 With that, I'd like to introduce our first afternoon speaker. It's my great pleasure to introduce Dr. Valerie Royalty-Quant, who's an experienced and passionate K through 12 educator. She received her BA in Women's Studies at UC Santa Cruz, her teaching credential at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and her MA in Education Administration from San Jose State University. Valerie completed her doctoral work in Social Justice Educational Leadership at San Francisco State University with a focus on preparing educational leaders for queer inclusion in schools. Dr. Valerie-Quant has been a high school teacher and an assistant principal, as well as international baccalaureate program coordinator at both the elementary and high school levels. She has an experienced public school principal having served at both the elementary and middle school after several years as the director of student services assessment and accountability at the district office level. Valerie has returned to the front lines of school leadership as a middle school principal, where she tells us all the action is. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Valerie Royalty-Quant. Good afternoon, everybody. I am so pleased to be here having previously been in the audience and really enjoying the Calciana Symposium. It is a little bit intimidating to look out there and see all the people, but it is quite an honor. And the first thing I want to do is, since we all know now which generation people belong to, I'd love to see, please raise your hand if you work in K-12 schools in any capacity. Wow. OK. And if you work outside of the school system in some capacity, it should be the rest of you. OK. And college also. And if this is the biggest screen you've ever seen, could you please raise your hand? OK. OK, thank you. But I seriously do want to start out by saying thank you. Because having been in education for a while, I recognize that this is the hardest and most rewarding job that a lot of us can do. There are no easy answers. Every day is different. A lot of times we come home and we're tired, we're exhausted, we don't know what to do, and we keep going. Because we know that by working with our youth, it's the most important thing that we can do and spend our time and effort learning about. So thank you for the work that you're doing. So on that note, I have some things to share today that I've learned along my journey. They are a variety of different things. They are not the right answer. But as I was looking through this entire group today, I thought, and I was telling Michelle this at break, if we as a group, these 500 participants, had time to interact with each other and share the best practices that we are using ourselves in our individual practices or with our school sites or our agencies together, we might come up with the answers that we're looking for. So that's the wealth of experience and knowledge in this room, and I want to recognize that. I wrote some notes because as the other presenters moved through their presentation this morning, there were a lot of connecting points for me. So part of my presentation will be connecting those points that happened in the K-12 world, but also dealing with anxiety and mental health in schools and our reaction to that, but also the social media components. So this, of course, is a representative article. We read a lot of articles. People who work in schools and with students generally continue their own learning on a daily basis. And the irony is not lost on me that this is from an Instagram edutopia article, and maybe you've read it. We are very, very, and I would say increasingly more, concerned with the mental health of our students in our schools. And we have a lot of work to do around that. And that. It's a beautiful screen. Thank you. Talk amongst yourselves. Keep talking. No. Oh, look at that. Technology. So I am the principal of a middle school right now, and I've been the principal of a middle school before and an assistant principal of a middle school. I also was a middle school student. So that means by this point in my career, I've spent 13 years in middle school. And I can tell you, yes, I am living the dream every day. I'm living the dream. But for many of us, when we learn to interact with that age group specifically, although it does also apply to elementary and high school, we come down to these three questions. Our students come in to us and work in their lives trying to answer these things. Who am I, which has everything to do with identity, self-perception, self-esteem? Do I belong, which is social relationships, communication, reflective in their peer groups and their colleagues and their siblings, their families? And more and more so, am I safe, has become a school topic and a school concern, not only for educators and parents and community members, but more and more for students as we drill and practice and hear the news about what is happening regarding school safety more and more. So if I had to narrow the three questions that we want to try to answer down, these would be the three questions that we try to answer. So as I go through my talk today, there are some of our responses to those questions that we've tried to proactively respond to, which I'll get to a little bit further on in the presentation. And some of them are reactive responses to those questions. So I'll try to point that out as we go. Has anybody seen this video, Screenagers? Oh, great. OK, some of you have. We have in my district in Palo Alto regular quarterly parent education nights. Just this week, just on Wednesday night, we showed Screenagers at my school. There are two parts to this, and I wanted to show you just the first part, a little bit of this second Screenagers video. I made a film, Screenagers, to understand the risks of screen time for young people and solutions for healthy use. My daughter, Tessa, comes with me at times to talk. And while on the outside, she looks fine. On the inside, she's been really struggling emotionally. Even though I'm a doctor and feel competent at work, at home, I'm feeling completely lost. How to understand, Tessa, and how best to help her? I know lots of teens are struggling with hard emotions like stress, anxiety, and depression. Think about something that stresses you out. Not being good enough. I'm hurting inside, but