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Getting Wellness

Principal Chris Rosenberg’s in-school wellness center
offers one-stop shopping for family social services

By Karen B. Manahan

Scraping by on unemployment, single mom Nanyamka Dallas was barely making ends meet. After struggling with
a learning disability in high school, Dallas had dropped out. She wanted things to be different for her 9-year-old
daughter when she started at Starr King
Elementary, outside of San Francisco. What Dallas didn’t expect was that her own life would change. Soon after her daughter enrolled in fourth grade, Dallas learned from Starr King principal Chris Rosenberg (Bay Area
’92) about the school’s wellness center, which provides family assistance with housing, food, and clothing, and even part-time employment for parents. Dallas became involved with the school's nutritional program, handing out healthy snacks after school and practicing her literacy skills by reading to the kids individually. After a couple of months, recalls the school's nurse, Mary Jue, Dallas asked to read a story aloud. "We thought, Wow, she wants to read this in front of the class!" Jue says.
"Her confidence soared." Rosenberg estimates that 40
percent of the school’s families use at least one of the wellness center’s services. He conceived the idea for the center in 2004, when the school was grappling with abysmal attendance. Rosenberg realized that issues beyond the classroom—immigration problems, unemployment, family trauma—were preventing many Starr King students from coming to school, even though many of them lived in the housing project just across the street. "We knew it was outside the school’s purview [to do something about these issues]," he says, "but bottom line is, if they're here, we can teach them. If they’re not, we can't."

Though some social services existed in the community, most families weren't taking advantage of them. "So we brought them to the school instead," Jue says.

"We now have a functional, threepronged wellness center," says Rosenberg, who secured resources through a series of grants and partnerships. The school runs programs to help with mental, physical, and community wellness. These include family counseling, a food pantry and healthy snack program, and referrals to social services like job counseling, housing help, and
immigration services.

Since the wellness center launched five years ago, student attendance has risen dramatically, and the school has hit its adequate yearly progress targets for the last two years. "When your
family is healthy and dad has a job, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to say this will eventually help," Rosenberg says. "We have families that have been deeply served, like the family of a
second grader whose dad comes to the food pantry every week. He was homeless, but now has a place at a shelter that put him on a list to help him get his own apartment. He’s also
gotten a job with UPS through working with the wellness team."

For Nanyamka Dallas, the support of the wellness center has given her a second chance. "They helped me with food and clothes, with getting a job, and with housing information, and they helped me learn how to get back to school," says Dallas, who now serves as a physical activity leader and a home health aid and is taking classes toward her GED. "They help out all of our families a lot…. This school is a community."