We All Win: Creating a System of Coordination of Services in Mammoth Unified School District

Kelly O’Neill, Community Schools Coordinator at Mammoth Unified School District, is a strategic leader in education and public policy with a deep commitment to empowering communities through education and health initiatives. Her passion for building equity-centered supports in schools has helped catalyze innovative, collaborative systems across Mammoth USD. 

In this episode, Kelly shares how the Coordination of Services Team (COST) breaks down inter-agency silos, strengthens partnerships with community providers, and creates more efficient, effective ways to meet the needs of students and families. 

Transcript

Intro Music

Joanna: Welcome to Beyond Academics Connecting Classroom and Community, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of community schools and explore how they're transforming education for students, families, and communities. We are hearing from educators and community members who are at the forefront of creating change and meeting the needs of the community, be it basic needs, healthcare, social services, support, or social emotional learning.

I'm Joanna, your host Integrated Supports Outreach Specialist with San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools. And in today's episode, we're honored to welcome Kelly O'Neill, Mono County Office of Education's community school coordinator, who's going to share how she's navigating community schools in rural communities in California, specifically in the eastern central part of California.

Kelly O'Neill has been a Community Schools Coordinator at the Inyo County Office of Education for three years and has been in the education field for 10. She is a strategic leader in education and public policy and helps empower communities through education and health initiative. Kelly brings a bright energy to Mono County, bringing her extensive knowledge in curriculum and instruction, elementary education, educational leadership, grant administration, and public policy analysis.

She has a sincere and authentic passion for building equity centered supports in schools and has helped catalyze systems for Mono County School District. We're so excited to have your expertise and we are so honored to have Mono County highlighted for our podcast. 

Kelly: Well, thank you for that welcome. 

Joanna: Yes, of course. So to start, I wanted to dig in and learn more about you in how who you are. So can you share a little bit of about yourself and how your values align with the community schools work? 

Kelly: Sure. Thank you so much. So as you mentioned in the bio and introduction, I have 10 years of experience in education. I started as a kindergarten teacher I've taught kindergarten, TK first grade, and I did those things before moving into school administration and public policy. When the opportunity came about to move into the community schools work, I was very excited to work in something that I saw as the intersection of public health and public education.

So for us here in Mono County, this is a rural frontier County, and it's been really wonderful to have the opportunity to work in programs that help reflect the makeup of the community and the makeup of the schools, and living in this tight knit rural community. I saw how firsthand, how vital it is to have systems that address whole child needs.

I, for one, know that my child is safer when our community is safer and more well supported. So it's been a wonderful opportunity for me and my family. 

Joanna: I love that your passion as a kindergartner teacher. I'm sure that you have a lot of patience and love for children, and now having you as our coordinator and your wealth of knowledge throughout the education system has really, you bring a great lens to this work.

So thank you for sharing that. I wanna dig a little deeper about the population you serve and how Mono County describe the demographics and what you're facing in this rural community. 

Kelly: Certainly. So Mono County is very beautiful. It's a rural mountain region on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Our largest town is Mammoth Lakes. That's where I live, and I happen to serve primarily, uh, Mammoth Unified School District. So Mammoth Lakes is home to both seasonal tourism and outdoor recreation, but also a year-round community of working families, many of whom face economic challenges, housing instability, and limited access to services.

We are definitely in a service desert very far from any type of shopping and, you know, extensive, specialized medical services, we all have to travel either out of the county or out of the state for those types of things. So in Mono County, we serve a very diverse student population, including a significant number of Spanish speaking families and students who have to navigate a history of trauma, poverty, and displacement.

Joanna: Thank you for sharing that. Learning more about the needs of rural communities and how the services are a higher need because there are like no regional services. So thinking about how schools are connecting and being that bridge for these students is really important. So I wanted to ask you, what are some of the challenges that you face in supporting community schools?

Kelly: So, as we've kind of mentioned before, one of the biggest challenges for rural community schools is a lack of service providers. Even when you have funding, there just aren't always professionals available that can deliver the care to students and families. For us, being in a Frontier County, we have an equity gap in how funding is distributed.

Our schools serve students with real needs. We are sometimes excluded from coordination funding because of our smaller size or our lower unduplicated pupil count. So it forces us to be very strategic in how we stretch our resources. If you don't have a buffet of community service providers to select from, then you really have to drill down on, well, can anybody provide this service? How do we provide those services? Who can we partner with? And in what cases, how can we reach outside of our community if needed? 

Joanna: Interesting. Yeah. These are really common challenges for small rural communities, and I'm so happy that you can bring some of those strategies in this podcast today. So with that, I'm curious to hear how you're able to really activate and catalyze these systems of support.

And if you don't mind sharing a little bit of the work that you're doing that you know, for the past three years in Mono County. 

