San Diego Unified School District (District) requests CDC-RFA-DP-24-0139 Component 1 funding to improve the health and wellbeing of our district’s, and the nation’s, youth. The second largest school district in California (CA), it serves 95,678 students, who are 44.8% Hispanic, 24.0% White, 7.2% African American, 14.4% Asian/Filipino, 0.6% Native American/Pacific Islander, and 9.1% Multi Racial/Ethnic. English learners represent 17.5% of District students, and 57.5% qualify for free or reduced lunches. With this funding the District will decrease health disparities and improve health outcomes for its students, especially for those at disproportionate risk such as racial/ethnic minority and LGBTQ+ youth and students with cognitive and developmental disabilities.
To support the What Works in Schools program, the District will scale up district-wide and school-based implementation efforts of previously established sexual health instruction to include social emotional and general and mental health education (HED) for grades K-12, and corresponding capacity building training for staff, in order to increase student receipt of HED and decrease sexual risk behaviors. The District will expand student access to health services (HS) to include sexual, mental, and behavioral health services in order to increase student and staff awareness of and student receipt of HS. The District will augment current efforts to foster safe and supportive environments (SSE) with additional strategies designed to predictably increase student and staff perception of safety, inclusiveness, and connectedness in school settings. Family and community engagement (ENGAGE) strategies will be implemented via a collaborative approach with involvement from a variety of stakeholders in order to improve student mental, sexual, and overall health and increase preventive behaviors that decrease students’ risk for HIV, STDs, and teen pregnancy.
The District will support School-Based Surveillance by implementing the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) in years 2025, 2027, and 2029 and School Health Profiles (Profiles) in years 2026 and 2028. The District has achieved weighted YRBS data since 1991 and weighted Profiles data since 1996. Surveillance activities will allow the District to collect, monitor, and assess student risk behaviors and analyze district-wide education efforts and policy implementation, with the goal of improving District health programs and policies, guiding effective health programming, and disseminating the resulting data to District staff, students, parents, the community, and CDC to increase awareness about program activities and progress. The District included questions about sexual minority status on the YRBS since 2011 and will continue to include these questions, in addition to all Tier 2 ACEs and PCEs questions.
Our multi-tiered approach builds upon our firm foundation of DASH-funded 801, 1308, and 1807 programming to address San Diego County’s concerning HIV and chlamydia infection rates and overarching health disparities. Anticipated outcomes include delayed onset of student sexual activity, increased safer sexual practices, decreased rates of HIV/STD infection and pregnancy, improved mental health outcomes, reduced experiences of violence and self-harm, and reduced health disparities experienced by specific populations such as LGBTQ+ youth and students with racial and ethnic minority identities, with the ultimate goal of increased academic success and overall health and wellbeing for all District students. Rigorous program evaluation, carefully aligned to the stated outcomes, will be conducted in parallel with the program’s implementation. Data will quantify impact and inform continuous improvement over each of the five program years.