I don't like to express my feelings that much. I have a very hard time dealing with stress about school. I see people doing fun things, and then my anxiety just kind of takes over. I want to talk to my brother. I want to talk to my sisters. I'll just be in my room all day doing nothing. He would always say, it's because you don't understand. Seeing your child's suffering is not something that is easy. Teens often tell me how they turn to screens as their main coping skill. When I get stressed, I tend to grab my phone and just start scrolling on social media. What I worry about is the young people who say, when I'm feeling depressed or stressed or anxious, using social media makes me feel worse, but I do it anyway. I want to understand the science of teens' emotional life and what can be done in schools and in our homes, including my own, to give all teens skills to navigate challenging emotions. When parents stepped in and tried to help their children with the task, they showed decreases in stress, and their children showed increases in stress. She would say, this is how I feel, and how could I respond more helpfully to her? My relationship with my parents was then to where it is now. It's like night and day. If you weren't invited, what would you do? How would you talk to the girl? I like to learn from the high schoolers. This is hard work. Everyone has to speak. That was the first time I've ever talked about how I felt about my dad. I definitely used to think that going to the counselor would be some sort of side of weakness on my part. This is a choice, and this is what I choose to do. And I especially don't choose to do it because you told me to. I don't know if that sounds familiar every day. This is a great film, and I highly recommend it. And our parents really enjoyed it, and it was interesting to have this showing just on Wednesday, because we invited parents to come with their middle school students. And I remember the film ended, and I hear two of my seventh graders looking over, and one of them says, mom, get off your phone. And in Palo Alto, this is a real issue. It's a real issue that we talk about a lot, because many of the parents at my school are those who work at Google and work at Facebook and have invented the apps. And the conflict between control and access is a daily concern, and then the impact on family life is something that is forefront for everybody a lot of the time. So that's just a great resource for everybody. Middle school. This was a great and very recent, actually, article in The Atlantic. So raise your hand if the best years of your educational experience were in middle school. OK, that's a big nobody, but middle school is so, so very important for so many reasons. And I think that for educators, K-12 educators, the rubber meets the road in education, but middle school is where the speed bumps are. And I think that we work to help students navigate those speed bumps a lot. And as several of our presenters already mentioned today, there is positive implication for stress. And specifically, when we get through elementary school and transition into middle school, we need to teach our students explicitly what positive stress looks like and reactions to positive stress. We come into the secondary environment, and our students need to learn how to be students. We tell them we're getting them ready for high school, which is getting them ready for college, which is getting them ready for life. And their anxiety level, their natural levels of anxiety, tends to rise. So if we don't complement that natural rise in stress and anxiety with the skills necessary to be able to be resilient and to act into that stress in a healthy way, then we start to recognize all of the imbalances that our students are experiencing for a variety of reasons. So we have a great responsibility there as educators to be proactive in that. We know that there is rising anxiety in youth. For those of us who have been in this realm for a long time, we see it. We see the changes in whatever we're saying is the causation. Social media, the political climate, immigration status, poverty. Right now, I can tell you at my school, yesterday, we had a huge briefing regarding the coronavirus. And for our families, our community, our school district, and our students, that is a looming cause for anxiety. The difference is between the good stress and this type of anxiety is the recovery. When students are able to manage their stress around things like test taking and learning, there's a recovery period. The difference with this type of anxiety is that our students generally don't get to recover or they don't recover sufficiently enough to be able to live balanced and healthy lives. I'm glad the screen is this big, because otherwise, I don't know if you'd be able to see this. But we at the school sites have to be able to gather information about our students' experiences. And we are able to do this in a variety of ways. And I hope that you can see some of that data there, and I'll try to point it out. We do the California Healthy Kids Survey. And if you are in education, you might know what this is. The California Healthy Kids Survey surveys our students, and we do it in seventh grade. High schools do it in ninth grade, on a variety of topics having to do with social interactions, substance interactions, how they feel at school, relationships with bullying, self-perception, identity questions. And then at the school site, we are responsible for taking the information from these surveys and doing something with it, either implementing programs, talking to our parents, boosting our counseling services. So I actually looked at our data, specifically related to this question, which is during the past 12 months, did you ever feel so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more that you stopped doing some usual activities? And that's a very strong question. The part that is distressing to me and to the people who I am working with at my school is the obvious increase in the subgroups, the demographics that I show. So if you can see, this is the general response at the bottom. There's an increase longitudinally from 2014 to 2018, from 14% to 18%. From our female students, there's an unfortunate increase from 17 to 24. Male, not so much, actually. When we get into our racial and ethnic