Addressing questions from families and students about where to find resources to address mental health, as well as financial assistance and support and community counseling, the Cloverdale Unified School District (CUSD)  has created an online resource center. The website, put together by the district’s wellness team, is a trove of resources and links that are both district and community-specific. The website will also be available in Spanish.
At the start of the district organizing its reopening plans, a wellness committee made up of students, parents, district staff and counselors and others was established. From there, the committee helped create what would become the wellness resources website. More specifically, the website was put together by the district’s counseling team with the help of SOS Community Counseling/Team Success.
“This whole team has been meeting twice a month as a large group and also as small groups, to design a wellness website to pull together lots of resources. Recently, we’ve talked with our PE teacher at the high school and she’s going to join the team so that we can factor in exercise and nutrition as part of our vision for wellness,” Superintendent Betha MacClain said.
Right now, the site lists resources for areas including: crisis and emergency; community counseling services; individual sections with resources regarding ADHD, anger management, anxiety, COVID-19, self harm, LGBTQIA+ issues, social media and cyber bullying as well as others.
“A lot of collaboration and meeting and getting feedback from the community and also listening to the board members and different resources (went into this),” said Washington School counselor Colleen Lurie during a presentation to the district’s trustees on Nov. 18. Lurie said that the team put together the resources based on “what’s going on,” as well as what they thought would be a good resource in addition to resources already available on the district’s website.
While the website primarily focuses on mental wellness with plans to incorporate physical wellness, it also has financial resources for the community. When planning what was going to be included in the website, Lurie said that financial resources “was a big topic that I heard (requested) from many people in the community.”
“There was talk about employment resources — there’s been a lot of job loss since COVID happened — financial assistance, and by doing this there’s a lot out there that the community may not know about. This is going to have good resources for our families to take a look at,” she said.
According to Lurie, they included resources located in both Sonoma and Mendocino counties, to account for CUSD students who may come in from Ukiah and Hopland.
“We did put in quite a lot of work pulling these resources, gathering this information on highlighted topics that we thought are maybe bigger issues or that we thought would be an issue later on,” Lurie said.
Included on the website is a counselor check-in form, where people can fill out a form if they or someone they know needs to speak with a counselor. From there, the district’s counselors will receive an email notification and reach out and follow-up with the person.
To view the resource center, click here- https://sites.google.com/cusd.org/resourcecenter/home?authuser=0

Previous articleSebastopol Wranglers hitting stride amid pandemic
Next articleWSCUHSD approves parcel tax measure, support for transient occupancy tax and prepares for consolidation scenarios

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here