$200,000 grant will boost an unorthodox approach to student wellbeing in Spokane

This week, the students are learning how to lobby Olympia.

In most ways, the Youth Wellness Zone looks like any other classroom at Spokane’s On Track Academy. There’s a lesson plan on the white board and a few student-made art projects across the room.

But the intention in that room is atypical. The students aren’t learning trigonometry or Civil War history or reading “The Catcher in the Rye.” They’re learning how to be healthy, but it’s not a physical education or sex ed class. It’s a wellness class whose lesson plan is drafted by the students.

At the start of each school year, the small cohort of students that signed up for this credited elective class define what wellness means to them.

“We have this huge whiteboard, it starts empty, and I just put ‘wellness’ in the middle,” said Lori Beaty, who has taught the class since it launched last school year. “And they just start listing: What does wellness mean to you?”

The categories the students come up with are broken down on the white board: safety, mental health and so forth. They break it down further – this year’s cohort wants to focus on safety issues on the public buses they take to school each day or in the parks near their homes, or on the mental health risks from people in their lives committing or contemplating suicide, for example.

They will discuss those barriers to wellness, identify solutions, learn how to voice their needs and, like this week, how to actually make change.

How do they navigate conflict in their household? How do they form a meaningful sense of community with their peers? How do they improve safety on their commutes? What skills do they need to develop to be gainfully employed?

“We’re use to, as educators, standing up in front and regurgitating stuff, with everything planned out ahead,” Beaty said. “Not so here. What do you guys want to do? What’s your focus? OK, let’s build something around that.”

Sometimes the students learn to make change directly.

Last year’s class created an outdoor learning space, planting trees alongside staff and the city’s Urban Forestry department on the nearby Hillyard Community Campus on a playfield shared with Shaw Middle School. They also launched the Zilch program, a partnership with Second Harvest to bring a fresh produce food pantry that food-insecure students and nearby community members could access twice a month; this year, that program has expanded to once a week and rotates between several of Spokane’s schools.

Sometimes, making change entails pushing for the state legislature, the city council or a regional agency like the Spokane Transit Authority to change policy or fund a program. On Tuesday, the students learned how to read bills and identify changes made during the amendment process, how to identify the legislators most likely to be able to apply pressure on an issue of interest and the committees where those bills need to pass first muster.

“So, I want to work with special needs kids,” said student Lydea Maynard. “I want to talk to someone about protecting special needs kids, or just anyone with a disability in general … but I don’t know where to start.”

Jene Ray is the executive director of The ZONE, the parent organization from which the Youth Wellness Zone sprang, and the Northeast Community Center, where The ZONE is housed. She also used to be a lobbyist, and on this particular day, she’s walking the class through the ins and outs of Olympia. She guides the students through the legislature’s website, searches for bills involving special education and notes that these bills pass through the Education Committee.

Nothing in this class ends with the theory; last year, the students went to Olympia to lobby for more funding for the 988 suicide hotline and for additional therapists in public schools. Soon, they’ll be trying to lobby the Spokane Transit Authority for increased safety on their daily commutes, and they take a few minutes to discuss how to make a convincing argument; what states to present, whose stories to tell, which organizations to try to get onboard.

Ray is directly associated with the program, but the Youth Wellness Zone is constantly on the lookout for other professionals, experts and mentors who can come in to present on a given topic, and it tends to be easy to recruit them to come speak.

“It’s so easy, because people really care about the youth and their mental health and wellness, and they just haven’t understood how to interact or to contribute to their mental health,” Ray said. “The doctor that’s doing our executive function course about how to learn with neurodivergence, she was doing a Facebook Live for the health district that I watched, I looked her up on LinkedIn … and now she’s coming.”

In The ZONE

It was a winding path that led to creating the Youth Wellness Zone.

The ZONE, an initiative launched by the Northeast Community Center focused on helping families in northeast Spokane with everything from childcare to employment to accessing healthcare, was launched in 2015 as a collaboration between the city of Spokane and the school district in order to pursue a federal grant to revitalize low-income neighborhoods.

Though the initiative was overlooked for federal funding, the partners and associated community groups decided to move forward anyway, relying on grants and philanthropy. In 2017, The ZONE launched a free summer program for youth in northeast Spokane.

A 2024 state funding proviso created four Youth Wellness Zones in Yakima, Renton, Parkland and in Spokane, each backed by local organizations. In most cases, those entailed after school programs, but On Track Academy took a different approach, deciding to offer an actual Youth Wellness Zone elective.

For the last two years, the program has largely only been available to On Track’s student body, but Beaty believes it is ripe for expansion.

And now they have that opportunity.

In late January, Mayor Lisa Brown successfully lobbied the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the American Beverage Association, promoting the Youth Wellness Zone as a program worthy of funding. The program won first place in the mid-size city category, receiving a $200,000 Healthy and Sustainable Communities grant from the two organizations.

“Next year, with this grant?” Beaty said. “Can you see that we can go even bigger? We can go to middle school, we go to elementary, we start ambassadors, peer-to-peer and going on to a broader base.”

Kids today need this kind of support more than ever, argue Beaty and Ray. The pandemic stunted social skills and has left a lingering mark on the mental health of many.

“The coping skills of how to interact with people, or just practice making friends, advocating for yourself to a teacher – if you were taken out of that entire system for two and a half years and you sat at home … when the world opens up again, you’re showing up two and a half years behind,” Ray said.

Additional funding in hand, the program still needs community support, Ray added.

“I would urge individuals, families, businesses and community groups to engage with the Youth Wellness Zone and volunteer to be a mentor or to work on a project with them,” she said. “Whether you are passionate about food security or environmental health or safety, there is a place to engage with our youth.”