demographics, the ones at the top, American Indian, and on top of that one that doesn't show is African-American, it's because in our district, those numbers are so small, unfortunately, that we can't get good data on trends at the California Healthy Kids Survey. But our Latino-Latina population also shows an increase from 18 to 29% in answering that question. And white and mixed race identified students also show a slight increase. Where we see the biggest increase here, actually, is with our free and reduced meal students, which is our low socioeconomic student group. And this is a huge area of concern for us, that they're self-identifying that increase in stress and feeling sad and hopeless. So it's our responsibility as educators to take this data and to do something with it. We have also made sure in Palo Alto, in other school districts that I've worked in, that we have codified supports and structures for students in our board policies. So if you work outside of a school district and you might be less familiar with how board policies work, they are the structures that guide the decision making and, generally, the funding for district schools. Make sure that you go and look at your school district's board policies to see if your groups are supported and if there are structures in place regarding gender identity, regarding homework. That's a new one that I'll talk about later. At-risk students, guidance and counseling services. We have a full board policy regarding student use of technology and also suicide prevention and related mental health services, which, as you may know, is a huge situation for Palo Alto. And I'll talk a little bit more later about how we've come out of that tragedy into some proactive work. This is actually a diagram from Monterey Peninsula. Is there anybody from Monterey here? OK, one person. Hopefully you recognize this. MTSS means multi-tiered systems of support. And it is what school districts are operating under. It's just like an umbrella. The idea with MTSS is to pull in all the supports and services in order to support kids with academic, social-emotional, and behavioral supports within the school system. That involves a lot of partnership, a lot of communication, and a lot of work in order to approach the holistic experience that students have in their lives and in schools. So using MTSS, or the multi-tiered system of support, at my school, this is what our counseling system looks like. Wow. So we have done a lot of work in Palo Alto around counseling. Because as I mentioned, out of tragedy and a community that has been very affected by anxiety and mental health and stress for a lot of reasons, we have developed a very robust and active counseling system. So at my school, we have counseling and we have MDT, which is multidisciplinary team. I was speaking with Erica from PVPSA, who actually, yeah, right? That's what I thought. I learned about multidisciplinary team when I was at Watsonville High School. And the multidisciplinary team, OK, yes. Please. Right? So you learn these things as an educator and you take them with you. Because if you have best practices or you learn something great, a system or an organization or a protocol, you want to use that wherever you go. And if we have the chance to share all that resource with everyone here, it would be amazing. So I brought this MDT idea from my time in Pajaro. And we are able to have a nurse. We have a student success coach. We have our assistant principals. Occasionally we have the district social worker. And we have our special education case managers who also participate in the MDT. The pyramid here shows how we handle social emotional concerns and also the response to intervention in our counseling services. All of our students, for whatever reason, have access to what we call tier one counseling. So tier one counseling is, I had a fight with my friend at lunch and I'm really mad. Or my teacher said something to me that really made me uncomfortable. And now I'm feeling really sad about that. Or my parents aren't getting along and I need somebody to talk to. So all students can anticipate a conversation with a tier one counselor. We also have grade level guidance counselors. So we have a sixth, the seventh, and an eighth grade counselor who rotate with their cohort. So that counselor knows those kids and those parents for their entire journey through middle school. And I know that different schools do it different ways. I've done it different ways in other schools I've been in. But I find this an effective model for relationship building, which is the number one connector to school. So if students can have excellent relationships with not only their teaching staff, but also their counselor, then that's a great way to start. If students need more than that, if they need more than the contribution from the tier one counselor or their guidance counselor, we do have CASI counselors. CASI is a great external organization that has a relationship with our school district and we have a lot of great counseling and community counseling agencies that have great relationships with school district. We also have an Aki counselor. Our Aki counselor is, if I can remember it correctly, Asian American community involvement. Because we have a high Asian population, we know that it's extremely important to have a culturally proficient and connecting counseling relationship as well. So that is very important to us and he is a great addition to our counseling triad. ERMS is educationally related mental health services and our school psychologist who get up into the higher level, the crisis zone, and also into students with IEPs. They can work with students who have 504s as well and that is the smallest population and many times the most fragile and needy population. It is not lost on me because I've been in a variety of districts that Palo Alto had a strong and resourceful response to a lot of the tragedy that happened several years ago with the experience with suicide in Palo Alto Unified. And out of that came a very, very robust counseling system, policies, structures, protocols. And I'm not taking that for granted and I know that there are a lot of school districts where having a robust counseling system is more difficult because of the financial implications. It is a challenge to provide everything that we need