Fresno Unified expands mental health support for students, families

Fresno Unified is trying to make mental health help easier to find before a student’s stress turns into missed class, behavior problems or a crisis call. The district has been using community outreach and its health initiative to steer families toward support, with Abigail Arii, LCSW-PPSC, the district’s director of Student Support Services in the Department of Prevention and Intervention, helping lead the effort.

On its public pages, Fresno Unified says the Department of Prevention and Intervention is committed to building partnerships with students, families, community agencies and businesses, and to connecting families with services that help students succeed. The district says those services now include clear pathways for students who need a mentor, social-emotional support, help finding the right school, or guidance on attendance requirements and discipline procedures.

The district’s Social Emotional Wellness and Support page says Fresno Unified provides suicide prevention, intervention and postvention services under California’s AB 2246. That work includes education and awareness campaigns about warning signs, instruction for secondary students and training for staff members across the district. Clinical School Social Workers, the district says, work with students and families on barriers to learning tied to academics, attendance, behavior, mental health and problems at home.

Attendance is part of the same push. Fresno Unified’s districtwide attendance program, Everyday Counts, frames consistent attendance as a building block for student success. That makes the mental health campaign more than a wellness message: it is tied directly to whether students show up, stay engaged and avoid falling behind.

The current outreach also fits into a longer shift in how Fresno Unified handles school-based mental health. In 2021, the district proposed increasing its social-emotional support budget from $5 million to more than $35 million over five years, and it said it was adding counselors, psychologists and social workers as students returned to in-person learning. In 2023, the district ended contracts with outside mental health providers, showing that its approach has continued to change.

More recently, Fresno Unified and the Fresno Teachers Association worked together to give students access to 24/7 mental health resources through SimpleConnect, and the district has also posted information on the Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative, which is designed to expand access to school-based mental and behavioral health services and reimburse districts for those costs.

For Fresno families, the message is that mental health support is now part of the school system’s basic responsibility, not something left entirely to parents to piece together on their own. The real test next school year will be whether those services reach students early enough to protect attendance, strengthen classroom climate and keep small problems from becoming larger ones.