Daybreak Health CEO Alex Alvarado talks to Superintendents nationwide about topics and trends affecting their school communities such as student mental health, chronic absenteeism, academic outcomes, and more. These Superintendents represent districts of all sizes, both urban and rural, which range in their minority enrollment and socioeconomic status. Our goal is to capture different voices and perspectives on the challenges facing our schools today.

Dr. Whitney Oakley has just commenced her third school year as Superintendent for Guilford County Schools (GCS), however her connection to the district goes back decades. Raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, Dr. Oakley attended GCS from kindergarten through high school before beginning her career as a teacher at Frazier Elementary. Her leadership journey began in 2012 with a focus on curriculum, learning, and professional development. As the district’s Deputy Superintendent and Chief Academic Officer, Dr. Oakley developed the district’s instructional framework and standardized high-quality curriculum across elementary, middle and high schools to ensure equitable access to education. 

Today, she’s committed to strengthening GCS through Better Together, the district’s strategy for making its schools the best place to learn, work, and grow. “We're the only K-12 business in town that takes all kids, no matter what challenges they're facing or supports that they need,” Dr. Oakley says. We spoke to the Superintendent about engaging the community to guide Better Together, which is the culmination of more than 200 community conversations and feedback from 8,000 stakeholders, and the systems that are in place to carry it out. 

‍Building the Best Place to Learn, Work, and Grow

In May 2023, GCS launched Better Together, a five-year strategic plan to accelerate learning, hire (and keep) top talent, and prepare students for a modern world. At the heart of this plan is a commitment to “strengthen health, wellness, and safety in schools,” a promise born of 100 days of in person meetings. Hundreds of people showed up to community consultation sessions, Dr. Oakley says, and they kept coming back again. 

Between conversations with parents and grandparents, teachers and students, business leaders and district employees – regardless of age or zip code – there was one common thread. “[The community] said that they cared deeply about the impacts of the pandemic. They wanted to make sure that kids could thrive at school and safety and mental health came up at the top of the list, over and over,” Dr. Oakley says. One year into Better Together, she’s made sure that conversation remains open. 

‍“We try to make it a two way street,” she says, which means consulting with parents at individual schools before new health services roll out. “We do message testing with parents to say, ‘Here's what we're planning to do, what worries you? What are you excited about? What do other parents need to know and understand?” It’s conversations like these that give Dr. Oakley and her team a clear idea of what needs to happen next.

‍Making Mental Health a Priority

“In our district, chronic absenteeism almost doubled post COVID. In elementary schools, it went from 7% to 28%, which is crazy,” Dr. Oakley says. That’s around one in three kids missing more than 10 days of elementary school a year. Under her watch, those numbers have slowly improved, and Dr. Oakley attributes this to increased mental health services. 

‍“The school-based telehealth and mental health services allow more equitable access when we think about care, when we think about burdens on working families, ” Dr. Oakley says. “We know that historically, when we were able to provide access [to mental health services], students did so in person, which might have caused them to miss out on more instructional time. And so now these visits are easier [via teletherapy], they are more convenient, it's more streamlined. It's also better for families who have transportation barriers, and we have lots of that here.”

Dr. Oakley called out the importance of having the right leadership in place to build strong teams that care about what’s important. Sometimes having people who have held various positions at a district are able to do “bigger things, faster.” Dr. Alex Tabori, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of Mental and Behavioral Health Services at GPS and he and Dr. Oakley have worked together for ~12 years in different capacities. He now oversees the whole mental health umbrella. 

Dr. Kimberly Steinke serves as the Chief Exceptional Children and Student Services Officer at GPS and took on student services in addition to exceptional children in a very large school district. Dr. Oakley said, “You have to get the structure right in order to make sure that the help gets to where the help is needed.”

With this leadership in place, the district’s school zones each have a mental health lead teacher responsible for making sure the right training and resources get to individual schools, Dr. Oakley says. Across the district, almost 400 teachers have gone through the National Youth Mental Health First Aid program; last year some 1,050 students attended around 9,000 mental health support sessions.

‍“Next year we'll expand partnerships to support kids and families who have intensive trauma-based situations, and continue to de-stigmatize the idea that needing mental health support is negative. It’s the work we all have to do.”

‍Future Proofing Mental Health Support Services

Come September, post-pandemic ESSER funding will end. “Like all districts across the country, that cliff is very real for us,” Dr. Oakley says, which is why she put systems in place 18 months ago to make sure that GCS would not have to cut mental health services. “[Pandemic] funding was very helpful in terms of different types of recovery as a district, but we only used it for things that were meant to be short term fixes,” she says. “We did not hire a bunch of people. We did not start a program that we then had to end.” 

Instead, Dr. Oakley and her team put their energy into grants and partnerships to continue to support mental health resources for students and staff. For example, GCS secured $14.8 million in federal government funding through the Prioritizing Resources to Impact Student Mental Health (PRISM) Project. Future funding could come from the NC Department of Health and Human Services which has promised $7 million for school-based telehealth in North Carolina. 

Those funds are being used to provide mental health services to students through partnerships like the one with Daybreak, providing evidence-based teletherapy programs to middle and high school students with qualified clinicians, and to recruit and retain school-based mental health clinicians. Because building internal capacity in a “mental health space that is now very much part of public education” is important, Dr. Oakley says.

“I think ultimately bridging the gap that exists between a student's education and their health, whether it's physical health or mental health, provides equity. When we think about educational achievement, you can't have one without the other,” Dr. Oakley says.