students or we think that students should have. Once again, I'm glad for the really big screen. But what I wanted to show was kind of our process for the multidisciplinary team. When we go through a multidisciplinary team meeting, we have them every Monday. The guidance counselors actually bring in students of concern. Students of concern can come in through team meetings which they have weekly with the teaching teams at our site. And as you can hopefully read through, they do a full holistic study of the student. What's going on with student? What are some background factors that we need to know about who they are and what they are? What is their educational status, their grades? Do they have any family issues going on? Might they have any health issues? And so we can really study the student in order to provide what they need in the school environment. We also do a lot of progress monitoring. So our progress monitoring looks like this. It's a very big spreadsheet. We assign particular interventions and supports depending on what the students need. And then we monitor it over time. So every two weeks, every month, every six weeks, every grading period, we wanna come back to those students to see whether the things that we have tried to support them with are moving the needle at all. So we wanna know if they have an IEP. We wanna know if they have 504. We wanna know if they have EL status. VTP is actually our Tinsley program. It's a busing program from East Palo Alto. So we wanna know if they're a VTP student. Many times those students coming from East Palo Alto to my school do not feel that sense of belonging, do not feel connected to the school environment where a lot of my students are coming in talking about the vacations that they took over spring break or how was skiing in Switzerland over winter. It's mortifying in a lot of ways for students to come in and have to engage in an environment where they feel like they don't belong to that environment. We want to also make sure that kids have the support classes that are necessary for them and other supports, community supports, dream catchers. If they're seeing the Cassie counselor, if they're seeing the tier one counselor, if they need a dog, if they have attendance issues. So this is a huge indicator for us of something going wrong with a student or some students needing help or support is if they're attending regularly or if they're attending irregularly. A lot of times we get stuck. We don't know what to do. We don't know how to help students or we've tried three interventions and supports and we haven't gotten to the point where we feel like the student is gaining traction or they're still exhibiting school avoidant behaviors or we're still worried about them and their team is worried about them. So this is actually something that we learned to do as part of the multidisciplinary team which is a consultancy protocol. A consultancy protocol is one person bringing a student of concern into the group, discussing the issues, discussing the interventions that may have been tried and then having the group without the presenter just discuss the student and everything that they could try, everything that they know from dealing with similar situations or resources that they've had that they can share and then looping the presenter back in so that everybody can share their best practices and the information that they have. As I mentioned before, chronic absenteeism is a huge red flag for us and if you are familiar with the California State dashboard, fun. The new metric is chronic absenteeism and we are actually responsible as a school to dig deeper into those students who are chronically absent. The reason for that is if students are missing 10% or more of their school days, which is the chronic absenteeism metric, we're worried about them, they're missing their instruction, they're falling behind and as you can see from our data, who is missing school? The students who are missing school, I can tell you are our Pacific Islanders for the most, African-American students, Latinx students, our homeless students followed by the next group up. So if we're in the red, this is a student group that for some reason is feeling too stressed to come to school, does not feel like they may belong there, does not see themselves connected to the school environment and we have a responsibility to address that. According to an article in Psychology Today, just a couple years ago, two to five percent of students refuse to attend school due to anxiety or depression and just in speaking with our school psychologist just a couple days ago, this is an increasing number. So because we have a responsibility to invite students into the school, their parents into the school and incorporate a sense of belonging, we need to figure out who our students are who don't feel like they are represented and belong to the school environment. Special education and 504 plans could be a whole entire presentation on its own. But for those of us in the school environment who interact frequently with 504 plans and IEPs, we have a responsibility called Child Find. Child Find says that if you suspect that a student has an issue that requires either a 504 for accommodations either for behavioral, emotional, or academic benefit, we have a responsibility to find them, to serve them, possibly to assess them and provide them what they need in the educational environment. And that takes everybody in the school environment to do that. One of the trends that I really, really love actually and I'm seeing more and more of this is wellness centers. And I know that in our district we have them at the high schools. Does anybody have wellness centers at their schools? Yes, okay. I think if we asked this question a few years ago nobody would have been able to say that they did because this is relatively new but I can tell you that the wellness centers at Pali and Gunn High Schools are amazing. So I went to visit these two sites because we have an opportunity, I have an opportunity at my site actually to develop our own wellness center. And what they do is this. They're advertising to their school population to their parents in the community says that they can deal with stress, anxiety, and general well-being, depression and suicidal ideation, sexual orientation and gender questions, family