Marin extends school mental health service contracts
May 5, 2025
By Krissy Waite | kwaite@marinij.com
PUBLISHED: May 4, 2025 at 1:05 PM PDT
Marin County has extended contracts for mental health services for some students for another year.
The Board of Supervisors approved the extensions at its meeting on April 22. The programs are contracted through the Marin County Department of Health and Human Services.
Four of the contracts are for students who have come to the U.S. within the last three years. The combined contract amount was increased from about $632,000 to about $949,400.
These contracts support qualifying students in San Rafael City Schools and the Novato Unified School District, said Matthew Carter, an official at the county department.
Carter said the services help a high percentage of students who arrive in Marin every year, many coming from poverty and experiencing trauma in their country of origin. He said these students are at a higher risk of failing or struggling to acclimate to a new place and culture.
“If we don’t support these students effectively, they will be vulnerable to negative influences, like the rising gang culture in Marin County,” Carter said.
One of the contracts is with Canal Alliance for services in San Rafael schools. The nonprofit runs a group program for families that have been separated during migration and reunited.
Elaine Tannous, a manager at Canal Alliance, said there is a lot of stress and tension in families that have been separated and reunified. The goal of the seven-week, multifamily program is to improve communication and teach stress management tools like breathing, stretching and mindfulness exercises.
“When you have a different experience, it can be hard to understand the perspective of the other person,” Tannous said.
Many children and family members that have been separated have unanswered questions regarding the time spent apart. The program hopes to help create a shared narrative within the family and uses a book about difficult separations — “You Weren’t With Me,” by Chandra Ghosh Ippen — to begin talking about these feelings, and about their hopes and dreams for the future. Families make their own book following a similar structure.
“It’s not uncommon for kids to wonder, Will you leave me again? Do you really want me?” Tannous said. “We’ve had families report back saying, we’re spending more time together, we’re more affectionate, we’re talking more.”
Four other contract extensions increased the combined expenditure from $1.7 million to $2.6 million. The contractors give mental health support to students in the Novato, Shoreline Unified and Sausalito Marin City school districts.
The contracts also include a drug and alcohol abuse prevention program partnership with the Marin County Office of Education. The program is being offered in seven middle schools.
Carter said the services aim to catch early signs of mental health struggles in students and intervene — by engaging family and school support systems and making the appropriate referrals — before they worsen and need psychiatric hospitalization or residential treatment.
North Marin Community Services holds several of those contracts, both for immigrant support and school services. Cheryl Paddack, the chief executive officer, said the services help fill a gap in underserved communities. The nonprofit’s work in schools includes increasing access to mental health services and breaking stigmas around therapy.
“Then part of that is also facilitating workshops, stress management and suicide prevention,” Paddack said. “So all really timely topics. We also have a strong history of being able to hire Spanish-speaking therapists, so that’s part of what we offer through these subcontracts.”
Carter said the contracts are funded through the Mental Health Services Act, and schools are chosen through a yearly community comment process. He said that in general, these school districts contain the greatest percentage of students from underresourced and vulnerable populations.
Paddack said, “If you really look at the data in Marin County, these are all gaps between the public and private sector and nonprofits such as ours, human service nonprofits, can really step into these spaces as trusted providers with Spanish-speaking and other underserved communities.”
