Building Transformational School Health for California’s Future

Vesper Society believes that a just society begins when everyone is well and respected as a human being. This idea permeated the largest annual conference hosted by the California School-Based Health Alliance (CSHA) at the end of April in Santa Clara, entitled Building Transformational School Health for California’s Future.

Nearly 800 educators, health practitioners, and children’s health advocates from 80 school districts and hundreds of agencies, from 43 of California’s 58 counties gathered, in Santa Clara to learn about California’s landmark investments, in Community Schools and the Child and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative (CYBHI).

The state of California has allocated a historic $4.7 billion to overhaul the state’s mental health system to tackle the crisis facing our children and youth. CSHA recognized the incredible demand for information from educators, child and adolescent health providers, and advocates for health and education equity who are helping to grow school-based health and wellness centers.

CSHA increased its capacity for the event, hosting more than 50 workshops on models of school-based behavioral health delivery to reach underserved students, funding models for sustainability, youth engagement and leadership, staff wellness, policy initiatives to name a few. CSHA provided scholarships to 77 attendees (22 from the Central Valley), show-cased nine school-based health and wellness centers via virtual tours and distributed 800 doses of lifesaving Narcan.

A former Vesper Society board member, Dr. Tomas Magana, gave an inspirational keynote address. Attendees shared that it was “really beautiful to see the long arc of school-based health, to reconnect with colleagues and to connect with new people from San Diego to Lake County!” “The best part was the diversity of workshop topics and a wonderful balance of health care and education-minded topics as well as programs and workforce-related topics.”

CYBHI is creating the momentum to start and expand school-based health services. Educators recognize the connection between healthy students and learning, and CSHA provides many resources on its website to plan and implement school health and wellness centers. In addition, CSHA analyzes how the new funding streams will operate and shares this information through webinars.

Vesper Society is proud to partner with California School-Based Health Alliance, to increase health access in rural areas of California.