issues, chronic illness, drug and alcohol use and abuse, violence, sexual health education, peer relationships, and cultural adjustment and identity issues which is huge and encompassing. When you go into the wellness centers what they do is they allow you to be there to take a break for a short period of time unbothered. You have to sign in because we're all accountable for attendance but then after that time period if you need to stay or if a student needs to stay they just check in with them and they make sure that they're okay. Do you need something? Do you need to go see a counselor? Do you need to see the nurse? Is there anything that we can help provide you to get you back into school? I think having the wellness centers enables students to take the mental health break that they need in the school environment and it confronts those issues that we used to have where students would get stomach aches, headaches, those physical manifestations of stress and they'd go to the nurses and they'd go home and that means that they're missing valuable instruction. Just, gosh, yeah, just a couple of weeks ago I found this in the Ed Cal Magazine. This is an elementary school who is starting a similar element. Students find a safe place to manage emotion. So I think this is a trend that we can welcome into our schools in a variety of ways and it also involves a great deal of partnership with outside agencies to help us provide this kind of service of wellness, comprehensive wellness for our youth in our schools. So I was asked about discipline crises in school safety. Discipline crises in school safety is a huge topic and I referred to the suicide prevention toolkit that Palo Alto had to develop years ago because of the suicide experiences in the district. And since then, this model has been used in other school districts in a great way. Electronic acts are now part of Ed Code. So the 48900 Ed Code is the suspension and expulsion list and electronic acts were added into that. So we are responsible for intervening in any act electronic or otherwise that impacts the school environment. We're also now responsible for using a multi-tiered system of supports and restorative justice practices to intervene in any of those bullying or harassment behaviors at the school site. So if you're not familiar with the Ed Code, we are actually mandated to intervene in a variety of proactive ways. To save time, I won't show this video on restorative practices, but more and more restorative practices are coming into the school environment. We wanna know that students have the empathy building skills to fix what they may have broken. So often we're using restorative practices in our restorative circles in disciplinary interventions to enable students to grow their empathy, to enable students to practice their social skills. Our counselors, our assistant principals have been trained in restorative questions and restorative questioning in circles. We're also working on grading and assessment because in my community, achievement is one of the top stressors for both parents and students. So while this may not work for some districts, for ours, it really does, we wanna teach students how to fail. And we wanna tell students that it's okay to do things again, that they don't have to learn on a timeline and that there are things that they can do to fix the mistakes that they made without being punitive and without causing high levels of anxiety. We are doing work with curriculum and instruction for inclusion. This is a list of the Senate bills and assembly bills that have passed since 2012. Many of our students who don't feel a sense of belonging don't feel a sense of belonging because they have not been represented in curriculum and instruction traditionally. And we know that that increases the amount of stress around identity and belonging in the schools. So very quickly, we have a sixth to seventh and eighth grade curriculum. In our sixth grade, our sixth graders get social emotional learning and an SEL course that involves mindfulness. In seventh grade, we have a sex ed program that it now follows the California Healthy Youth Act in seventh grade. And it's appropriate for all races, genders, sexual orientations, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, which is new. And yes, it does discuss, right? It does discuss masturbation. It does discuss the culture of consent, which is exceptionally important. And it does discuss gender orientation, sexual orientation, gender identity and everything that comes with that with a mandate to be positive and affirming. In seventh grade, we have challenge day. Have any of you done challenge day? Oh, highly recommend it. I also learned that at Watsonville High School. In eighth grade, we start with a digital citizenship around sexting. So this is part of our digital citizenship program through common sense media, which is an excellent resource. I'll skip through that. The eighth graders also get the culture of consent lessons about how to give consent, what is consent and our teachers get their own training. So our teachers learn about all the applications that students are using to talk to strangers online, for example, how to hide their apps behind their other apps. And how they're using apps that we are never going to know because we didn't have the same experiences. Just last Saturday, we had a parent education summit. These were some of the topics that we had at the parent education summit. And I find that connection with parents is exceptionally important in the school environment. If we can do more connecting with our parents in parent education, then we can all work together to better serve our youth. This is one of the common sense media examples of how to use tech in your home. This came out at the parent summit this Saturday and we have this now available at the school site. So I apologize for going a few minutes over time. But as I was thinking about concluding this presentation, I thought, we all, you all do such hard work. And I wanted to remind everybody that while we need to model and communicate and connect and we need to serve as that person for our youth, we also need to take care of ourselves very deliberately, intentionally, and proactively because it's very difficult work and our kids need us to be doing this for them and with them. So thank you very much.