The Community Health Awareness Council (CHAC), which has for decades served both the Mountain View-Los Altos School District and the North County community of Santa Clara through mental health services, was dissolved and uptaken by Pacific Clinics this July. 

At the MVLA District board meeting on Monday, August 12, the district approved a resolution outlining CHAC’s proposed plan for “winding down” services. MVLA will replace CHAC’s student services with those offered by Pacific Clinics and CASSY, two separate mental health care providers.

In 1973, CHAC was created out of a Joint Powers Authority agreement between seven public agencies, including the City of Los Altos, City of Mountain View, and MVLA. According to a staff report, there was an “observed […] need to promote mental health and well-being” and “lack of available […] resources.” 

Though they provided community-based services at large, CHAC specifically served MVLA through student referral forms. Two CHAC therapists were assigned to campus four days a week, providing short-term therapy to students for 10-12 weeks. CHAC also had a community-based clinic located in Mountain View which provided therapy to members of the community. 

“I’ve been in the district for 20 years and I’ve been working with CHAC the whole time,” MVLA District Wellness Coordinator William Blair said. “When we talk about mental health services, we call it CHAC services because that’s how ingrained it is — they’ve really helped build the system with us.”

“CHAC has taught me so much about not just mental health, but also about myself,” an anonymous former CHAC employee said. “Getting to be at CHAC was an experience I’ll never take for granted or forget.”

However, CHAC has been experiencing financial pressure in recent years — providing mental health services has become more expensive, and competition in the industry outperformed the quality of services they were able to provide. As MVLA Board of Education trustee Phil Faillace put it, CHAC “disintegrated slowly.” 

With the change in responsibility for student mental health services, the District also decided to partner with CASSY,  a nonprofit that focuses on providing mental health services to schools. CASSY will fill in for CHAC’s role of connecting students to clinicians through the student-referral form. Moving forward, they will offer available clinicians to students at Los Altos five days a week, compared to CHAC’s four.

“Once we receive a referral form, we’ll do a check-in with the student to hear about both what’s going well and any challenges, and then work with the student to make a plan for any support that might be appropriate,” Los Altos High School Lead Therapist Makenzie Gallego said. 

“I’d been using CHAC services for a long time,” an anonymous student said. “I’m looking forward to working with the new clinic because I know I can consistently get more help more frequently.” 

Despite the seemingly sudden announcement, this was not an unanticipated move. In 2020, the district contracted Uplift Family Services to provide Medi-Cal, which provides health coverage for free or at a low cost for California residents, in order to support MVLA students. Uplift was acquired by Pacific Clinics two years later. For about a year, MVLA also worked with the school-based team in Pacific Clinics, and they were contracted with work at Foothill Middle College just a year ago.

“The type of service that CASSY and Pacific Clinics is providing is comparable to the service that CHAC was providing,” Blair said. “For students, the transition should be smooth.”

Despite CHAC’s closing — what Gallego describes as “a loss to the broader community” — many, like Blair, have an optimistic outlook on the future of mental health services for students in the MVLA district. 

“It’s sad to see CHAC dissolve,” Blair said. “But we’re excited to partner with CASSY and Pacific Clinics moving forward.”To access free, district-provided mental health services, fill out the referral form at bit.ly/mvlasupport.