In an effort to “address the ongoing need for youth mental health support and suicide prevention,” Palo Alto City Council Member Greer Stone and Palo Alto Unified School District Board President Shana Segal proposed a three-way partnership with the Jed Foundation, the City of Palo Alto and PAUSD at a City of Palo Alto Board Meeting on April 1.
According to their website, the Jed Foundation offers customized, strategic school district mental health plans, consulting services after “tragic events” and workshops to improve student mental health. Students at schools that completed the Jed Campus program reported they were 25% less likely to attempt suicide, 13% less likely to make a suicide plan and 10% less likely to experience suicidal ideation, according to data from “A Decade of Improving College Mental Health Systems: JED Campus Impact Report” and a Healthy Minds Network survey.
However, after being introduced to the Palo Alto City Council, no vote was taken to refer the Jed Foundation to the school board, who instead opted to gather more community input and data.
“Basically, it looks like the school district formed yet another mental health committee,” Stone said. “They’ve been doing this for years now, … and there is the potential that through those internal discussions, the school board or the school district might say, ‘Yeah, let’s go with the Jed foundation.’ So it wasn’t a rejection of Jed, but it also wasn’t an acceptance.”
In the tentative first year of partnership, Jed outlined four major areas of focus: postvention support after suicide or other “tragic events,” facilitating youth engagement in mental health through task forces, advising on the citywide mental health campaign and providing workshops to understand youth mental health better.
The Jed project would be facilitated by a team of nine experts, including Jed’s Mental Health Expert Lead, Dr. Katie Hurley, who previously served as a Clinical Director for The HELP Group, the largest family-based nonprofit in Los Angeles.
In the first year, proposed fees totalled $125,000, and the district would be expected to pay about $67,258 for the nonprofit’s services, according to a Palo Alto Online article. Currently, PAUSD spends $24 million on mental health resources, which include on-campus wellness centers and psychologists, free rides via Palo Alto Link, a multi-tiered counseling referral system and long-term therapy partnerships with TBH and Allcove.
PAUSD Assistant Superintendent Yolanda Conaway agreed with board members who recommended that the Jed partnership should be further evaluated before being referred to the school board.
“From my perspective, introducing an external agency to do an external assessment at this stage risks really duplicating efforts or misaligning with the strategic direction already outlined in our mental health and wellness plans,” Conaway said.
However, Conaway acknowledged the possibility of a Jed partnership in the future after gaining more community input.
Despite current efforts to address mental health in PAUSD, 24% of Palo Alto High School juniors reported chronic sad or hopeless feelings, according to the 2023-2024 California Healthy Kids Survey.
“There’s no deadline [to decide to partner with Jed], which concerns me, because within the government, these things can take a long time,” Stone said. “This is a crisis that needs to be addressed now, and to continue to kick the can down the road and refer us to yet another committee was, I think, the wrong decision.”
