “We’ve seen a lot of grief and loss, a lot of family members passing from COVID. A lot of transition. Kids coming back and maybe missed kindergarten and so we’ve worked on a lot of social skills. We’re dealing with a lot of changes in the lives of these kiddos.”
Following a nationwide movement
The opening of Tracy’s wellness center follows a national movement of schools building health centers on campus to support students by using wraparound services. Studies have shown these kinds of programs improve health equity disparities for low-income and families of color by breaking down barriers to care. That includes seeing better attendance rates and less absenteeism.
San Joaquin County, where Tracy Unified is located, has about a 42% Medi-Cal coverage rate. Neighboring Valley counties Stanislaus and Merced have even higher rates, at 49% and 54% respectively, according to California Department of Health Care Services Medi-Cal eligibility numbers from October 2023. About 60% of Tracy Unified students are low-income.
The Tracy’s Student Wellness Center launched last fall with services only one day a week and has gradually expanded. In March it started offering services from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday and 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday. The center will also be open during the summer when school is out.
Issues that students face
The center is on an unused former district school site and is run by front desk staff and associate social worker Jasmin Arenal, who has handled all of its cases since it opened.
The building has one clinical office where Arenal works, but all of her appointments so far are through telehealth. Students can be referred to the center by the school, parents or CMC staff or even self-refer. Currently only individual therapy is available, but Coble said they hope to expand into on-site group therapy as well.
Arenal sees students from kindergarten through high school. Many of her clients are in the lower grades, she said. The pandemic fallout continues to be an issue among the students she sees, particularly around socialization.
“There’s a lot of anxiety, whether it’s about their families or their friends,” she said. “They’re also dealing sometimes with multiple households if there’s a split family dynamic. Or sometimes it’s from kids interacting with other kids or other classmates like with bullying.”
The services are free of charge to students. CMC staff can help students enroll in Medi-Cal if they are eligible or work with private insurance, Coble said. The center is being funded through a grant from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration.
Rising demand for mental health services
For Tracy Unified officials, the partnership with CMC has filled a need for more behavioral health services that has only grown since the pandemic.
Tracy Unified Coordinator of Prevention Services Samia Basravi, who is also the district homeless and foster youth liaison, said mental health caseloads at the schools are “very extensive.” Demand has at least doubled since students came back from the pandemic.
Having the wellness center also allows for more follow-up and case management with students who need care, Basravi said. Unlike school-site specific centers, the CMS site is open to any students in the district.
Next year, the district and CMC hope to expand the center’s offerings to extend to parents and families of students. Coble said they also hope to incorporate medical and dental services, including things like immunizations and physicals.
Coble said eventually they’d like to be able to provide walk-in services on site. The building has additional unused space that the program can grow into. The site also has several other buildings that CMC officials would love to use to create a comprehensive mental health and medical center for students and their families.
“My dream would be to continue to expand there,” Coble said. “There’s been a lot of initial excitement, but we’re also concerned we’re not getting the users who would benefit the most from it. We sent things home, but things often get lost in kids’ backpacks. But we’ve gotten feedback (from those who are using the services) that we’re able to bring children in feeling very cared about who are able to access services that weren’t available before.”
Marijke Rowland is the senior health equity reporter for the Central Valley Journalism Collaborative, a nonprofit newsroom based in Merced, in collaboration with the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF).