Kelly: Certainly the cornerstone of our work is definitely our coordination of services teams. This is a system that has now been adopted district-wide across Mammoth Unified School District. So our coordination of services teams meet for an hour each week at each school site, and it really functions as a school-wide weekly SST, where we layer and track increasing levels of student supports, school-based and community-based, student and family supports. And through this service we've provided everything from clothes, food, academic support, so much mental healthcare support. Tons and tons of school-based mental healthcare support.

We've also helped families navigate other agencies. We've helped families work with Mammoth Lakes housing, public health. We've had students that faced housing instability that have now moved through the whole process of, uh, temporary shelter housing to long-term housing, to having nonprofits pay for their housing for a year to having their homes fully furnished for, you know, in that kind of situation. So we've really been successful in navigating with, uh, county agencies and the few nonprofits that do exist in Mono County.

So, for example, as I mentioned, we have mammoth Lakes Housing. That's a housing nonprofit that can help provide housing support. We also have IMACA, Inyo, and Mono advocates in Community Action. They run our food banks and they help stock our food pantries on campus. So really, it's not a one size fits all situation any, any request for support that comes in is tailored to the student and family needs. This is a system that we've now been operating for three years, and we've now decided as a district to embed all SSTs into this system, and they're putting together this great outreach campaign for next school year where there will be like business cards and flyers throughout the community.

So anybody who has any type of student concern can just quickly scan a QR code or click a link and elevate that concern directly to us. And through this system. Some of the successes we've seen is: other agencies are coming to us if they know that something is about to happen in a student's life. So if the Sheriff's department knows that an eviction is pending and children are involved, the cost team is notified.

So we will often know weeks ahead of that eviction and we can wrap around that family leading up to that event. 

Joanna: That is an amazing, incredible system you have there. Just really bridging all the stakeholders involved and just so impressive because these are things that schools traditionally have not been involved in.

And the, I'm, I'm curious to learn about the impact, maybe some stories that you, you know, have witnessed or things, successful stories, if you don't mind sharing. 

Kelly: Certainly. Well, it's so wonderful that you say this and all of the attention that we're getting for this system. When I first started three years ago, we weren't even really supposed to say wrap, like other agencies did wrap and that was their thing, and we had to really figure out what we were going to call, what we were doing. And now those agencies are coming back and looking at the success of what we're doing and applauding us for our successful school-based wrap.

So we're very proud of just even the shift in ownership of language has been wonderful. And then, you know, when you zoom down to look at student successes, like I mentioned, we had a student happen to be a teen parent who faced some housing instability.

We, always cost involved our teen parents, we just wanna keep an eye on them. So we had been supporting these teen parents already for over a year prior to the housing instability. So we were able to act immediately, help them get the classifications that they needed to obtain housing vouchers and and emergency housing.

And then by putting that family on a pathway to where they could stay involved with school and then engage with higher education. Right. We've. We've improved the life of not just that student but their children. So we feel that a multi-generational impact in that particular case. So, so many places like that, we've aided in cases of financial abuse.

We have found that when. If there is a student on student crime, we tend to wrap around both the victim and the perpetrator because they both need support as they navigate the legal process and their life post whatever the law enforcement involved event was. So there really is no one size fits all situation for us.

Now, in our third year of doing this, we received cost referrals for 7.5% of all Mammoth Unified School district students. And what we like about this intervention is that it's a fluid intervention. It kids aren't stuck in the intervention. We have a mechanism to close the case and say, we've done our job, we've supported you, and we'll be here if you need us again.

So we're very proud of that as well because it also helps take some of the impact off of our service providers who don't necessarily know when to close the case or when to say, okay, you know, job well done. You can move on. Now on that one note, it's not just impacting the students. We see a positive impact on service providers and school administrators because now they have a place where we can all go, we can talk about it, and then we can move on.

So it's also cathartic for the people involved. And you know, like I mentioned before, we had a coordinator working under us about attendance issues and she never didn't have a mechanism to close cases. But now because of this system, she both has a mechanism to communicate with administrators regarding.

Attendance issues and then also a mechanism to say, okay, we've seen improvement. We can close the case, and her caseload can get lighter. So it's also helpful for the adults, not just, or you know, for the, the workers in the situation, not just the clients. 

Joanna: Mm, I hear you. Yeah. It sounds like everyone is able to be, like, you're removing that communication gap that exists with the, the community providers and then the school and just building these positive relationships among the community. I'm curious, how do you think the, the community relationships have really tightened? I'm sure, and I'm just curious like how that culture shift has, how do you feel about that? 

