Over the past three years, MVHS has reported measurable improvement in student mental health and wellness, with trends reflected in both districtwide and school-level survey data. These advancements can be seen through two primary surveys that FUHSD administers to measure student well-being: the California Healthy Kids Survey and MVHS’ End-of-Year Student Survey.
The CHKS is a statewide, anonymous, modular survey administered to students in grades five and above. It collects data on key indicators, including school climate and safety, connectedness to adults, engagement, substance use and mental health. According to the California Department of Education, more than 1.3 million students participated statewide from 2021 to 2023, with nearly half of California districts administering the survey annually.
As a district that is currently part of the Tobacco-Use Prevention Education program, FUHSD is required to administer the CHKS at least every other year due to its substance-use questions. According to Associate Superintendent Trudy Gross, FUHSD chooses to administer the CHKS every single year, using it both as a comparison tool and as part of the district’s accountability process, with the off-year focusing more on mental health related questions.
“A lot of districts use the CHKS because you can look at trends across the state,” Gross said. “If you’re seeing certain things in your district, you can look at districts around you and get a sense of how your kids are doing in comparison to other places.”
While the CHKS allows for districtwide, statewide and year-to-year comparison, the MVHS End-of-Year survey collects campus-specific data on how students feel about their experience at school. Recent results from both surveys show consistent positive change at MVHS, particularly in indicators tied to belonging and help-seeking.
According to End-of-Year Survey data, the percentage of students who said they feel comfortable asking a counselor for help “often” or “always” rose from 28% in 2018-19 to 58% in 2024-25. Student-reported comfort in seeking help from teachers increased from 56% to 71% over the same period, while willingness to approach school-based therapists rose from 31% to 43%.
MVHS Principal Ben Clausnitzer emphasizes that the significance of the data lies not just in higher percentages, but in what they suggest about student attitudes toward support, signifying a fundamental shift in school culture where students feel more comfortable to ask for help when they need it.
“That’s just incredible movement,” Clausnitzer said. “In terms of students feeling more comfortable approaching our school counselors for help — that maybe speaks a little more to things like stigma. This data actually spans my entire time as principal, which makes it especially meaningful to look at. This is now my eighth year as principal, so it’s kind of fun to see what’s happened over time.”
According to Clausnitzer and Gross, the analysis of these surveys are action-oriented. Results are reviewed by the District Wellness Council, a group of students, staff, parents and administrators.
“A couple of years ago, we looked at the results with our Wellness Council, and we did that again this fall,” Gross said. “We asked, ‘what do you think are things that are happening in the schools that connect to this increase in data? What do you think are the things that we need to keep doing or start doing?’”
Those findings are shared with principals and incorporated into school site and district plans, Gross said. Clausnitzer added that the data also feeds directly into MVHS’ Western Association of Schools and Colleges six-year school goals, which include a specific focus on student wellness.
One way that MVHS has been working to support student mental health is through wellness spaces. MVHS has been operating a wellness room for the past three years, managed by Wellness Space Support Specialist Doreen Bonde. Previously, Cupertino High School was able to fund a wellness room through a grant, where they were chosen over MVHS and Homestead High School. Due to the absence of funding, MVHS reduced the number of Assistant Principal’s secretaries from three to two, allowing them to fund the wellness room and Bonde, the first FUHSD employee dedicated to wellness rooms. Currently, all schools in FUHSD have a wellness space, with the exception of Lynbrook High School, which plans to open one in the 2026-2027 school year. According to data collected at the MVHS wellness room, from a scale of one to 10, on average, students self-report a 2 point increase in mood when leaving compared to when they arrive.
“Some of our classrooms have what we call calming corners,” Clausnitzer said. “They work with our wellness room to get some materials such as soft seating, mood meters and fidgets. The idea of a calming corner would be like, ‘I’m feeling a little dysregulated, but not so much that I need to leave the classroom and go to the wellness room. But instead, I can go to that corner, and I’ll be good.’”
To further improve mental health support on campus, MVHS employs full-time School-based Therapist Akiko Chung, who is supplemented by interns and part-time therapists such as Kristi Iwami and Leila Lurie. Despite this, capacity still remains a constraint, requiring MVHS to continue using creative staffing models to expand their mental health access. Clausnitzer emphasizes that even while budgets can be tight sometimes, the school keeps mental health access as a priority in terms of resource allocation.
