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High-needs students

Wellness coaches take on youth mental health problem in rural California

Certified professionals tackle high levels of emotional distress and substance use among young people in far-flung communities.

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Students work on homework during an after-school program in Chico, the largest city in Butte County. (File photo)

Credit: Julie Leopo / EdSource

Top Takeaways

• Students in rural areas fare much worse than those in urban areas in mental well-being because of poverty and geographic isolation.
• New certified wellness coaches focus on early intervention, to increase access to care.
• Between long wait lists and incomplete referrals, many students still do not receive the help they need on time.

At 14, Charlotte Peery dropped out of high school. 

“I was one of those silent sufferers,” Peery said. “I was battling with addiction, and once I finally decided I couldn’t go to school anymore, there wasn’t anyone around to say, ‘Well, let’s see what we can do’.” 

It took another four years for Peery, raised in rural Tehama County, to return to school and enroll in an alternative education program. There, she met a counselor who provided the academic guidance and mental health counseling she needed to graduate from high school. Peery has since started earning her bachelor’s degree in social work and has become one of Tehama County schools’ first certified wellness coaches. 

“When I had the opportunity to apply to be a wellness coach — it was everything I’ve always wanted to do — to provide the kind of support that I lacked when I needed it most,” Peery said.

As an entry-level wellness coach, Peery provides students with nonclinical support such as quick check-ins, screenings, referrals to specialists, structured mental health curriculum and outreach to their families. 

Peery’s role is part of the state’s $4.6 billion Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative, for which the Department of Health Care Access and Information received $278 million to recruit, train and certify a diverse slate of mental health support personnel, known as certified wellness coaches, for schools and community-based organizations. Since February 2024, the department has hired over 2,000 certified wellness coaches. 

“The wellness coach program helped define what coping skills and home-to-school services I could focus on,” said Jacque Thomas, who serves as a certified wellness coach II and is able to provide more in-depth services to students, such as individual 30-minute sessions focused on coping skills, goal-setting and life skills. 

According to a 2021 study, 45% of California youth between the ages of 12 and 17 reported having struggled recently with mental health issues. The overall suicide rate in Tehama and neighboring counties is more than twice the state average, and according to a 2017-2019 survey, more than a third of 11th graders in Tehama County reported feelings of depression.  

Research shows that children ages 2 to 8 in rural communities consistently have higher rates of mental, behavioral and developmental disorders than children in urban communities, largely due to financial difficulties and geographic isolation. Students in Tehama County tend to start struggling with mental health issues at a younger age, said Savannah Kenyon, a parent to a fourth grader and an education behavior assistant at Red Bluff High School. 

“Our neighbors could be acres and acres away, and we don’t know them by name — so there’s a lot less socializing,” Kenyon said. “A lot of our students also come from a family of addiction or have to be the providers for their families.” 

In Tehama County, nearly 1 in 5 children, and a third of children under the age of 5, live below the poverty line. The county also ranks sixth in California for the number of children who have experienced two or more adverse childhood events, such as abuse, neglect, substance use or mental health problems, known to have lasting impacts on health and well-being. 

“It’s hard to see our children dealing with adult problems, and as a result, adult mental health problems, way younger,” Kenyon said. 

Wellness coaches like Thomas and Peery try to understand students’ needs as they evolve. Thomas said that in the past school year, they saw an increase in students referred for substance use intervention, mirroring troubling rates of adolescent drug use and fatalities in the U.S.

In response to the increase in referrals, Thomas and Peery decided to become trained in Mindfully Based Substance Abuse Treatment, a program focused on building emotional awareness and examining cravings and triggers in youth substance use. In the process, they also learned about students dealing with unhealthy relationships or domestic violence at home. In response, Peery developed and ran a 16-week curriculum in three schools and a juvenile detention center, teaching students how to identify and respond to issues like abuse and family trauma.  

Charlotte Peery, certified wellness coach I in Tehama County.

Peery is often the first point of contact for a student struggling with mental health issues. On paper, her job spans the next two or three steps in the process — a mental health screening, a mindfulness and stress reduction session, or a referral to a specialist. But in practice, she hopes to strengthen the long-term network of care available to students. She has partnered with the Tehama County Department of Behavioral Health, which provides substance use recovery treatment, and Empower Tehama, which helps victims of domestic violence, for example. 

“I’m making connections with drug and alcohol counselors and becoming more aware of which clinicians are accepting new clients once students transition out of our program,” Peery said. “To have that open communication, I’ve seen a huge shift in the way all of our partners are working together.” 