Kelly: I do. So it, it removes inter-agency walls and it increases friendships because if you look at, you know, the, if you look at the cost framework there, you always start with like a warm welcome. Something to break things down. So we start with either a professional or personal check-in, and we just share something about our lives. And we've all noticed that we've become friends over time. And then. So through that, you know, we've become friends. We're also leaning on each other's expertise. It's no longer just one person trying to figure out how to deal with any situation.

We now have a team of professionals looking at situations. So I, there's definitely been an increase in our ability to collaborate inter-agency wide. And then, you know, on that note, we also have this ROI document this interagency release of information. So that document allows us to cross the HIPAA and FERPA line. And that document was created prior to our community school's work even beginning. It was something that was developed by, you know, the six primary child serving agencies in a county. So. Public health, child welfare, the hospital, the police department, probation, et cetera, et cetera. So we have this agreed upon document that allows us to cross that HIPAA and FERPA line. So we implement that a lot.

So we all know that we're protecting each other's professional liabilities, you know, so we have the culture of friendship. We have the professional framework that allows us to break down those interagency walls. And then with all of that, we publish a lot of data reports and we share them with our agency partners so they can then go back to their agencies and say, look at these success stories.

Look at how many jackets we've handed out. Look at how many, you know, referrals for mental health care we've successfully completed. So. Then there's a very tangible document that is, shows evidence of all of this hard work in play. 

Joanna: When I hear you, I just think of the word collective impact, because that's truly the work that you're doing is ab like, it's beyond everyone's role.

It's it's everyone's role and it's so beautiful to see how you're just weaving in those, those supports and, and making sure that it, you know, we're abundant with, with how we're allocating our resources and finding our resources and helping each other rather than, you know, thinking competition, right?

Kelly: Yes. We're always quick to share the credit. We always say that. These successful stories didn't happen because one person, they happened because we had a system. We had a system to catch student needs and concerns. We had a system, a caring system of support that allowed interagency collaboration.

So it, it really comes back to systems for us and for us coordination of services teams, they don't cost you anything. It's a culture does, you know, it's just the time. That it takes to sit down and have the meeting and the culture of collaboration and somebody on that team, you know, is hopefully tech savvy enough to whip up a report at the end that says, look at how great our, our collaboration has been.

Joanna: I love it. And where are they hosted? Out of curiosity, which organization hosted. 

Kelly: So certainly. So I work for the County Office of Education, but I serve Mammoth Unified School District. So as part of our community schools initiative, I do have a classroom, but it is a community classroom. We host a lot of different things out of it.

So basically our coordination of services teams meet at each school site. We travel to the site, so our elementary school team meets in the elementary school office conference room. Our middle school team meets in the middle school principal's office. Our high school team, which is our largest team, as you can imagine. They have the most service providers. They meet in the community schools classroom, which is my office. And then at the alternative school, we meet in the superintendent's conference room. 

Joanna: Awesome. So I just wanted to highlight like you can have these meetings with your team anywhere. You don't need a like a special place.

Kelly: Absolutely. No.

Joanna: All just putting them in the same room. 

Kelly: Yes. And everything you need to start it really, we have to circle back to Alameda Community or Center for Community Healthy Communities in Schools. That's the team that put together the cost toolkit. You know, we're standing on top of somebody else's work, so we wanna give credit where credit is due. We've just taken their framework and run really, really far with it. 

Joanna: Wonderful. Well thank you for that plug so that our listeners can look into that resource for them to start that cost strategy. Well, I'm really excited to hear Mono County is also doing a lot of great work around sustainability, so I'm curious to hear more about that from you.

Kelly: Oh, thank you. Yes. Okay, so we have been thinking about sustainability from the beginning. We, for us, the, the rural commitment to community schools. We wish it had been more for us and we only have one implementation grant. We no longer have any county coordination. So really to achieve our district-wide visions, we've been blending and braiding from the beginning.

So we have created a district-wide vision and we've been using one site implementation grant to help fund that vision district-wide. So in addition to that grant, we've had to weave in other funding sources. So at our high school level, we've gone really far in implementing shared leadership, student voice, community curriculum, and expanded learning opportunities through blending and braiding the career.

So the ccap, I believe it's Career College Access Pathway grant, the Early College Middle College grant, and the K 16 collaborative grants. So what we did with those grants was we funded a teacher leadership team, and that team has created a healthcare pathway. That next fall has enrolled 21 students.

It will be taught completely by community college teachers on our campus. The days that we don't have the community college instructor there will be filled with career learning opportunities, field trips, internship opportunities for the students in that pathway, and at the end of that year, they will have completed four college level courses towards a career in healthcare, completely free and supported on the high school campus.

And that was always a part of our community school's vision. At the high school, we wanted to create a community classroom where students could be trained to be members of our working community, where they, so they wouldn't have to leave, they could live and work where they grew up, and they could stay here and this would be the ladder into their future career. So we achieved that vision through other grants.

