Redwood City School District Mental Health Counseling Program: Year 2 Implementation Study. Research Brief.

As the nation transitions from responding to the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to navigating its ongoing impact on youth and their communities, K-12 students continue to experience mental health and wellbeing challenges. In the fall of 2021, Redwood City School District (RCSD) placed a full-time, district-employed mental health counselor in each of its twelve schools in order to bolster district capacity to support mental health and wellbeing. 

As a long-time research partner, Stanford’s John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities (Gardner Center) conducted a qualitative implementation study that first year, designed to describe the role of the counselors, conditions that affect their practice, and general domains of impact that could inform program improvement and future evaluation efforts (Geiser et al., 2022). During the program’s second year of implementation (2022-2023), the Gardner Center conducted a follow-up study to document its evolution, specifically, how administrators and counselors perceive and operationalize the counseling role and what they observe to be early indicators of impact. This study aims to identify strategic opportunities for understanding and advancing the counseling program’s impact as it moves into its third year. 

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Redwood City School District Mental Health Counseling Program: Year 2 Implementation Study. Research Brief.