Quilcene School District #48
Project: Quilcene School-Based Mental Health Services Program
Request: $15,000
Your gift keeps the only mental health care in Quilcene available to students.
Quilcene School District requests funding for a licensed mental health clinician to provide one day of mental health services per week for 14 weeks. The clinician is co-located at the school and provides assessment, early intervention, treatment, crisis response, suicide prevention, care coordination and referral services to students in grades K–12 who need support, regardless of insurance coverage or ability to pay.
Because the clinician works with students over an extended period and sees them weekly when possible — the most effective approach for the level of need — one day per week sustains ongoing care for approximately 15 students across a school year.
Why "one day a week at school" is the entire system here
In a larger community, a student who needs help has options: multiple providers, several clinics, various points of entry, and transportation between them. Quilcene has none of that depth.
The barriers to accessing care outside the school are the ones every rural family recognizes: financial limitations, transportation, long wait times, parent and guardian availability, and provider shortages. Each is individually capable of ending the attempt. For many Quilcene students, school-based mental health services are the most accessible and often the only source of mental health support available.
Which means this isn't a supplementary program that would be missed. It is the program.
Having a clinician in the school removes those barriers. The child is already in the building. The appointment costs the family nothing, requires no drive, and asks no one to take a day off work.
Here’s the problem you can help solve
The Olympic Educational Service District, which contracts with the mental health providers serving local schools, was not awarded Jefferson County 1/10 of 1% behavioral health grant funding for the upcoming cycle. Those funds have paid for school-based mental health services.
Without replacement funding, Quilcene’s services are expected to end in February or early March of the 2026–27 school year. Students currently in ongoing treatment would have their care interrupted mid-year. Students whose needs emerge afterward would have nowhere else to turn.
What your donation makes possible
Quilcene needs help paying for one day per week of licensed clinical services for 15 weeks. Your gift makes that possible.
Students seen through this program have presented with anxiety, low self-esteem, family difficulties, grief, trauma and acute crisis. The expected outcomes are the ones that matter most at this age: reduced symptoms, better emotional regulation and coping skills, increased hope and resilience, improved safety, stronger relationships, and enough steadiness to stay engaged in school. Progress is tracked through clinical assessment, treatment plan review, student feedback and validated measures.
Early help is also the least costly help. Concerns caught in a school office are far easier to address than crises caught later, somewhere more expensive and more frightening.
The bottom line
This is bridge funding, not a long term fix. The district is working towards a lasting solution, but a bridge is exactly what's needed right now when the alternative is a gap no child in Quilcene can cross on their own. Your donation builds it.
