Recruitment
Outcomes
Summary

Milpitas Unified School DistrictThe Secondary Continuum, With An Equity Case At The End Of It

Milpitas selected across its full secondary range: Rancho Milpitas Middle, Milpitas High and Calaveras Hills High, the district’s alternative high school. Rancho and Milpitas High are comprehensive campuses with established if still-developing behavioral health staffing. Calaveras Hills was selected on explicitly equity- and need-based grounds: its enrollment of roughly 105 is small enough to make universal schoolwide screening feasible rather than requiring a targeted subgroup, and a school community event in spring 2026 heightened the district’s urgency about behavioral health support on that campus.

These sites also give Milpitas a chance to evaluate and validate its existing contracted mental health model, led by the district’s lead social worker, overseeing a team of contracted associate marriage and family therapists and social workers deployed across sites by need.

Milpitas structured onboarding as individualized, site-specific planning sessions for each of the three schools rather than a single district kickoff, reflecting how differently the three sites are staffed and scheduled. Rancho Milpitas serves only grades seventh and eighth, the district’s elementary schools run K through sixth, so the school has just two years with each student. The district’s target is seventh grade, prioritizing the first year a student arrives so that staff can build relationships and establish a baseline early, within the limited window they have with that student population.

Mount Pleasant Elementary School DistrictInfrastructure Present Against Infrastructure Absent

Mount Pleasant selected three of its four schools, spanning grades TK through 8 across the district, and paired them deliberately. August Boeger (grades 6–8) and Robert Sanders (grades TK–5) are both designated Community Schools with existing behavioral health staffing and programming to build on, though the depth of that infrastructure varies between them. August Boeger is the more developed of the two: it operates a dedicated on-site wellness center and has the most consistent implementation of the district’s existing screening instrument. Robert Sanders shares the Community School designation and uses the same screening instrument, but implementation there is newer and less consistent, and the site does not have a comparable dedicated wellness space.

The third site, Ida Jew Academy (grades TK–8, co-located with Valle Vista Elementary, grades TK–5), was chosen as the contrasting case: one of the district’s largest school communities, carrying documented behavioral health need in its middle-school grades, and without the Community School designation, a wellness center, or the screening instrument the other two sites use in some form.

District leadership described the pairing as intentional: it allows the district to observe implementation across a spectrum of existing infrastructure, from most developed (August Boeger) to partially developed (Robert Sanders) to none (Ida Jew/Valle Vista), rather than a simple binary. For the project’s purposes this is the most analytically useful selection any LEA made, and it is discussed again under Element 6.

Sunnyvale School DistrictA Limited First Release, Scoped By The District

Sunnyvale is a TK–8 district with no high school to select, and its composition follows that structure: both of its middle schools and one elementary. The two middle schools qualified in part because both currently receive social work services, an existing-service indicator consistent with the cohort’s readiness criteria.

Lakewood Elementary was scoped to 5th grade only, and this was a district decision rather than a constraint. Leadership chose a deliberate limited release: begin with one grade in one building, expand in future years based on what the first phase shows. That is a district treating participation as a multi-year systems change rather than a one-time compliance activity, and the project records it as such.

Lake Tahoe Unified School DistrictFull TK–12 Continuum, And The Cohort’s Rural County

Lake Tahoe selected Bijou Community School, South Tahoe Middle and South Tahoe High: one elementary, one middle and one high school, exactly the composition Exhibit A describes, and the only LEA in the cohort able to produce it because it is the only participating district operating a full TK–12 continuum. Lake Tahoe also contributes El Dorado County, the cohort’s only non-metropolitan member and the reason findings from this project can speak to rural California at all.

The three sites also give the district one campus at each grade band with behavioral health provision already in place. Bijou is named in the district’s $4.7 million Community Schools implementation plan under the California Community Schools Partnership Program. South Tahoe Middle operates an on-campus wellness clinic and South Tahoe High a wellness center, both staffed through the district’s standing partnership with El Dorado County Behavioral Health under grant agreement #24MHSOAC008.

Rio School DistrictDeliberate Socioeconomic Spread Within One District

Rio selected Rio Lindo Elementary, Rio Vista Middle and Rio Del Sol STEAM Academy, and district leadership described the distribution as intentional. Rio Lindo was identified at kickoff as the district’s highest-need site: the largest concentration of students with moderate-to-severe special needs and the lowest household-income profile of the three. Rio Del Sol is the opposite end of that range: a lottery and waitlist site described as the district’s most sought-after school and its most affluent participating population. Rio Vista sits in the middle.

The California School Dashboard ↗ confirms the spread the district described. Socioeconomic disadvantage runs 54.9 percent at Rio Del Sol, 68.8 at Rio Vista, 81.0 at Rio Lindo; students with disabilities run 9.3, 14.0 and 20.2 percent across the same three. The purpose is to observe implementation across meaningfully different socioeconomic contexts inside a single district, holding district policy, staffing model and leadership constant while varying who walks in the door. All three sites volunteered.

San Diego Unified School DistrictVertical Articulation And Continuum Of Care

San Diego’s selection developed over the recruitment period. The district first identified Creative, Performing and Media Arts, Innovation Middle and Madison High after the August 5 kickoff, on a vertical articulation rationale: both middle schools fed Madison High, so one student population could be followed across the transition. Those three were profiled and assessed on that basis, and Creative, Performing and Media Arts carried a comparatively high volume of existing mental health referrals.

The district then refined the selection to Pacific Beach Middle, Mission Bay High and Clairemont High. Vertical articulation carries forward: Pacific Beach Middle feeds directly into Mission Bay High, and that pair preserves the continuous view of one student population moving from middle school into high school. What the second selection adds is an established continuum of care. Each of the three campuses operates an on-campus wellness center with a wellness coordinator, and the district’s interest is in using screening data to measure how well services already running are working, rather than in standing up a first layer of support.

Clairemont High has administered a behavioral health screener before. Its multi-tiered system of support meets weekly, with the site administrator, the school counselor and the wellness coordinator at the table, and screening results route into that existing meeting rather than into one built alongside it.

More schools in the district wanted to take part than the three the project scopes at each LEA, and the district asked whether it could bring more. Participation was held at three so the cohort stays narrow enough for implementation lessons to be legible, which made selection at this LEA a matter of choosing among willing schools rather than finding them. The selection moving once before it settled is what that longer process looked like in practice.