[Updated: June 1, 2023, 1:50pm]
Spaces for Black students’ healing and affirmation in Santa Barbara Unified high schools are to become as accessible as school lunch in the next school year. Counseling to address racial trauma will be supplemented with healthy coping strategies and preventive services, all provided through collaboration with the Healing Space clinic at UC Santa Barbara.
“We want to encourage prevention around mental health distress, or prevention of loneliness and isolation, and demonstrate through our clinicians' own lived experiences how to talk about racial identity and what it means to be a Black youth growing up in Santa Barbara” said Dr. Alison Cerezo, director of the Healing Space.