School-based support is likely the most effective way to reach Tehama County students in need, she said, because most families cannot easily access major services, in part due to a disproportionate shortage of mental health providers, 

“We’ve been able to provide more services to the farthest outreaches of our community and helped build rapport with every school,” Thomas said. “We go out to all 33 schools in the county to provide check-ins and open up the doors for our clinicians to meet with high-need students.” 

Early intervention matters 

After her daughter’s school shut down at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, just as she was starting transitional kindergarten, Kenyon noticed that her daughter was missing some key developmental milestones. 

“We were realizing that the kids were not socializing at some of their peak times when they should be learning social skills,” Kenyon said. “I knew at an early age that she was going to be struggling with her ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), so we knew that starting young was going to be the best way to help her in the long run.”

Early intervention for Kenyon’s daughter began with a screening and diagnosis of ADHD. From there, she said, her daughter’s counselor and teacher helped with little things like — motivating her through action-oriented feedback on her work, or teaching her mindful, deep breathing when she feels anxious — that allowed her daughter to handle emotional distress as well as social expression and inattentiveness in the classroom on a day-by-day basis.   

“We’re always having open communication with the counselor or teacher. Being able to tell them, ‘We struggled last night, so she might be a little tired today; she might be a little bit emotional,’ has been imperative to her success,” Kenyon said. 

Research shows that early, multidisciplinary interventions, such as a combination of school-based programs and family support initiatives, significantly reduce the risk of carrying mental health disorders into adulthood. 

School shutdowns during the pandemic compounded the youth mental health crisis in California. About 65% of young people with depression did not receive treatment during the pandemic, while the rate of suicide among adolescents rose by 20%. 

“We saw heightened anxiety, depression and delays in social development for students that had gone longer without intervention than they typically would have if they were on a school campus,” said JoNell Wallace, school mental health and wellness team coordinator at the Tehama County Department of Education. “We’re now starting interventions in third or fourth grade that we would’ve caught in second grade.” 

Jacque Thomas, certified wellness coach II in Tehama County.

Despite the additional support, Thomas said she has been flooded with students approaching her for help (“which is amazing,” she adds) and that students’ needs in Tehama County are still outpacing available staff and services at schools. She frequently eats in her car on the way to a counseling session, or sometimes skips lunch altogether, to fit another student into her schedule. 

 “You start to get stretched thin, and I don’t want any one student to have to be on a waitlist,” Thomas said.

Understaffing has also underscored the weaknesses of the referral system, a process through which schools assess students and refer them to wellness coaches, depending on the level of support they need. Schools do not always connect students to the support they need because of how time-consuming referrals can be.

“I think schools would much rather prefer it if we were on site,” Thomas said. “And that’s the goal — that more schools are qualified to have more wellness coaches, so their referral process will be in-house, and those services can start happening with a lesser barrier.”

There will be some relief starting this fall, when five additional certified wellness coaches will be placed at elementary and middle schools in Tehama County. Kenyon said the expanded service is a win for students like her daughter. 

“She used to hide under the table if she got any type of feedback or if she felt like she had done something wrong,” Kenyon said. “But she hasn’t done it this entire year, which is such a big change from how she would try and escape her feelings.”

Now, with help from her counselors, coaches and teachers, her daughter comes home excited to talk about her day, feeling more confident and self-assured. 

“Knowing that she’s coping, and for me to have help beyond just parental help — I know she’s a hundred percent supported through these programs,” Kenyon said.

EdSource

Trump Executive Order Calls for Artificial Intelligence to Be Taught in Schools

EdSurge

Education leaders offered mixed first impressions about the directive.

By Rebecca Koenig     Apr 24, 2025

Since generative artificial intelligence burst onto the scene a few years ago, schools and educators have grappled with how to approach the powerful-but-experimental technology. Ban it? Embrace it?

A new executive order plants the White House firmly in the latter camp.

On April 23, President Donald Trump signed Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth. The order promotes “appropriate integration of AI into education” to “ensure the United States remains a global leader in this technological revolution.”

The directive’s primary aims are teaching students and training teachers to use AI in order to improve education outcomes.

Use of AI in schools, the order states, “demystifies this powerful technology but also sparks curiosity and creativity, preparing students to become active and responsible participants in the workforce of the future and nurturing the next generation of American AI innovators to propel our Nation to new heights of scientific and economic achievement.”

To bring this vision to life, the announcement calls for the creation of a White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence Education made up of cabinet members and chaired by the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The task force’s marching orders include establishing and “promptly” announcing public-private partnerships with AI industry groups, nonprofits and academic institutions to quickly develop online resources for teaching AI literacy to K-12 students.

