Building on the success of two prior cohorts of Project Cal-Well, the California Department of Education (CDE), in partnership with the Department of Healthcare Services, Stanislaus County Office of Education (COE), and Santa Cruz COE, proposes to serve 23,117 students in 37 schools from seven school districts annually. This expansion of the Project Cal-Well model will target school districts from both the Central Coast and Central Valley of California and serve a range of student mental health needs related to poverty, ethnic minority status, and experiences of community trauma after a natural disaster. Project Cal-Well is intended to expand access to mental health services for students through leveraging and aligning existing mental health investments and resources to improve student mental health outcomes, promote resiliency, reduce risk of suicide, and create a sustainable infrastructure.
Project Cal-Well will utilize a comprehensive three-tier public health model of evidence-based interventions that are developmentally appropriate and culturally competent in expanding school and community based mental health services. The first goal of the project is to provide a comprehensive mental health awareness program targeting youth, families, and school staff that creates a de-stigmatized school climate that is conducive to addressing the mental health needs of students. This will be done by implementing suicide awareness and prevention policies; training students in suicide awareness and prevention; training school staff in how to recognize and referring students in need to appropriate services; developing school safety and violence prevention programs; and establishing multi-disciplinary risk assessment teams. The second goal is to increase access to and availability of sustainable culturally competent and developmentally appropriate school-based mental health programs to screen and provide early intervention for youth at-risk for development of mental health or substance use disorders. This will be done by developing partnerships to expand access to services; developing processes to screen and identify youth in need of services; and providing brief intervention services. The third goal is to build partnerships and cross-system collaborations to increase and improve access to tertiary intervention and behavioral health treatment for youth with mental health and substance use needs. This will be done by partnering with community-based organizations to serve as referral sources; refining systems to ensure that youth that receive necessary services; and developing crisis response protocols.
Project Cal-Well is leveraging the $4.7 billion unprecedented commitments from California on transformational system change to support the behavioral health of children and youth under the Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative. While many school districts in California benefited from new mental health resources, many are temporary and fragmented. It is the intent of Project Cal-Well to leverage existing and new mental health resources under the three-tier public health model, align them to districts' goals, and sustained them through untapped Medi-Cal funds. As the state lead, the CDE will support the COEs and districts in implementing school-based mental health interventions through technical assistance. Partnering with an experienced university-level evaluator will allow Project Cal-Well to collect robust data to document lessons learned and to disseminate best practices through briefs and webinars to share with other districts throughout the state.