On-demand mental health help for middle schoolers in San Mateo-Foster City School District

Barrera said that she was inspired to create Clayful because current systems to address mental health are often inadequate, or are offered too late.

“[Other] systems are designed for students, and frankly all of us, to get support once we hit a breaking point, once you’re in the hospital, once something bad happens. I think that’s why we are where we are,” Barrera said. “So the first thing was to address how do we work on the prevention side?”

In addition, Barrera said she created the app to increase accessibility to mental health resources and address cultural needs of students from underrepresented backgrounds — 84% of psychologists are white, according to the American Psychological Association.

Barrera said 63% of Clayful coaches are Black, indigenous or people of color, and the majority of them grew up in similar situations as many of the students Clayful aims to serve. While the identity of the coach and student remain anonymous to one another, she said there is an established understanding from the coach of what the student may be experiencing.

“There is a lot of power to empathy and having empathy and having been through some of the things that young people are going through,” Barrera said.

The anonymity aspect of the app was intentional, Barrera said, because it establishes the adults helping students as “coaches, not crutches.”

“Given the populations we want to work with, they see a lot of turnover with educators. It feels really bad when this person that really cared about you leaves,” Barrera said. “We want to teach them that there is a whole community of coaches who care about you.”

The desire to establish this sense of communal support has become a top priority within SMFCSD in the years following the pandemic after seeing an unprecedented need, Superintendent Diego Ochoa said. The specific desire to establish Clayful at Abbott Middle School was because he noticed that the students weren’t connecting with one another and there was a heightened sense of anxiety among them.

“I’ve been doing this work for 20 years, and every year is new and unique to itself,” Ochoa said. “But when we came back from COVID, the alarm bells were ringing and the needs were very, very intense.”

Ochoa said the district has worked extensively to implement a variety of support systems across its schools, such as increasing the numbers of adults available on campus who could provide counseling or support for students.

However, the school administration still noticed students not taking advantage of all of these resources. Ochoa said he thinks this is because of the stigma around mental health.

“They didn’t feel comfortable going and asking for that help because other kids would know that they were asking for that help,” Ochoa said. “It’s almost like announcing to people you’re having mental health problems.”

Ochoa said that stigma around mental health is exactly why he thinks Clayful has been so impactful, because they don’t require a third party to connect a student to help.

“That’s what is so powerful about the tool, is it’s in their hand and it’s private to them,” Ochoa said. “That’s what really separated that as a service.”

Clayful, and other efforts to improve mental health and overall culture at schools within SMFCSD over the last two years have already led to an improved learning environment.

According to the California School Staff Survey, staff across the district’s four middle schools who identified depression among students as a “severe problem” went from 30% to 13% from 2022-23 to 2023-24. Additionally, staff that identified physical fighting between students — which was a particular concern at Abbott Middle — as either a “moderate” or “severe problem” dropped from 65% to 24% in the same time period.

“It’s not solely our impression or our feeling about it, it really is connected to the data that we see,” Ochoa said. “Attendance is up and we’re really taking that to heart. Our student grades look great at all of our middle schools.”

The district plans to implement Clayful at its other middle schools this next school year.

Barrera said that she’s pleased with the results she has already seen from her work both specifically with Abbott Middle School and through Clayful at large.

“We’re giving these young people these skills that are going to make them stronger, better, more resilient humans,” Barrera said. “And they’re going to save the world as a result.”