Spotlight on Mental Health: Healdsburg High’s New Student Wellness Center

In 2023, Healdsburg High School opened a new student Wellness Center, designed as a welcoming and safe space on-campus for students to go during school hours, talk with trained staff (in English or Spanish), and access a range of wellness services. While the new center expects to add more services and resources in the near future, mental health services are already available on-site and via partnering organizations. 

We first heard about the new Wellness Center in our conversation in May of this year with Zenia Lemos Horning, lead psychologist and program specialist at Healdsburg Unified School District. To learn more, we spoke recently with Kim Harris, the Wellness Coordinator, about how the Center works and how it has been received by students, faculty and parents in its first full year of operation at Healdsburg High.

Kim is a Marriage & Family Therapist and a northern Sonoma County native, raised in Windsor and Santa Rosa, who earned her graduate degree in counseling psychology from Berkeley’s Wright Institute. She did her first traineeship while a graduate student at the now closed Social Advocates for Youth in Santa Rosa. She returned to northern Sonoma County seven years ago to pursue her career in the region she is from. “It’s been really nice to be back here with my family and friends,” she says, “and to help give back to the community I was raised in.”

Can you describe your role at the Wellness Center?

The Wellness Coordinator role includes program development as well as case management. I am a school-based therapist—this is my third year in the Healdsburg School District—so I see a small caseload of students as well. I supervise our mental health interns, or trainees, supporting them with any issues they may be facing in their professional development working with students. It’s an interesting variety, no two days are ever the same. 

What are the service offerings at the Wellness Center?

We have a large focus on mental health. Anxiety, depression, body image—all of those are very common among our students. Eventually, as the Wellness Center expands, we want to be able to offer more services as well, partnering with different agencies to support our students’ physical health, and supporting students struggling with substance use. Eventually we would love to have a teen health clinic on-site a couple of times a month. Those are areas we want to expand into, but right now we feel we do have a pretty robust mental health offering. 

“There can be a lot of chaotic things going on in the lives of students outside of school. Even if it’s for ten or 15 minutes during the day, it’s important that they know we can be that safe landing place for them.”

Kim Harris

Is there a timeline for that expansion?

This year we hope to focus on more physical health resources for students, and maybe next year start to expand into substance use and teen health clinic offerings. Within the next couple of school years we hope to have all that up and going. One thing we’re working on adding this school year is a mobile dental clinic. We’ll have one dental day at each of our district’s four school sites this year.

Who is the first person a student meets if they visit the Wellness Center?

My coworker, Christina, the Wellness Outreach Specialist. She’s there to welcome students when they come in and orient them to our drop-in space. She was hired at the end of last school year, and we’re so grateful to have her. Christina is bilingual in Spanish and English. Some of our students are new to our school, new to the country, and just learning English. They know if they go to the Wellness Center, they can talk to Christina. It’s also helpful for our families to know they’ll be able to easily communicate with someone on the Wellness Center staff.

How many graduate trainees are on staff?

We have two mental health interns on staff. One is in the USF Santa Rosa program. Our other trainee was hired by SCOE [Sonoma County Office of Education]—SCOE places interns at different schools across the county—and she’s going to school at Sonoma State. She’s also bilingual, so she sees a lot of our Spanish-speaking students.

As a supervisor, what do you see as the challenges for trainees working with students?

Our trainees are brand new to the counseling experience, so part of it is supporting them through their own nerves, which is totally normal when you’re getting started. In terms of working with students, it’s important to meet them where they’re at. A lot of students are coming to school with many outside stressors. Whether it’s financial stress in the family, juggling a job or maybe doing sports, or siblings or family members going in and out of the juvenile system, it’s making it hard for them to focus while they’re at school. I encourage focusing on being a trusted adult on campus for them, and being flexible with your own therapeutic agenda, as the best way to reach a teenager at our school site.

Are there other staff in the mix?

We also have partnerships with outside agencies—CPI and Side By Side are partners of ours—and they come onsite to do counseling as well or provide it offsite. Other folks who interact with the Wellness Center include our academic school counselors, who sometimes do low-level social and emotional work with students and families as they’re checking in around grades and graduation requirements. We interact a lot with our special education department, too. Those students often have counseling through their IEP, their Individual Education Plan. But if they don’t have counseling and need that support, they are always welcome to come and receive mental health counseling here. In that regard, we work closely with our school psychologist, Zenia Lemos Horning. It’s a good mix of support for the size of our school. Our school overall is fairly small, we have about 500 students.

How have students responded to the Center in its first full school year?

A lot of students are looking for that space on campus where they can go and know that they’ll be listened to and feel supported. Just this Friday, Christina and I were talking to one of our students who comes into the Wellness Center everyday during break and lunch. This is a student who has been in the foster care system and has often had to move from one school to another. It’s a point of contact for him. We asked him, ‘What would you want people to know about our Wellness Center?’ He said if you need somewhere to go and feel respected, a safe place to be, then this is it. He was telling us he’s never going to forget us. There can be a lot of chaotic things going on in the lives of students outside of school. Even if it’s for ten or 15 minutes during the day, it’s important that they know we can be that safe landing place for them.

This was part of the conversations leading to the opening of the Wellness Center. We’ve had a lot of students in the past feeling overwhelmed and just leaving school. We asked, How can we better help these kids while they’re in school and give them what they need here? Those students who do feel overwhelmed and would otherwise tend to leave campus, not come back for the rest of the day, can now come to the Wellness Center. Maybe they spend a little more than 15 minutes here. We’d rather have you here for 30 minutes and then feel like you can go back to class. We’ve seen it really helping, and we hope that it continues to help.

What has been the response from teachers and parents?

It’s been overall very well received from staff and, most excitingly, from parents. Some parents are struggling to get their kids to school due to mental health reasons. Knowing there is somewhere on-site for their kids to go during the day is very reassuring for them. We had a presentation last year for our Spanish-speaking families and took them on a tour of our Wellness Center. There were several parents almost in tears. They told us, my child needs this. And the longer the Wellness Center has been around, the more our teachers are having positive experiences with it—maybe one of their students left crying and came back in a better mood, things like that. These teachers are doing so much and responding to so much all day long. It takes a little pressure off of them to know that Christina and I are here and we can help.