Shasta supervisors discuss youth substance use prevention, strategic planning and possible new medical school

Repeat topics including substance use prevention for youth, the county’s strategic plan and local efforts to open a new medical school were all up for discussion at today’s Shasta County Board of Supervisors meeting.

CORE update 

A group tasked by the county with addressing substance use prevention among Shasta County’s young people — known as Community Opioid Response and Education or CORE — gave a presentation on the progress made since last summer’s initial proposal.   

The group, which includes two nonprofits, Raising Shasta and Youth Options, will receive a total of $4 million in Shasta County opioid funding for use over four years. They’re halfway through the first year of funding in which they’re working toward four goals, including finding and implementing a substance use prevention curriculum. They’re making progress on that goal but not yet there, as indicated by Raising Shasta Director Jenna Berry.

“We have been doing a ton of research around curriculum,” Berry told the board. But she said one of the research limitations is that evidence-based curriculums often don’t keep up with the pace of substance use trends among youth. 

“By the time that they’re evidence based, [they] have become outdated and no longer reference current substances. And so we are in this process of looking if there’s a way to combine evidence-based programs and find a more evidence-informed model,” she said. According to researchers, evidence-based programs rely on data proving that they work while evidence-informed models are ones that have shown early promise but so far lack proof of success.

To meet another goal, the group is hoping to leverage current data to better understand local students’ attitudes toward substance use. Berry said they’ve utilized the California Healthy Kids Survey but noted her views on the limitations of that survey. For example, the number of schools and students represented varied greatly from year to year, or the questions were focused on substance use on and around school as opposed to at home, she said. 

As for developing a new survey — a third goal of CORE’s first year — Berry shared that the survey is under development and is being rolled out with specific partner organizations in a “trial and error” stage of use. At this point, Berry told Shasta Scout after the meeting, the survey is not yet available for public view. 

Asked after the meeting what organizations CORE is partnering with, Berry said only that some are rural. “There are a lot of nonprofits in town that do specific work around substance use prevention, but there’s also a lot of groups that do really great work around mentorship,” she said, declining to name specific groups.

CORE’s fourth goal for the first year relates to a public media campaign to share information about substance use prevention. They’ve found a partner for that project, JD Hudson, the founder of the Redding-based marketing agency Parabl, but there has not yet been roll out of a campaign.

Asked by Supervisor Allen Long about whether there’s been an increase in the number of youths served by Raising Shasta since the opioid funding was granted seven months ago, Berry said that the organization just implemented a new system in December to track numbers, and doesn’t yet know how many they’re serving as compared to previously.

CORE member Youth Options also presented, providing data on the number of juveniles who participated in  programming over the last six months, but the organization did not include a comparison to the past that demonstrated either an increase or decrease in overall reach as a result of the new funding. 

CORE member Clay Ross, superintendent of the Columbia School District, told the board that while superintendents around the county have shown interest in what the group is doing, referrals from local superintendents to CORE programs have been slow so far. But he said “there’s a thirst and a hunger for these kinds of programs,” explaining that the word just needs to get out so that referrals increase.  

Strategic planning process moves forward

The board of supervisors also discussed the county-led strategic plan, an item that’s been in process for months and is intended to identify a set of public-centered goals for the county to focus on in the coming years. Members of an ad hoc committee that’s been working on the plan, which includes Supervisors Matt Plummer and Allen Long, came up with five proposed goals for the county’s overarching strategic plan using community feedback gathered from public meetings and a countywide survey. 

Those goals, which were presented to supervisors today, include: 

• Develop a corrections and rehabilitation campus
• Increase access to effective health care and behavioral health services through participation in community efforts toward the addition of a regional medical school in Shasta County
• Significantly reduce the risk of destructive wildfires in the county
• Develop a comprehensive general plan, zoning plan, code enforcement ordinance and policy updates and streamline the development process 
• Increase engagement, outreach and conversation to enhance trust among Shasta residents

Plummer said county approval of the goals would be very beneficial to the community.

“We think that by the county saying this is the direction that we want to go forward,” he said, “we are more likely to be able to achieve significant milestones and momentum on these things that have been challenging to make progress on.”

The supervisors voted 5-0 to approve the five goals as presented and direct staff to develop further steps to achieve each goal. The full strategic plan, including specifics of how goals will be achieved, was originally supposed to be presented in May. Supervisor Kevin Crye requested the plan be brought back sooner to give the board more time to consider it ahead of the county’s budget hearings in June. It’ll now be brought back to discussion in early April.

Long explained that since the strategic plan is moving to the next stages, there will be sub-committees assigned to each of the goals so that they can be further developed and possible funding sources to help facilitate them can be identified. 

Supervisors express support for medical school committee

Toward the end of the meeting, supervisors received a presentation from a group of local leaders working to open a new medical school in Shasta County. The group requested a letter of support from the board encouraging the establishment of the school, which supervisors approved unanimously. 

During the discussion about the medical school, Long raised concerns about the use of the word “partner” in the letter’s description of the county’s role with the school, stating that the county can’t afford to financially partner with the school due to a tight budget. Crye quickly interjected, telling Long to “speak for yourself.” After County Counsel Joseph Larmour weighed in and explained that the use of the word “partner” does not oblige the county to financially support the school in any way, Long didn’t press the matter further. 

The group requested the letter of support from supervisors, members of the medical school committee said, because it is required for state and federal grants, strengthens funding competitiveness and signals regional alignment and readiness.

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