Urban Sanity: Examining Administrators' Perceptions of School-Based Mental Health Programs in Oakland Unified School District
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The school-to-prison pipeline, a process of criminalizing students through discipline policies in schools that put students in contact with law enforcement, plagues urban schools and communities across the nation. Every day students from marginalized communities, specifically Black and Latinx students, are over-disciplined through punitive policies in urban schools. These policies can lead students to become involved in juvenile delinquency or even eventually become incarcerated. This disturbing national trend that leads students from the schoolhouse to the jailhouse negatively impacts the incarcerated student and the student’s family. It also decreases the likelihood of a student being a successful citizen and exacerbates racial inequality in prison and society. Many students who are victims of the school-to-prison pipeline suffer from immense trauma and mental health difficulties that often go unnoticed and untreated. Scholars suggest that mental health programs may be beneficial to students living with trauma and experiencing harsh disciplinary punishments, but there is little empirical research that explores these suggested mental health programs and their impact. Understanding teachers’ and mental health professionals’ perspectives can provide important information about whether school-based mental health programs and practices are effective in improving outcomes for punished students. This research aims to examine the perspectives of administrators on current mental health programs in schools where students experience punitive disciplinary outcomes, specifically in low income, urban schools in Oakland, CA. This research incorporates data on disciplinary outcomes from the years 2011-2015 of students in the 88 schools in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), as well as interviews with 15 school administrators and mental health professionals in OUSD. Teachers and mental health professionals perceived school-based mental health programs as effective for some students experiencing harsh disciplinary sanctions because the mental health programs provide coping mechanisms for students living with trauma. However, they believed that there were significant challenges in accessing school-based mental health programs, specifically for Black and Latinx students. Teachers also reported that some of their peers lacked cultural competency to support students’ mental health needs.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 13, 2019 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Farrell, Makaila |
|---|---|
| Primary advisor | Dr. Arnetha Ball |
| Advisor | Dr. Jackelyn Hwang |
Subjects
| Subject | Stanford University Department of Urban Studies. School-to-Prison Pipeline |
|---|---|
| Subject | Punitive Discipline Policies |
| Subject | Trauma |
| Subject | Mental Health |
| Subject | Mental Health Professionals |
| Subject | Oakland Unified School District |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Farrell, Makaila (2019). Urban Sanity: Examining Administrators' Perceptions of School-Based Mental Health Programs in Oakland Unified School District. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/td226pz0880
Collection
Stanford University Urban Studies Capstone Projects and Theses
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- Contact
- makailaf@stanford.edu
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