OUSD in partnership with Salesforce brought the Newcomer Wellness Initiative to their schools during the 2017-18 school year. This Initiative places a social worker in each middle and high school with designated newcomer programs. This team provides case management around critical needs, builds community partnerships, provides mental health supports, attendance interventions, and school culture and climate interventions with the goal of helping newcomers stabilize and build safe relationships in order to keep them in school. We will share context around newcomer students, some of the needs and concerns they experience and how our team creatively approaches this multifaceted work through a trauma-informed lens.

1. The Newcomer Wellness Initiative:
Oakland Unified School District’s Innovative Approach to Supporting
Recently Arrived Immigrant Youth

2. Presented By:
Julia Sitko, LSCW, PPSC and
Leticia Manzanares, LMFT
California School-Based Health Alliance Conference, 2019

3. Objectives
● All participants will leave this session with greater knowledge about
newcomer youth from Central America, including their reasons for
coming, their needs, and the challenges they face.
● All participants will leave this presentation with an expanded toolkit of
best practices, interventions and promising approaches to serving
newcomers in our schools.
● All participants will leave this presentation inspired and moved to
expand the work that their schools and districts are already doing to
support newcomers.

4. Newcomers in Your Schools

5. Welcome to OUSD

6. What is he carrying?
4

7. Context of Newcomers Within OUSD
Newcomers in OUSD as of March 2019: 3,007 which hovers between 8-9% of
our entire district population.
1,701 from Guatemala
475 El Salvador
183 Mexico
180 Honduras
174 from Yemen
Currently 624 of our newcomers are Unaccompanied Immigrant Youth (UIY)
*Newcomers are defined as immigrant youth who have arrived to the US within the last three years.
Majority of our students
come from the Northern
Triangle: Guatemala, El
Salvador and Honduras

8. Unique Newcomer Population in Oakland:
The Mam Community
Over 800 of our
newcomers and several
hundred of our non-
newcomers students’
home language is Mam.

9. Why are they coming?
“The nature of the violence is distinct in each country, but the proliferation of
gangs, narcotics trafficking, weak rule of law, and official corruption are
common threads.” (Council on Foreign Relations).
● Extorsion
● Corruption
● Gangs
● Violence against women
● Poverty
● Drought
● Food insecurity

10. How the Newcomer Wellness Initiative
Emerged
- 2007-Position was created for a Refugee
and Asylee Coordinator
- 2014- Position was created for an
Unaccompanied Immigrant Youth (UIY)
specialist.
- 2017- Salesforce granted us funding
to create the Newcomer Wellness Initiative.
- We currently have a team of 9 social
workers and MFTs as well as a program manager and two social work
interns all of whom are bilingual in Spanish/ English supporting 13 middle
and high schools and one elementary.

11. Newcomer Wellness Initiative Goals
1. Improve attendance and retention rates of secondary
newcomers.
2. Establish and strengthen school systems to support
secondary newcomers.
3. Increase secondary newcomer access to clinical services.
4. Strengthen Tier 1 systems that create a safe, inclusive,
and positive environment for newcomers and all students.

12. Flow of how newcomers are identified and
supported from day one

13. Vignettes Activity

14. Our Model:
First things first…..getting basic needs met

15. All supports are provided through a
trauma informed lens

16. Cultural Humility
Tips for how to work from a culturally humble lens:
● Don’t assume you know about a student or their experience. Come from
a place of honest/ sincere curiosity. This is better than pretending to
know.
● Let the student be the teacher, they are the expert on their experience.
● Using shared references is appropriate for connecting, but does not
make us experts
● Understand that the challenges in accessing some newcomer families is
complex and that we need to approach with cultural humility.

17. Newcomer Wellness Initiative Tiered Interventions

18. Partnerships, Partnerships, Partnerships!
Just one student alone may be receiving services from 5-10 service providers.
Coordinated wrap around care is our goal.
REAL EXAMPLE: Gilberto (UIY student):
Centro Legal de la Raza: Receiving free legal representation for asylum case.
Unity Council: Receiving job placement support
East Bay Agency for Children/ Alameda County Social Services: Receives MediCal benefits, needs
someone supporting MediCal case management through EBAC’s Central Family Resource Center
Children’s Hospital: Receives mental health services at school health clinic run by Children’s
Hospital
Soccer Without Borders: Engages in soccer and receives mentoring from Soccer Without Borders
Bay Area Community Resources: Receives gang intervention/ prevention services from safety
specialist who partners with school site.
Covenant House: Was homeless, now lives in long term homeless shelter

19. Best Practices/ Tips for working with
newcomers

20. Critical Do’s and Don’ts: 101
● Don’t ask them specifics about their traumas/ journey, etc. Let them share
when/ if they are ready (as student said in video).
● Do give them opportunities to honor positive aspects of their culture, customs,
rituals, food at school.
● School should be a safe place for learning. Not a place to dig up/ share traumas
in unsafe contexts. For example DO NOT have assignments or class discussions
asking them things like what their border crossing journey was like, or why they
came to the U.S. These conversations require safety and containment.
● Be cautious about not highlighting the idea that everything is joyful (i.e. What
fun activities did you do over summer?! How will you celebrate the holidays,
etc?). Often these times are more challenging.
● Be aware that many of them have missed a chunk of childhood and have been
functioning as adults, are parentified and/ or are very independent. Their
childhood experiences may not parallel those of American born kids, so the
experiences and expectations will be very different. Just hold this in mind.

21. Co-care and self-care are essential to mitigate the
effects of compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma

22. Thank you for coming today!
Contact: Julia Sitko, LCSW, PPSC
julia.sitko@ousd.org OR Leticia Manzanares, LMFT
leticia.manzanares@ousd.org

24. Materials/ References
Newcomer Wellness Initiative Program Overview
Far From Home and Alone: Unaccompanied Immigrant Youth Find Refuge in
Oakland Unified

25. Role of school systems in identifying/
serving newcomers
School systems are key to making this work effective and efficient!
Systems that have been helpful in our work include:
● Student Assignment Office they must be supportive or have systems in
place at the time of enrollment!
● Coordination of Services Teams (COST)! Please be sure that newcomers are
being referred and discussed and triaged to services as needed!
● Attendance teams: Many newcomers struggle with attendance for various
unique reasons (kids out of school to help parents translate, kids staying home to
help babysit, youth out working, lack of transportation and other basic resources,
etc). Have appropriate and supportive interventions!
● Newcomers enroll throughout the year, have an orientation protocol to help
them settle in. This may include a tour, review of school policies, uniform policy,
intake to identify needs, and assignment of a buddy to support them (doesn’t
have to happen in one day!)
● School culture and climate teams: Be sure you are intentionally working to
integrate newcomers!

26. Secure Base Teams
**This concept comes from Homeboy Industries, Los Angeles.
Secure base is a multi-disciplinary, strengths-based,
individualized team meeting that we strive to
implement for students with multiple service providers.
Each student who has multiple service providers will
have a secure base team monthly and will be facilitated
by the newcomer navigator and might include a
therapist, drug counselor, academic tutor, gang
intervention specialist, etc.
The purpose of the secure base team meeting is to
check in with the student to see how the supports in
place are working for them and to identify ways for
improved collaboration or any changes needed to
improve service provision to meet the multiple and
complex needs of the student.