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0:00:05.0 VB: Welcome to the Inclusive Education Project. I'm Vicki Brett.

0:00:10.1 AS: I'm Amanda Selogie. We're two civil rights lawyers on a mission to change the conversation about education, civil rights, and modern activism.

0:00:20.7 VB: Each week we're gonna explore new topics, which are going to educate and empower others.

0:00:25.5 AS: And give them a platform to enact change in education and level the playing field.

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0:00:33.9 AS: Welcome back friends.

0:00:36.3 VB: Hello. I feel like for some people...

0:00:38.7 AS: We are almost there.

0:00:39.8 VB: I know. This is like the last week of school, and then a couple of other people have a couple of weeks into to June. We're pretty much busy all through June, just depending on the different districts and charter schools and year round, like I feel like June is still one of those busy months.

0:00:54.5 AS: Yeah. I mean, my son's doesn't end until the third week of June, which like is [0:01:00.2] ____, which, it's just crazy. And I know that a lot of schools are now shifting to be more to like the end of May because this is when the AP testing is, and so we're trying to adjust to that. But we are in the thick of this last stretch. I think I've had like a ton of IEPs this week, and I'm sure, our listeners, if you attend IEPs, I'm sure you're inundated with all of that. So hang on, we're almost there.

0:01:30.3 VB: I know. We're almost there. And catching you guys at the tail end of May, which is also Mental Health Awareness Month, we've been posting about it all throughout the month, and we're really excited about our guest. Maria, thank you so much for coming onto our podcast.

0:01:42.5 MB: I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

0:01:46.3 VB: So can you just give a little bit of background for our listeners of who you are and what you do?

0:01:52.5 MB: Definitely. So I'm Maria, the founder and CEO of a company called Clayful. We started Clayful to address the mental health crisis, and which is why May is a very important one for us. And really looking at it through a preventative lens, right? So we as a society have kind of defined mental health as, okay, once we get to a breaking point, that's when we provide support. And we're really, really, really trying to turn that on its head so that students get support when they need it, but like, way before, right? Like when someone's being mean to them, when there's a test that they're stressed about, when they're having a fight with their sibling, and really supporting them in that moment to have the tools and the resources they need to get through that and become more emotionally aware and more resilient and build the toolkits so that when things get really hard, they already have the tools that they can pull from.

0:02:51.1 AS: It's so important... Yeah. I mean, we too often see kids when we're, I don't wanna say it's too late because it's never too late, but when things have gone really downhill, and we have kids who have significant school refusal and we're having to really implement pretty significant mental health services from residential treatment to completely changing their program to being home programs. And I think there's such a push in this country, like, I think the facade is, "Oh, we're caring about mental health, we're caring about mental health." But we're seeing such a delay in schools in not really being able to figure out how can we prevent it? How can we work towards... I think there's a lot of that push of, "Okay, well, we'll provide a lot more counseling for students," of like, after the fact responding to it, but we're not really doing anything to prevent, and I think it is so important what you're doing.

0:03:55.2 MB: Yeah, and look, there's been a big push toward prevention as it relates to curriculum, right? So you see more SEL, more wellness curriculum out there. And when we started looking at the market, we realized like, it's just not enough. We need more targeted interventions. I mean, think of any middle school or high school that you know out there that's, you teach them something one time. Like are they really gonna remember it the next time if like, if it wasn't relevant in the moment? Making content and making this like skill building hyper relevant so that they can use it when they need it, is I think one of the big challenges and the part that we're missing in a lot of the preventative work, so that's really why we're here.

0:04:37.0 VB: And did the pandemic kind of throw you into this type of population? What's your background with students and your involvement in curriculum and things like that?

0:04:49.0 MB: Yeah, so I started on the, actually on the curriculum side, so really thinking about instructional technology, as iPads and Chromebooks were making their way into the classroom, how do we leverage them as tools for learning instead of distractions? And I spent the bulk of my career there, the earlier part at Nearpod. So very much focused on, okay, how do we give teachers a tool that will essentially give them superpowers in the classroom? Like, help them leverage these devices in a way that's really powerful to drive learning to the next level, right? And that was such an incredible experience and really where I got to understand, okay, how do school systems work and how do we build a product that students are really excited to use, teachers can make the time to use, and administrators can pay for, because all of those pieces are really important. So had gotten really, really familiar with the school system as a result of that. And then as the pandemic was unfolding, saw an article about eight-year-olds dying of suicide. That was the moment where you're like, well, if we've gotten to a point where an 8-year-old knows what suicide is, let alone [0:06:00.1] ____ with it, something is wrong. We have to do something. And that's really what started this new journey.

0:06:09.6 VB: I remember when the article came out and for the area of law that we do, we do see that more often than not, it was nice for a light to be kind of shed on this epidemic in the middle of a pandemic. And with what Amanda was saying, in terms of kiddos in the mental health aspect, we saw a lot of our clients that may have had anxiety, depression, had IEPs really thrive in the virtual setting. But that was maybe like less than 3% of our clients.