Meanwhile, the executive order tasks the secretary of education with identifying federal spending mechanisms to use AI to improve education outcomes through federal, state and local efforts. Examples listed include creating AI-based teaching resources, supporting higher ed advising and boosting intensive, high-impact tutoring.

The order also directs the secretary to prioritize federal spending for professional development that will help teachers instruct students about AI in stand-alone computer science classes as well as integrating the technology into classes of all subject areas. Other training mentioned helping teachers use technology for “reducing time-intensive administrative tasks.” That’s an application that many teachers are already enthusiastic about, according to Pete Just, the generative AI project director for the Consortium for School Networking, a professional association for K-12 edtech leaders.

“This has brought them back additional time into their week,” he says.

Additionally, the order calls for creating registered apprenticeships related to AI, establishing a Presidential Artificial Intelligence Challenge for students, and enabling high school students to take courses in artificial intelligence, including through dual enrollment at colleges.

While some components of the order lack deadlines for completion, other objectives are supposed to be accomplished within the course of several months.

Some education leaders expressed support for the broad goals of the order while also voicing questions about how to achieve them.

The birth of generative AI is “a bit like the arrival of electricity,” says Beth Rabbitt, CEO of education innovation nonprofit The Learning Accelerator, explaining that the technology has the potential to change the world for the better — and, if we’re not careful with it, also to spark “fires.”

“It’s incredibly important that we as educators help kids understand how it works and use it well in their lives,” Rabbitt says, “but avoid the harms.”

Just, of the Consortium for School Networking, is hopeful that the executive order will put artificial intelligence near the top of the agenda for superintendents and other education leaders, some of whom have seemed to him to be reluctant to prioritize AI.

“Increasingly they are burying their heads in the sand,” Just says. “I think this will certainly bring the conversation forward again.”

Offense and Defense

Much of the discourse about AI in education so far has focused on playing defense — against students using the tools to cheat, leaders using them to replace the teaching workforce and rollouts that reinforce racial and economic inequities in access to high-quality education. Then there are worries about companies rushing products into classrooms without adequately protecting students against bias, misinformation, data breaches and inaccurate “hallucinations.”

The new executive order was issued during a period of rollbacks of regulations governing the AI marketplace, points out Rabbitt of The Learning Accelerator. She notes that the Trump administration revoked Biden administration rules designed to put guardrails on artificial intelligence tools, and that this new education executive order lacks the harm-mitigation requirements included in a separate Trump executive order directing government agencies to increase their use of AI.

“There seems to be a lot more work we need to do to make sure the tools we are giving to our children are safe, and ready to go, and actually can support their learning in ways that keep them healthy and whole and protected,” Rabbitt says.

But plenty of educators have already started playing offense by trying to find positive ways to use artificial intelligence. One group effort, backed by The Learning Accelerator, is the School Teams AI Collaborative, which has dozens of educators from schools across the country experimenting with and evaluating AI-enabled instruction. For example, they’re using AI to offer writing feedback and to teach students about civics by developing voter registration chatbots.

Using AI to improve teacher training fits with the vision that Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy brings to her new role as president and CEO of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, she told EdSurge, pointing out that some teacher training programs already use mixed-reality simulations to prepare teacher candidates to excel in the classroom.

“How can we tailor the AI tool to help teachers, specifically new teachers, receive professional development on the spot, when they need it, instead of waiting for professional development opportunities given by the school system, which could be totally unrelated to what the new teacher needs?” Holcomb-McCoy asks.

She was glad to see the executive order indicate that the administration would invest resources in teacher training. Given persistent teacher workforce shortages and student struggles in math, Holcomb-McCoy says she would like to see additional federal support for training top-notch science, math and technology teachers who can prepare today’s students to become tomorrow’s AI innovators.

And when it comes to the AI education resources promised by the order, she asks, “How will the federal government ensure that every child and every teacher, no matter their location, will have equal access to what they are providing?”

To make positive outcomes of AI in education more likely, policymakers and educators should plan for a realistic pace of change when it comes to AI, Rabbitt says, allowing for enough time to test thoughtful, strategic applications.

“The worst thing we can do is have people feel forced, and then throw a bunch of tools into classrooms that aren’t ready for them,” she says. “In the pandemic, we saw what it looked like to ask a whole bunch of educators to rapidly shift practice in a highly technology-dependent way without being adequately prepared and supported.”

Rebecca Koenig is an editor at EdSurge. Reach her at rebecca [at] edsurge [dot] com.

