• Video Collection: Attendance Matters, Kerman!, Attendance Matters, Parlier!, and Attendance Matter, Tulare!
  This set of videos describes the prevalence, causes, and academic consequences of chronic absenteeism and features how three rural school districts in California’s Central Valley use cross-sector practices to boost attendance.
  
• Video: Every Student, Every Day: A Multi-Tiered Approach to Reducing Chronic Absence in Elementary Schools
  This video describes a multi-tiered approach to reducing chronic absence and features practical examples of preventive and intensive student interventions that address barriers that interfere with school attendance and success.
  
• Info: Helpful Links about Multi-Tiered Attendance Interventions
  Explore resources—including worksheets, reports, and videos—to deepen your knowledge of multi-tiered supports for attendance and how to design your own approach.
  
• Materials: Reducing Chronic Absence Awareness Campaign Materials
  Parlier Unified School District’s campaign to reduce chronic absence includes a suite of materials that send powerful messages that daily school attendance matters and there is support to help students address barriers to missing school. These materials include an infographic, a billboard, and a checklist to help families.
  

• Video: Trauma-Informed Approaches: A Central California Convening Keynote Presentation Highlights
  This video features excerpts of a keynote presentation by Dr. Martha Merchant, a leading expert in the field of applying trauma-informed practices in school.
  
• Video: Voices from the Field: The Importance of Trauma-Informed Practices
  This video features two leading experts on trauma and resilience discussing the importance of schools and other youth-serving organizations integrating a trauma-informed approach to policies, programs, and practices.
  
• Video: Now You See Us: Youth Helping Adults to Better Understand Youth Behaviors
  This video features youth presenting information about ways adults can better understand youth behaviors and ways to strengthen student supports in school, social service, and health care settings.
  
• Video: Six Strategies to Promote Student Resilience
  This video presents highlights from a presentation by Dr. Flojaune Cofer on key actions in six areas that adults can use to address youth trauma and promote resilience.
  
• Video: Trauma-Informed Strategies for Building Relationships with Students
  In excerpts from a presentation by Dr. Sam Himelstein, viewers learn about research-based skills for building relationships with children and youth that promote healing from trauma.
  
• Video: Postvention is Prevention: Considerations for Responding to Youth Suicide
  This video shares highlights from the keynote presentation by Stan Collins on concrete strategies for youth suicide postvention, which are actions taken after a student's death by suicide.
  

This series of annual events is designed to strengthen the capacity of rural Central Valley educators and other professionals who work with children and youth to understand the research on trauma and resilience and to deliver evidence-based interventions to students needing additional support to succeed at school.

In October 2017, the series launched with an introduction to the research on trauma, especially in the context of teaching, learning, and child development. Dr. Martha Merchant, a clinical researcher from the HEARTS Program (Healthy Environments and Response to Trauma in Schools) at the University of California San Francisco, provided an overview of the neurobiology of trauma exposure and how it affects learning and behavior in the classroom. See a video of highlights from Dr. Merchant’s keynote presentation and a video of an interview with Drs. Merchant and Leora Wolf-Prusan, another presenter who led the closing plenary session, which focuses on promising trauma-informed strategies.

“Resources for evidence-based mental health assessments and interventions will be helpful in my organization’s practice.”

“What was most helpful was learning about strategies that can be implemented in schools.”

In October 2018, the second annual event focused on promoting cross-sector approaches for delivering effective trauma-informed mental health practices. Mary Donnelly-Crocker, an award-winning and nationally recognized nonprofit executive director of Young & Healthy in Pasadena, California, provided an overview of the research on what it takes to work across education, health, justice, and social service sectors and included practical examples of cross-sector, trauma-informed work from her experience.

“It was nice to have so many sectors represented at the same event.”

A particularly powerful breakout session was developed and facilitated by youth. They led an interactive activity to help professionals who work with youth to better understand how to support students struggling with mental and behavioral health challenges and offered practical and promising strategies for strengthening resilience, relationships, and environments necessary for encouraging students to seek and accept help. See a video of highlights from the youth-led session.

“I received some very good ideas to take back to my administrators and teaching staff. Mostly I enjoyed learning about the importance of integrating youth voices.”

In 2019, the event focused on building youth resilience through a variety of strategies, with a particular focus on the research finding that positive adult relationships can help mitigate the negative impacts of childhood trauma. Participants were presented with examples of how to build authentic, supportive relationships with children and youth. They also explored how to maintain organizational cultures that leverage positive relationships to sustain their work in education, healthcare, and social service settings. See selections from two keynote presentations from Dr. Flojaune Cofer and Dr. Sam Himelstein on the event archive page.

“A beautiful blend of research and expertise with practical and authentic application.”

The 2020 convening was delayed and switched to a virtual convening on account of the global COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2021, practitioners from the Central Valley convened online to build their understanding of and address youth suicide in the region. Participants learned from state and local leaders about practical information and resources for understanding, responding to, and preventing youth suicide. Visit the event archive page to learn more about this event and watch keynote highlights on strategies to respond to a student’s death by suicide.

REL West is providing coaching to several rural Central Valley cross-sector district teams to use evidence-based practices to boost attendance and to strengthen multi-tiered supports for students who are chronically absent.

For example, in Parlier Unified School District, the focus is on identifying students with attendance challenges and providing them with individualized tiered interventions that address barriers to daily attendance. REL West is assisting a local team to use data to track student attendance, to work with and through community-based agencies and families to support student success, and to provide school-based health care, trauma-informed supports, and other evidence-based interventions for promoting attendance. The team produced a video documenting its approach to reducing chronic absence, a suite of materials aimed at various audiences to reinforce the message that attendance matters, and an infographic that shows district gains.

In Tulare City School District, the focus during 2017-2019 was on reducing chronic absence in the Transitional Kindergarten-Kindergarten grades, where the rates are highest and there are readily available opportunities to help students and families establish stronger daily attendance routines. REL West helped the district conduct Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles of inquiry to implement and collect data on health-based interventions intended to increase attendance. REL West is now planning with the district coaching sessions for teachers, school nurses, and other student support staff to implement additional strategies to improve attendance.

Fresno County is the first rural county in California to receive a state subsidy to expand early childhood education opportunities for low-income families. REL West is helping the county, through the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools, to guide the planning process; to develop communication strategies for engaging hard-to-reach prospective families, including working with and through school-based health centers; and to support the collection and use of implementation data to monitor progress.

REL West helped the county to conduct and analyze service provider and end-user baseline data to inform implementation of the initiative and to develop a logic model. Building on this, REL West provides continued support to the county to monitor implementation, and to examine the use and outcomes of outreach materials intended to engage families and to promote the importance of school readiness and of the initiative in general.

Read our blog post about how REL West is supporting innovations in early childhood education in Fresno County.

While school districts and school-based health centers serve the same at-risk students and families, it can be challenging to share data across the sectors, limiting information that can be used to better support student academic, social, and health needs. To address this challenge, REL West facilitates a statewide working group of information- and data-sharing education and health care experts that assists the California School-Based Health Alliance (CSHA) to develop accurate, vetted, and scenario-based information that CSHA can share on its website. The content design calls for case-based materials to help users better understand what is permissible in the context of common information and data exchange scenarios, short topical videos, documents such as vetted consent forms and memorandums of understanding for districts, and references to other promising practices for sharing education and health information and data across sectors.