From Participation To Preparedness.

The Approach

Recruitment criteria were set before outreach began, and deliberately prioritized LEAs meeting several readiness indicators at once rather than excelling on any one: current BHSSA-funded behavioral health programming, existing multi-tiered system of support infrastructure with counselor or wellness coordinator staffing, equity multiplier eligibility, and CYBHI Fee Schedule participation or demonstrated readiness for it.

That conjunction shapes how the cohort’s findings should be read. Recruiting LEAs with overlapping initiative eligibility demonstrates cross-initiative coherence and fiscal efficiency: a district already inside CYBHI, already running MTSS, already receiving county behavioral health service is a district where performance management can be layered onto existing structure rather than built from nothing. That makes the statewide scalability case stronger. It also means this cohort is not a random sample of California districts, and its findings are evidence about what performance management does in reasonably well-resourced systems.

Channels

Outreach ran through three networks in parallel. SCCOE used its superintendent network and its Bay Area county-office and district relationships. Deveau Burr Group brought reach beyond that region through its CYBHI Statewide Capacity Building and Technical Assistance work, which supports all fifty-eight county offices of education, the route by which El Dorado and San Diego entered a Santa Clara-led cohort. Breaking Barriers California contributed engagement support and state-systems expertise. Impacter Pathway supported throughout and led the technology and readiness assessment work that followed selection. Informational briefings were held for prospective LEAs, and an information packet ↗ described scope expectations, data sharing requirements, timeline, and the participation incentive.

SCCOE’s Recruitment Record

Prepared by Dr. Pilar Vázquez-Vialva, Director of Youth Health and Wellness.

SCCOE began recruitment in early May 2026 by first adhering to the criteria and eligibility requirements of the contract and identifying LEAs that were BHSSA school grant recipients with existing school-based behavioral health investments. Two eligibility questions were put to the Commission before outreach widened: whether schools receiving School Linked Services in partnership with a county behavioral health department could be considered, and whether small and rural LEAs, which generally have one or two schools, could participate as one LEA. Both mattered because the contract requires each participating LEA to identify three schools. The Commission confirmed that schools receiving School Linked Services in partnership with a county behavioral health department could be considered, and recruitment proceeded on that basis. The second question did not bear on the final cohort, which includes no LEA of that size.

In partnership with Impacter Pathway, SCCOE co-designed the invitation to participate ↗, describing the grant opportunity, the purpose of the project, the benefits of participation and the expectations for LEAs and schools. The County Superintendent announced the opportunity at the Santa Clara County Superintendents Meeting; it was carried to the California Student Health and Wellbeing Professional Learning Network; and it moved through the subcontractors’ statewide networks. SCCOE then met interested LEAs (superintendents, assistant superintendents, directors and behavioral health leads) one-on-one to review the project, discuss benefits and expectations, and assess readiness, and coordinated demonstrations so that prospective LEAs could see the behavioral health screener ↗, the entry point for every participating school, and how the project could support local behavioral health goals. Participating LEAs were told they would receive $120,000 ($60,000 each year) to be shared equally with the participating schools, with suggested uses such as stipends for participating staff, wellness supplies and other supports aligned with each school’s behavioral health needs.

The Demonstration Asset

Prospective LEAs were shown an operating system rather than a described one. The behavioral health screening platform ↗ was already deployed across seven California counties (San Diego, Ventura, San Mateo, El Dorado, Placer, Orange and Imperial), supporting more than 200,000 monthly users at the time of recruitment. Three of the six LEAs ultimately recruited sit in counties where the platform was already running: Rio in Ventura, San Diego Unified in San Diego, and Lake Tahoe Unified in El Dorado. Recruitment in those cases converted existing county-level familiarity into district-level participation, which is a materially easier conversation than a cold introduction.

The Participation Incentive

Each participating LEA receives a $120,000 participation incentive, $720,000 in total pass-through, supporting dedicated staff time for training, data review and collaborative learning. What this bought is specific. Every participating LEA carries board-adopted behavioral health investment that dwarfs the incentive: Milpitas alone budgets $4.7 million a year for mental health staffing. The incentive did not purchase interest. It purchased staff time through a monetary stipend, which in districts of this size is the genuinely scarce input, and it is the reason site counselors at Rio are receiving $2,000 stipends to serve as behavioral health champions rather than absorbing the work unpaid.

Outcome

Six LEAs and eighteen schools were recruited and selected within the contract window: Rio School District, Mount Pleasant Elementary School District, Milpitas Unified School District, Sunnyvale School District, San Diego Unified School District and Lake Tahoe Unified School District.

Barriers And Challenges

1 · Leadership Availability Was The Binding Constraint

Five districts were contacted during the May to June 2026 window and did not join: Soledad Unified (Monterey), Campbell Elementary School District (Santa Clara), Santa Clara Unified, East Side Union High School District, and South Bay Union (San Diego). All five are CYBHI Fee Schedule participants, and each had the behavioral health capacity the project was looking for. What each lacked was a settled leadership team with room in the calendar.

Two of the five were mid-superintendent-search during the recruitment window. Soledad Unified’s superintendent was retiring, with finalist interviews on May 8 and a successor appointed June 4 effective July 1. Campbell Elementary School District’s superintendent retired on June 30 after six years, with an interim named June 24 and a permanent successor effective August 13. A district cannot commit to a multi-year data-sharing arrangement in the eight weeks before its chief executive changes.

