Four Lessons For Anyone Addressing Youth Mental Health
May marks Mental Health Awareness Month. Over the past decade, young people’s mental health has steadily declined, driven by rising rates of stress, anxiety and depression, according to the former Surgeon General of the United States.
School districts, like Fresno Unified in California, have sprung into action to support young people during this crisis. Fresno Unified School District (FUSD) represents 100 schools, 70,000 students and is the third largest district in the state.
In April 2024, DoSomething Strategic partnered with the Foundation for Fresno Unified Students to assess the current state of the mental health supports available to students. Within FUSD, eighty-eight percent of students are English language learners, foster youth or students whose families live below the federal poverty level and therefore tend to face unique mental health challenges.
We began by conducting a robust ecosystem assessment and developed a youth advisory council of Fresno students to reflect on our findings and co-create youth-centered mental health solutions that will resonate with their peers. Here are four of the biggest takeaways from our immersion in student mental health at Fresno Unified School District.
Navigating a school district’s complex mental health supports warrants a systems map.
A systems map lays out all the relationships and interactions between stakeholders in a given system. With the sheer number of relationships across the district, we needed to understand how students, partners, teachers, administrators and partners were working (or not working!) together to tackle shared goals. What were the strengths of these relationships? Where was trust lacking? And, what could we do to facilitate alignment? A systems map answers these questions and helps identify the key relationships that need strengthening.
Facilitating a student advisory council for the project led to bold, youth-centered strategies that address adults’ blind spots.
While the adults on this project remember what it was like being a teenager, they don’t know what it’s like to be one now. A global pandemic, pervasive gun violence, and the rampant use of phones in classrooms all play unique, troubling roles in the modern school experience. Our student council members served as a sounding board for our research, participated in design thinking activities to explore new programming, and brought this work to life by sharing meaningful lived experiences on their peers' behalf. By co-creating this work alongside them, we ensured that they had seats at the table and the ideas they proposed were authentic to them.
Evaluating the components of a strong youth mental health ecosystem is critical.
These components are vast and intersectional. And, they need a container. We mapped the 12 leading components that emerged from our literature and listening tour against the Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) framework to identify key points of intervention; universal interventions for all, targeted interventions for some, and intensive intervention for a small number of students. Then we audited where FUSD was succeeding with its intervention strategies and where they needed to lean in further. For example, only 42% of students agree that their school teaches them how to manage their emotions. Whereas, 90% of family members agree or strongly agree; 82% of school staff agree or strongly agree.
Convening a youth-centered town hall led to new shared language and priorities for 2025 and beyond.
DSS capped off our engagement by planning a town hall in February 2025. With over 100 students, parents, teachers, administrators and ambassadors of the work in attendance, the event marked a moment for DSS and the youth council to share our learnings and spark broader community dialogue. The Head, Heart and Hands Framework we adapted from the Renée Crown Wellness Institute allowed the town hall to engage in stimulating conversation (head), share their lived experience (heart) and explore practical implementation (hands). The town hall concluded with a new shared language and a greater consensus on which priorities from the ecosystem assessment to focus on.
These are just a few of the insights that emerged from spending nearly a year steeped in the community of Fresno. This is a waypoint, not an endpoint, on the journey to improve students’ mental health in Fresno. But, we were honored to have played a part in building that new foundation for the city in the Central Valley region of California. For those interested in supporting the youth mental health work being done in FUSD, you can reach out to Linda Laettner, Executive Officer of Engagement and External Partnerships at The Foundation for Fresno Unified Students at: linda.laettner@fresnounified.org.
