From Participation To Preparedness.

Recruitment pursued diversity as a measurement requirement, not a representational one. A behavioral health performance management system intended for statewide use has to demonstrate that it measures the same competencies with the same meaning across genuinely different contexts: different community types, different languages spoken at home, different cultural expectations about what it means to ask for help. A cohort drawn from one kind of place would produce an instrument validated for one kind of place.

The English learner range carries the most weight of the six for an instrument of this kind. The screener reads what a student says and writes, so its accuracy has to hold in a classroom where two in five students are English learners and in one where fewer than one in ten are. Recruiting across a range that wide is what puts that question to the instrument during the project rather than after it.

The Efforts Undertaken

Diversity was pursued through the recruitment channels rather than as a filter applied afterwards. Three deliberate choices produced the cohort’s spread:

• Recruitment was run through more than one network, on purpose. SCCOE’s own superintendent network reaches Santa Clara County and the Bay Area. Had recruitment relied on it alone, the cohort would have been six suburban and urban Bay Area districts. Deveau Burr Group’s CYBHI capacity-building relationship with all fifty-eight county offices of education was used specifically to reach beyond that footprint, and it is the route by which El Dorado County and San Diego County entered the cohort.
• Community type was an explicit selection consideration, not an outcome. Recruitment sought LEAs outside a single regional cluster, and rural inclusion was treated as a requirement rather than a preference, which is why a 3,363-student mountain district sits alongside a 112,250-student urban one.
• Districts contacted that did not join are reported alongside those that did. Five districts across three counties were approached and did not convert, described in full under Element 1. They span the same range of community types as the recruited cohort (Monterey agricultural, Santa Clara suburban and urban, San Diego south-county), so the pool from which the cohort was drawn was itself diverse. The cohort’s composition is not an artifact of who was asked.

Regional And Community-Type Diversity

The cohort spans four California counties across four distinct regional economies: Ventura on the coastal agricultural plain, Santa Clara in the urban and suburban South Bay, San Diego on the southern border, and El Dorado in the Sierra Nevada. The resulting geography stretches roughly five hundred miles.

Community type varies as widely as geography. Rio School District serves an agricultural community on the Oxnard plain. Mount Pleasant serves an urban neighborhood on San José’s east side. Milpitas is a suburban district shaped by an industrial and technology corridor. Sunnyvale sits in the heart of the technology economy with the fiscal profile that follows. San Diego Unified is among the largest urban districts in the United States. Lake Tahoe Unified is a rural mountain district in a seasonal-economy town, the cohort’s only non-metropolitan member, and the reason findings from this project can speak to rural California at all.

Linguistic And Cultural Diversity

English learner concentration across participating sites ranges from 3.1 percent to 44.7 percent, per the California School Dashboard ↗ 2025 release. That range matters more to this project than to most, because the instrument measures authentic student voice ↗. A screener that reads spoken and written language has to work for a third grader in a dual-immersion classroom at Ida Jew, where 40.3 percent of students are English learners, and for a ninth grader at Mission Bay High, where 3.1 percent are. Recruiting across that range is how the crosswalk methodology gets tested rather than asserted.

Cultural context varies in ways raw percentages only partly capture. Rio Lindo serves a community that is roughly 95 percent Hispanic or Latino. Milpitas High serves a student body that is predominantly Asian and Filipino. South Tahoe High is close to evenly split between Hispanic or Latino and White students. Sunnyvale Middle is a genuine plurality with no group in the majority. Bijou Community School combines a majority-Hispanic population with a substantial White minority in a rural mountain setting. These communities differ in what help-seeking looks like, in how families engage with schools, and in the language a student reaches for when asked how they are doing.

The Premise This Cohort Is Built To Test

No school in this cohort was selected because its racial or ethnic composition was expected to predict its behavioral health. That expectation would be wrong, and designing around it would build the error into the instrument. Schools serving predominantly Black, Latino, Asian or White student populations are not thereby more or less behaviorally healthy.

What differs across these communities is how competency is expressed: the vocabulary, the register, the willingness to name a difficulty out loud. An instrument that mistakes a difference in expression for a difference in capacity produces exactly the disparate outcomes California’s accountability systems have spent two decades trying to correct. Recruiting across this range is how that failure mode gets caught during the project rather than after it.

Socioeconomic And Fiscal Diversity

Socioeconomic disadvantage across participating sites ranges from 21.1 percent to 82.4 percent, and sixteen of nineteen participating school entities hold Title I schoolwide status. Students with disabilities range from 8.1 to 20.2 percent, with Rio Lindo Elementary carrying the cohort’s highest proportion.

The cohort also varies by fiscal context, which is less visible but consequential for sustainability. Five participating LEAs are funded through the Local Control Funding Formula. Sunnyvale School District is community-funded (Basic Aid), operating on excess local property tax at $7,263 per pupil above its LCFF entitlement. Sustainability arguments resting on LCFF supplemental and concentration dollars do not apply there. Including one Basic Aid district means the project’s findings about what it costs to sustain behavioral health performance management, and where that money can come from, will hold in both funding environments rather than only the more common one.

School Model Diversity

Participating sites include traditional elementary, middle and comprehensive high schools; a project-based STEAM academy; a locally funded dependent charter co-located with a traditional public school on a shared campus; designated Community Schools with established integrated support infrastructure; and a continuation high school serving 105 students. Enrollment ranges from 105 to 2,926, a factor of twenty-eight.

That range is a deliberate stress test of implementation feasibility. A screening and performance management workflow that functions at Calaveras Hills, where the entire student body can be screened in a single sitting, and at Milpitas High, where a ninth-grade cohort alone exceeds a thousand students, is a workflow that will transfer.