And then for our cost team and the school-based wellness providers that we've hired, we're really leaning into the multi-payer fee schedule and LEABOP. We have a lot of work going into that. This year we are, this summer, we're focusing on aligning our MTSS and all of the services that we offer as a school with those fee schedules.

So we can be very clear at the beginning of the school year, these are the services we offer and this is the system that we will use to try to recuperate the funding for that. So, you know, we have different funding sources for different initiatives. We also have a ski PE alternative learning program.

We're hoping to have that funded long-term with some community bond measures that fund arts, culture, and community. So we'll be seeking some long-term sustainability from our town council for that element of our community schools plan. But yeah, for us it's really blending and braiding having a strategic co cohesive overall vision and then just working towards that vision with all of your funding sources.

And I have to say that's only possible if you have a strong relationship with your financial team. So our chief business officer is very much included in our coordination of services teams, not the, the week over week operations, but he comes to our annual improvement planning days, and then same with our community classroom task force.

Whenever they need to talk about budget and long-term plans, he comes to advise on that. So we definitely keep him included. So we all have, you know, the same vision and plans for the funding. 

Joanna: Fantastic. It sounds like you have been being, have been able to be creative, innovative, and just a true partnership with all the people involved to make sure this community school's funding doesn't end right when the grant ends. It's gonna continue until till the end of time because we really want the resources to stay in Mono County and I love the creativity of bringing in the city as a resource. That's something I haven't heard yet, so I'm really glad that those are the relationships that you're building.

Kelly: And I do have to say there is one more very strategic point on this. You know, if you are trying to hire people, staff that you want to align with the Medi-Cal multi-payer fee schedule, you do have to think about, you know, the union component of it. So in all of our job descriptions, we have been putting that in there that they, they will be expected to participate in private insurance and Medi-Cal Billback services.

So the people that we've hired with community schools, funds and these other grant funds, because they're eligible, because they have bachelor's degrees, they're, they qualify as wellness coaches. We put that in their job description and then moving forward, that will have to be something that will go to labor negotiations.

If you want more staff to participate in that. So again, having your superintendent and your financial people involved in that from the beginning is very important because at some point it will come down to, you know, this is an extra duty and there will be labor negotiations. So we've also been very strategic about including it in job descriptions.

Joanna: Wonderful note and advice for the, the folks that are listening to make sure that they have those people involved from the beginning. Any other advice that you would like to share to communities, small rural communities or, or the community as a whole in California? Like what, what is something you want to share?

Kelly: So we are so excited about this community school's vision, and for us, the things that have really worked, like cohesive vision, long-term vision, and then like grit, dedication, commitment to that vision over time. Like you have to stick with it. You have to hold that vision's hand. You have to help it grow. You have to build it with your team and your community, and that's the way that we've been able to move so far, so fast is, you know, just a cohesive vision and partnership.

So I think that's good advice for anybody embarking on community schools work. Then for my rural friends out there, really lean into your coordination of services teams. For us, it is so cool that we have one set of providers that goes site to site to site. We all know the whole story. We all know what's going on.

So you know, if big brother is in crisis, we're gonna keep an eye on little brother at the elementary school. You know, we are a neighborhood, we're a team, and rural schools really have the opportunity to leverage those relationships, you know, what we lack in a, in abundance of providers, we make up for in the quality of our relationships and our connections to one another.

So rural communities really do have the opportunity to provide great services to their whole community through this cost process. 

Joanna: Thank you so much, Kelly, for sharing all your insights and sharing how the vision, you know, having a consistent vision, creating those spaces where people are connecting, building that partnership, changing that culture.

Building those systems, as you said, and truly wrapping around your community. It's, it's so great to hear the work that you're doing and I'm so thrilled to see how, what's to come and how, you know, how more students in Mono County and their families are, their needs are being met and they're gonna be really just in gratitude that they're, that they have the, the Office of Education that has their back.

So thank you so much. 

Kelly: Oh, thank you so much. The one thing I've been really trying to emphasize in all of this is Mammoth Lakes is a community that cares and we have the opportunity to really like highlight that caring work done by our partners. So thank you for the opportunity to uplift Mono County and our coordination of services, team partners, and our wonderful students and our beautiful landscape.

It's been a great opportunity. 

Joanna: Thank you for joining us at Beyond Academics Connecting Classroom and Community. Where we dive deep into the stories from people who are making a difference in school. They're the change makers who bring community schools to life by making an impact for families and children by meeting their need.

Don't forget to connect with us on social media accounts. You can find us on X at SI_RTAC, Instagram at SB_IEBRANCH, at our website, CCSPPSIRTAC.ORG, tune in for more episodes.