0:06:43.5 MB: Yeah, a fraction.

0:06:47.4 VB: Yeah, it was just a small, small fraction, which was amazing to see, right? But then for the majority of our clients that may have had other learning challenges and then the collective trauma that we're going through in a pandemic as a society as a whole, there was just so many more layers where we had to essentially force school districts to really provide these services. And we say this all the time, if you think about, this as Amanda's example, of if you have 13 eligibility categories with a catchall one, a couple of them, they're a catchall, and all you got to do is walk, have your child walk through one of those doors. And then on the other side, whatever services that child needs to address those unique challenges, not just academic challenges, but social, emotional and vocational, it's the tripod of those three things, then the school district gets to provide it.

0:07:38.7 VB: And we were fighting to get those mental health services when we were in the middle of the pandemic. And now, because it was like, well, he has specific learning disability, and it's like that doesn't matter. Like that's eligibility category, right? But that now this child is showing symptoms of anxiety about returning to school, getting sick and all this stuff. And I'm really kind of curious to hear about how being able to connect students with mental health support in such a technologically advanced way, how has that been impactful? Have you seen the impact of that in school districts where it's being implemented?

0:08:17.6 MB: Oh, 1000%. I mean, think about our unique, let's say approach is that we connect students with a human to support them in 60 seconds. So I always talk about that the timeline between when a trigger happens, when someone's mean to you. You get that test back and you got a D, right? That time, and between that and when you work through those emotions, that is when bad decisions may get made. So by being able to support them right there in the moment, it's like, okay, maybe someone was mean to you and you wanna do something about it, and that can quickly turn violent. Okay, let's play that out. What happens if you do that? What are the potential consequences? Or like, do you just wanna let out those feelings and let them go? Is this really worth you getting in trouble for? Talking through all those things right in the moment makes it so that our kids are not making those mistakes or causing... We hear from teachers all the time that the behavioral regulation and there's just a lot more violence in the classroom than there used to be. And I'm not talking abot gun violence even, but just students feeling so frustrated, they're like throwing chairs across the room. That's such an unhealthy environment for our kids to be learning and for our teachers to be teaching in. Like, how can you focus on trigonometry when you're not even mentally or emotionally ready for that?

0:09:51.0 AS: And that is such an impact on all of these kiddos, but what we see so often is any kid that has any type of mental health difficulties are being shoved to some of these separate classes that are considered to be therapeutic. That's the way they're sold. But the majority of the kids in the class are also the ones that are having these behaviors in the classroom, and they're being told because they're being told, their family's being told, well, we can't have this type of behavior in the classroom, so we're gonna put them in this other class. And unfortunately, when you have a group of students that all have anxiety or mental health challenges and they're having these big behaviors, it's only exacerbating the problem because they're all seeing it from their peers, and they're not in an environment where they are truly able to feel safe and supported. And I feel like we're not really solving the problem. We're trying to put this bandaid on it in that, and absolutely when we see it in the general education classroom, it's challenging for everybody. And it's very rare that we see a team that's actually like trying to come to the table to figure out like, how can we solve this? How can we help this child? Rather than the answer of, we're just gonna pull them to another classroom.

0:11:06.1 MB: And I love that you mentioned that too 'cause it makes me think of the power of labels, and the power of like, am I an anxious person or am I just feeling anxious? Like there's difference between how we identify and like what our beliefs are about ourselves. And if I see myself as, oh, I am an anxious person, then I will behave like an anxious person. And then even if I'm feeling excitement or nervousness, I'm gonna label that anxiety. Whereas if I just say, "Oh, I'm feeling nervous about something coming up." Okay. The language that we use is so, so, so important, and I think it has played out, I mean, we talk about just like TikTok therapy and all the content that our young people have access to now and how that has... It's been great to see so much of a conversation continue to build out around mental health and how do we support our young people in not self diagnosing and sort of going on downward spirals that don't serve them.

0:12:05.3 AS: Yeah. Well, and we've seen in the past so many kids who need counseling services or support even like early on where maybe it hasn't risen to the level where they're missing school or they're having severe panic attacks or anything like that, but they need support. And the answers we get from these IEP teams are, okay, well, we're gonna see if they qualify for an IEP under the eligibility category right now is called emotional disturbance, which brings such... I mean, talking about labels, is such a stigma to that. I mean, even just hearing that word, it really says something, like we feel something about that word, and what it really means in terms of like the legal side of what we're designating this child is like needing is mental health services.

0:12:50.3 AS: And that term I don't think really does it justice, and what it's caused is families not wanting to have IEPs, not wanting to get supports because they're like, I don't want my child as labeled as emotionally disturbed. Like, that is huge, places such a huge burden and label on the kid who's already having anxiety or suffering from depression. And so this kind of brings us into full circle of something we wanted to kind of bring up today is that, there's, in California, a bill being put through the California Assembly, so it's Assembly Bill 2173, which actually proposes to change this language from emotional disturbance as an eligibility category to emotional disability. Now, I mean, I don't know how much of an impact, it's still a label, obviously, but I think...