South Bay Union is the instructive case in the other direction. It was described in project records as very ready and did not convert inside the window, a reminder that expressed enthusiasm and executed agreements are different things, and that the ninety-day clock is the constraint rather than the appetite.

2 · Aligning Site Selection With BHSSA Investment In Practice

The solicitation seeks to build on existing initiatives by aligning this program with BHSSA-funded programs. Because of how the money moves, tracking that alignment to a named school site is difficult in practice.

Ventura County’s MHSSA partnership names five wellness-center districts and Rio School District is not among them, yet the Ventura County Office of Education operates wellness centers at all nine Rio schools under a program it credits to MHSA and MHSSA. Santa Clara County’s grant names “the thirty-one Santa Clara County school districts” collectively rather than enumerating them, which makes district-level participation a definitional question rather than a documented fact. San Diego Unified is a named Creating Opportunities in Preventing and Eliminating Suicide (COPES) partner with a $7 million four-year county award and no published site allocation. El Dorado County’s executed grant agreement names no LEAs at all.

The pattern is consistent: county behavioral health funding reaches schools through county offices of education and consortium structures that do not publish which schools received what. Every participating LEA is inside such a system. Almost none can produce a document tracing the funding to a named school site. The project team addressed this by identifying district partners building comprehensive behavioral health response systems that include BHSSA dollars, even where those dollars cannot be traced directly to a participating site.

3 · A Named Key Person Transitioned From The Project Mid-Recruitment

Dr. Deborah Gorgulho, named in the proposal to the Commission ↗ as Project Director, transitioned from SCCOE on July 1, 2026, with this project’s thanks and every good wish in her new role. The Commission relationship for this deliverable sits with Dr. Pilar Vázquez-Vialva, Director of Youth Health and Wellness, who leads the project.

4 · Agreement Execution Takes Time

Three instruments at six LEAs is eighteen signature paths, and each moves at the speed of a different signatory: a superintendent, a general counsel, a technology director, a governing board’s agenda. The memoranda of understanding with SCCOE were fully executed between July 21 and August 20, 2026, and the master services agreements and CA-NDPAs are executed at all six LEAs, covering all eighteen sites. Element 3 gives the position by LEA and by instrument.

The cadence is worth recording for statewide scaling, because it is not the cadence of recruitment. Board approval sits on a monthly calendar. Insurance review turns on the specific endorsements a district requires: Rio’s package went through exactly that step. Counsel review is its own queue again. None of these were disputes and every LEA signed, but the period an agreement set takes is a function of how many boards, counsels and insurers it has to cross, and it should be planned as its own period in a statewide design.

5 · Selecting Three Schools At The Largest LEA Took Longer Because More Wanted In

San Diego Unified enrolls 112,250 students across 226 schools, and interest in the project ran ahead of the three sites the project scopes at each LEA. The district asked whether it could bring more than three. Keeping participation narrow and focused is what makes implementation lessons legible, so selection stayed at three, which meant choosing three from a field of willing schools rather than persuading three to volunteer. That is a longer conversation at a district of 226 schools than at a district of five, and it accounts for most of the difference in pace between the largest and the smallest LEA in this cohort.

The three selected are Pacific Beach Middle; Mission Bay High; and Clairemont High. The district first identified a different three at the August 5 kickoff, on a vertical articulation rationale, then refined the selection toward campuses with an established continuum of care. Element 4 sets out the rationale in full.

6 · End-Of-Year Timing, Board Calendars And District Size

SCCOE’s account names timing as the most significant recruitment challenge. Many conversations fell in May and June, when LEAs were closing the school year, managing end-of-year obligations, preparing for summer and finalizing the annual approval of the Local Control and Accountability Plan and School Plans for Student Achievement, alongside competing year-end grant requirements such as the California Community Schools Partnership Program annual progress report. That made it difficult for some LEAs to convene staff, assess readiness, identify three schools and commit within the available window. Several interested LEAs asked to resume in late July or August when staff returned; others needed to take the opportunity and the contract language to their governing boards, whose June agendas were already crowded with LCAPs, SPSAs, budgets and time-sensitive contracts before summer recess.

Small and rural LEAs presented a further challenge: some do not have three schools, or three schools receiving BHSSA-funded services. SCCOE sought clarification from the Commission and continued to explore whether the participation requirement could be met while honoring the context of smaller LEAs; the timeline did not allow those meetings to take place before summer recess.

Lessons For Statewide Scaling

• Size the agreement period separately from the recruitment period. Six LEAs were recruited comfortably inside ninety days. Executing three instruments at each of them is eighteen signature paths, each with its own board calendar, insurance review and counsel review, and that period should be planned in its own right rather than assumed to fit inside the window that governs recruitment.
• Superintendent stability should be a screening question, asked first. It is public information, it takes minutes to check, and it separated the districts that converted from the districts that did not more cleanly than any capacity indicator.
• County-level familiarity converts. Half the recruited cohort came from counties where the screening platform was already operating. An existing county relationship is the cheapest recruitment channel available.
• Expect the largest districts to have the hardest selection problem, not the hardest recruitment problem. At San Diego Unified the difficulty was choosing three schools from more than three that wanted to take part, which is a good problem and a slow one. Build time for it.
• The absence of site-level funding attribution should be treated as a project finding to report, not a documentation gap to close. No amount of additional recruitment effort would have produced records that county structures do not generate.