Room 30 at Oak Ridge Elementary School in Sacramento is decked out with inspirational posters.
Board games and art supplies fill the shelves. An exercise treadmill is tucked in one corner. Students use this piece of equipment on a daily basis to manage stress and refocus their energy.
Across the room sits school social worker Danielle Martin. She has a stack of student files on her desk this morning, and gets ready to make some phone calls to families. But first, she turns on a small device in her cubicle called a “sound screen,” which produces a constant buzz of white noise.
“It’s like a little buffer,” Martin says. “A lot of what happens here could be sensitive, but it’s also a private confidential space.”
Martin then calls the parents of a young girl who has been getting into fights. Martin says the girl needs help and she wants their permission to get her some group counseling.
Oak Ridge is unique in the Sacramento Unified School District because it has a Student Support Center on campus with two dedicated professionals. Millions of dollars in federal funding made that possible several years ago. But now, that funding is drying up.
To read the entire article from KQED's Ana Tintocalis: http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/...top-a-day-in-room-30
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