10 Years of EdReports: Empowering Educators With Evidence

Lessons learned and progress made over 10 years of curriculum reviews and advancing quality materials. Plus, the work ahead to support educators and students.

MARCH 6, 2025

As EdReports celebrates our 10th anniversary, we have been reflecting on the progress we have helped the field make toward our guiding vision: that all students and teachers will have access to the highest quality instructional materials that will help improve student learning outcomes. 

Still, like many in the world of education, we know that a great deal of work remains to be done. We believe that high-quality, evidence-based instructional materials will be an important part of the journey to helping more students thrive. While it’s true that curriculum doesn’t teach students—teachers do—and that other factors such as attendance and school environment are significant, research shows that high-quality instructional materials, paired with professional learning, are a critical tool for teachers to support student success. 

Before EdReports published its first reviews in 2015, states and districts did not have an independent source of information about curriculum. They relied on what publishers said about their products or by word of mouth. As an independent nonprofit, EdReports has democratized this process by providing local schools, districts, and states with evidence-rich insights on curricula from expert teachers. 

Research shows that high-quality instructional materials, paired with professional learning, are a critical tool for teachers to support student success.

The Role of Independent Reviews When Dependable Evidence of Effectiveness is Scarce

There continues to be a deficiency of robust, independent evidence, as many publishers sponsor or conduct their own studies. Plus, it is extremely difficult to prove the effectiveness of any single program across multiple contexts while also accounting for the many factors that influence teaching and learning. For this reason, EdReports reviews focus on how materials are designed rather than the various ways they might be used in practice. 

Time and again, educators and leaders have shared that transparent, unbiased evaluations of instructional materials are invaluable in helping them select resources that best meet their students’ needs. This requires reviewing curriculum for multiple aspects of quality, including how well materials structure evidence-based teaching and learning grounded in research, alignment to college and career-ready standards, and supports for all students including multilingual learners. 

EdReports Is a Place to Start

We’re gratified that this approach has resonated with educators. Yet, we strongly believe that our reports are a starting point, not a prescription—and a meets expectations “green” rating should not necessarily mean go. Our reviews are designed to be just one part of a comprehensive, educator-led adoption process. 

We believe the most effective selection processes are those that recognize it isn’t as simple as just choosing a green-rated curriculum—it requires thoughtful, thorough, collaborative work.

For example, in Wisconsin, districts used EdReports to prepare for in-depth publisher discussions. In Fife, Washington, leaders combined EdReports insights with teacher surveys to develop customized selection criteria. In Rhode Island, EdReports reviews were a key resource, but other state-specific criteria were integrated into the selection process as well. We believe the most effective selection processes are those that recognize it isn’t as simple as just choosing a green-rated curriculum—it requires thoughtful, thorough, collaborative work. 

EdReports Remains Committed to Learning and Improving 

As states and districts continue the hard work of selecting materials to help teachers and students thrive, EdReports is committed to continuously improving our supports for the field. Our updated review criteria released in January 2025 are a prime example of how we listen to the field and update our tools to reflect educators’ feedback as well as the latest research and science on learning. 

For example, we have made significant enhancements to our English language arts (ELA) criteria to more tightly align to the science of reading. This includes the introduction of a dedicated indicator to ensure materials are absent of three-cueing. In other words, a curriculum reviewed using our latest criteria cannot achieve an “all-green,” or “meets expectations,” rating if it uses three-cueing. While our ELA criteria have always looked for systematic and research-based explicit phonics instruction, we did not previously have a specific score relating to the absence of three-cueing. Updates such as this underscore our ongoing commitment to responding to educator feedback and ensuring our tools evolve alongside both the latest research and the needs of the field.

We recently rolled out new labels on reports that provide educators with additional context on the purpose of reports, review tool versions, and recommendations for integrating reports into a broader instructional strategy. We also added clearer guidance on how to use our earlier reports, including detailed information on specific improvements we’ve made in ELA, math, and science. We keep every report we’ve published freely available because some of the materials and editions reviewed years ago are still in use. 

Finally, we are a nonprofit and our reports are powered by passionate, dedicated, and very busy educator reviewers. We have limitations in what we can review and how quickly we can move. We’re always willing to consider re-reviewing materials if they have been substantively updated, but that decision is prompted by changes to the materials, not to our review tools. We remain committed to working hard alongside educators to share transparent information and insights that districts and teachers value.   

While we are proud of the progress we have made over the past 10 years, we believe our best report is yet to be written. We are excited for the next decade of working closely with educators to increase demand for and access to high-quality materials—because instructional materials matter to teachers, to students, and to our collective future.

EdReports