0:13:38.3 VB: Well, I mean, words are everything. How many clients have we had over the years, whether like, "Emotional disturbance? I don't want that. I don't want that label." And words do matter. And I see this just as President Obama during his time, we took out retardation from the federal law and that was really a turning tide for people. Now we say the R word and I feel like people are more sensitive to that. And so California is always a leader recognizing that, just even emotional disability so that, I get it, mental health might be mental health disability, that might be too much. But I think they wanted to keep it a little bit so people kind of understood. They didn't wanna completely overhaul it, but I think it's definitely a step in the right direction. It's how we talk about the different learning challenges of the kiddos so that they're comfortable with... And I feel like this generation is getting more and more comfortable with talking about mental health issues. And even just changing that word I think will be incredible for future generations.

0:14:45.2 MB: I really, I totally agree. And I mean, a big part of our work and the reason... So we partner with schools and we work with them to introduce Clayful to every single student. Everyone gets an account. We're normalizing. We're de-stigmatizing. Everyone has a bad day. And everyone can use support. And it doesn't mean that you're broken, it doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you because you reach out for help. Rather, how do we teach our young people that there's power in asking for help? And they're like, I think about it as like if you break a bone, you want a cast. A cast is gonna let it heal by itself. And by putting on a cast, it's gonna help faster and it's gonna help in the way... It's gonna heal in the way you want it to. And same thing, when we're going through something that's emotionally difficult, having someone guide you through it and give you the tools can make all the difference. Whether it's to speed up the healing process or to help you heal in the right way. So that's a big part of what we do.

0:15:40.0 MB: The other piece, which I'm interested in hearing in your thoughts, we really lean into what we're calling performance coaching. So this idea that "Hey, we don't have to wait until something's wrong to develop skills." And if you think about an athlete, they're always training and they're always getting strong and they're always getting better. And how do we do that for our brain too and for our emotions? So what are the things that are... And really keeping... I mean, a big part of the mental health crisis is the lack of hope. Our young people are feeling so hopeless, and like that spirals into depression. So how do we help them think about who do they wanna be? What do they wanna accomplish? Like what are the goals that they wanna set for themselves and help them reach that in a way that's very proactive and frankly acts as a protective layer toward mental health? Because if I know I wanna accomplish these things, I'm gonna be less prone to getting sucked into these negative cycles, whether it's of my thinking or of my peers thinking, it becomes a very strong protective layer.

0:16:42.3 MB: So that's what we're launching with schools now and giving students the opportunity to connect with the coach on a weekly basis and really build out those habits and have those conversations. And I'm super excited to see how that's gonna impact behavioral challenges, the increase in attendance.

0:16:58.3 AS: Yeah. I see that as a really good building blocks from, we've talked to teachers and different other professional speech therapists before on the podcast about really integrating social emotional learning into like elementary school classrooms. So like start them off their educational journey on the right foot. And I think that's like the first step. But I think when we get to the upper grades, fourth, fifth grade, middle school especially, what you're talking about is like that perfect next step because it's one thing to teach the whole class, try to build coping strategies and digging into emotions and really being able to both regulate and talk about our emotions and how we're feeling. But then on an individual level, some kids are gonna need a little bit more than that. Whereas other kids, that first step works really well, but then that second stage there's gonna be kids who need this, exactly this. And so I'm really excited to see how this goes too because I think it's the perfect, like I said, next step.

0:17:57.3 VB: Yeah, and, I mean, different providers, currently, speech and language pathologists use social stories, right? And they create situations in groups, and so to have that kind of role, the performative aspect. I think that works for all kids. It works for everybody. In fact adults as well. So I think that that would be wonderful. Maria, if people wanted more information about Clayful or more information, wanted to talk to you, how can they reach you?

0:18:27.2 MB: Yeah. So our website is clayfulhealth.com. C-L-A-Y-F-U-L H-E-A-L-T-H. Wow. That's...

0:18:34.3 VB: Yeah. It's okay. [laughter]

0:18:37.7 MB: And you can email me at hello@clayfulhealth. That's like the best. That goes directly to my inbox and we'd love to get in touch. We are so excited. We're continuing to grow and partner with more school districts. Bringing Clayful to the hands of as many students as possible is really my goal as quickly as possible because we know that we don't have time to waste. We're in a crisis now.

0:18:57.9 VB: Absolutely.

0:18:58.8 MB: It's not getting any better. So the faster that we can all partner and bring more resources to our young people, the better.

0:19:05.9 VB: Here, here. We love the work and I'm sure we'll connect with you to discuss what districts you're in because I'm really curious. But thank you so much, Maria, for your time. Listeners, we hope you enjoyed this conversation. We will update you as we know more as this bill goes through the assembly, the California legislator and things like that, and how you can write to your...

0:19:28.3 AS: Representative.

0:19:30.1 VB: Strongest person and representative to get this pushed over the finish line. Thanks listeners, we'll talk to you next week.

0:19:34.9 AS: Bye.

0:19:36.0 VB: Bye.