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CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities | 2018-11-28 | 19 | ITEM 2-A COMMISSION ON DISABILITY MEETING MINUTES Wednesday, November 28, 2018, 6:30 PM know, and you don't have to answer it all now. You can get back to us too. Jodi McCarthy: Anything you can do to advocate for services, I'm not going to say no to. And that's kind of what we're doing now is we're presenting these needs. It's like, "Hey community.. 11 Because, we can't take care of our children by ourselves, you know what I mean? The school district can't do it all. We need the community. We need the parents, we need the non-profits, we need the village. Victoria Forester: And right now what we're seeing is that when it comes to mental health needs, the only game in town is special education. So in order to get help if we have mental health issues which many of our students do, you have to get referred for an IEP, individualized education plan, then the cost of special education skyrockets and it just becomes this wall. In other districts that have lower socio-economics and higher Medi-Cal needs, you can harness that Medi-Cal dollar to get everything that they need. Alameda's, it's trickier. It's trickier because we have less than 30% of our students on Medi-Cal and in neighboring districts, folks in Oakland and Berkeley. San Leandro's has 73% of their students qualify for Medi-Cal. Heck, I had all sorts of services in San. Leandro. Victoria Forester: It's extremely difficult. So any way that we can partner with community organizations to bring mental health services or just some emotional work to our students, we're bettering the situation. That's a great question. And we will. You will see both of us link arms with anyone that wants to help us bring this work to our kids. What you saw tonight is incredibly alarming. And again, 34 years in public education, I'm a little older than Jodi, those statistics that are just about Alameda Unified are extremely alarming. Jennifer Roloff: Right, okay. Just a thought, maybe we put that on our agenda for our upcoming retreat. We'll have another one early in 2019 and see what we can come up with. Jodi McCarthy: The city of Alameda also did a needs assessment last year, and one of their findings was there was a need for mental health services. So it's not just a finding for the school district, but I don't know, I think there's more awareness. Jennifer Roloff: Find a way to bridge those two. Okay, thank you. I think that was my big broad question. So I know that was a lot, I'll stop there. Thanks so much for coming in. Acting Chair Jenn Barrett: Commissioner Deutsch. Susan Deutsch: Well thank you very much. These presentations were excellent. I worked in the Berkeley Unified School District in Special Ed. In Berkeley, they have Berkeley Mental Health. We referred so many students there, but are those just Medi-Cal students that get access? And how does Berkeley Mental Health get their funding, because that's not county, that's city? Jodi McCarthy: Right. And right now for our mental health work in special education, we have partnered with the county most of all. We're also using East Bay Association for Children, EBAC, for our mental health work. But any way you slice it, the billing is much more expensive for 03/13/19 Page 19 of 32 | CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2018-11-28.pdf |