We are all suffering, myself included, under the high-achieving notion that wellness is a thing to be sacrificed in order to achieve
— Biology and Physiology Teacher Lora Lerner
“When you talk about a challenge of staffing, you try to find all these different resources about how we can work with what’s available to us, but also potentially increase,” Clausnitzer said. “So we’ve moved from a 1.0 school based therapist to having 1.2 with Lurie to a 1.6 with Iwami to a 2.0 with the intern. So all of a sudden, in terms of access for students, you’ve doubled that access for school based therapists.”
Aside from just wellness areas in the classroom and around campus, MVHS teachers have also been incorporating wellness practices into their classroom routines. Physiology and biology teacher Lora Lerner embeds wellness into her curriculum by teaching the science behind why wellness is important. She also dedicates Mondays in her class to wellness activities where students eventually teach each other wellness practices such as yoga, art or journaling.
“I think it’s super important to be explicit about wellness and to talk about it as an important thing,” Lerner said. “ I do that a lot because I teach biology and physiology, and I can build it into my curriculum. I can say ‘This is what happens in your brain when you sleep, and that’s why it’s important.’ A lot of the curriculum itself, of course, is built around that in physiology. We do have a pretty strong health component in biology as well, where we get into why it actually matters that we do all these things that we call wellness. I feel like I teach wellness a lot, not necessarily because somebody told me to, but partly because it’s kind of a philosophy of the courses that we teach.”
Despite these improvements, Lerner, Chung and Gross still see students continuing to face pressures such as academic stress that affect their mental health. Lerner notes that students often find themselves sacrificing wellness for achievement, which she thinks speaks to the cultural issue of people prioritizing working and making money over everything else. Gross adds that students also deal with broader global stressors that can feel overwhelming since they are outside students’ control.
“We are all suffering, myself included, under the high-achieving notion that wellness is a thing to be sacrificed in order to achieve,” Lerner said. “I think we all do that to some extent. I mean, if I’m trying to get ready for class, I stay up too late. And obviously, you all are doing that as well. It’s a hard thing because wellness is a lifelong thing, and it feels very easy to sacrifice it in the moment for just this one thing that you have to do. But of course, if that becomes a habit, you’re just doing it all the time and you are sacrificing that longer term wellness.”
According to Lerner and Chung, one of the most significant barriers that blocks progress is the family stigma around mental health. They have both also witnessed multiple instances where students were either not permitted by their families to seek mental health support or were too afraid to request permission from them.
“Even if kids have a desire to seek mental health service, they need a parent’s consent,” Chung said. “At times they don’t want to share with their parents because their parents are against it. So then, the support ends right there. When we talk about mental health on campus, I think it’s really important to also reach out to the parents and help them really understand that when students seek support, it doesn’t go on the college apps. You’ll be surprised how many times I hear this: ‘does college know’ or ‘is it gonna be on the file?’”
Moving forward, Lerner believes sustaining these improvements requires an ongoing effort from MVHS staff, students and their families. She and Chung both echo the same idea of exposure being a key way to improve wellness, with Chung noting that freshmen who had prior exposure to wellness resources in middle school are more aware of campus support at MVHS. According to Lerner, students need consistent messages about wellness from different teachers and adults as well as practical tools that they can use, such as the wellness room or in-school therapists.
When we talk about mental health on campus, I think it’s really important to also reach out to the parents and help them really understand that when students seek support, it doesn’t go on the college apps.
— School-based Therapist Akiko Chung
“What you want over time is that by being exposed to this, you will really internalize it and it becomes a part of the way you think,” Lerner said. “The second aspect is to actually have the tools to do it and I think that’s where other teachers take a little time to teach about deep breathing, meditation or whatever strategy is helpful. It’s a tough thing, because we all have other stuff to teach so we’re squeezing little bits of it here and there. But I hope that if people are hearing it from a lot of places, that it becomes part of the culture, and it’s like ‘Oh, this actually matters to a lot of the adults who care about me. It’s incorporated in a lot of my classes. And therefore it’s hopefully as important as learning my subject.’”