Developmentally and emotionally challenged children and youth need the therapy and individualized learning they often do not receive in public school classrooms, their families, and in their communities. Lost with few other places to turn, Oakes Children's Center embraces these students, providing the necessary psychiatric and counseling services to bolster the resiliency of these at-risk youth, providing these children with tools to learn and to thrive in their school, their family, and in life. Students come to Oakes programs through referral from local SF public schools: they are often facing significant stressors including poverty, disrupted communities, trauma, community violence, discrimination, racism, divorce, fostering, housing difficulties, neglect, and lack of access to crucial resources. Each youth diagnosed with mental disability deserves and requires individualized therapeutic attention and an educational environment where he/she can learn and practice self-awareness and the skills needed to continue to learn and to thrive.

All Oakes' programs are family-centric and education-based, aimed at keeping our clients with their families and in school. Oakes thus uses a trauma-informed relational perspective to work with children and to help foster healthy, safe relationships between clients, Clinicians, and all staff, and to provide clients with experiences that will aid them in learning how to live with or to overcome their challenges, whether emotional, psychological, or from other experiences that have impeded their learning and social relations. Our highly trained teachers, therapeutic clinicians, psychologists, and support counselors provide a trusting, caring environment that is guided by an understanding of how our behaviors, responses, thoughts, and feelings impact the ability of the children we serve. We aim to maintain or repatriate all clients to mainstream public schools with increased self-regulation, self-reliance, resiliency, leveled-literacy and overall learning to ensure their success in their school, family, their community, and in life.

The success of ourclients is adjudicated through all individuals’ progress reports (IEPs) and engagement, through regular testing and grade-level achievement markers, through daily staff and teacher reports on each client, professional oversight and with peer and mentor interactions. We track student clients to their transition location after leaving our care, including those who return to their mainstream public schools and thus transition to less restrictive and less costly levels of services, those who require the same level of intensive treatment, or who transition to a more intensive/restrictive/expensive program. We generally repatriate 20% of our clients each year back to regular classrooms, as we have in the last two years. We aim to maintain or repatriate all clients to mainstream schools with increased self-regulation, self-reliance, resiliency, leveled-literacy and overall learning to ensure their chance of staying in school and their future success in their family,

Oakes Children's Center is regularly certified or adjudicated by The San Francisco Department of Health: Mental Health Services and the CA Department of Education. Our California School Assessment Report Card (SARC) is available online. San Francisco Unified School District is our partner for our Partnership Program, where we serve individuals and in classrooms in over 60 elementary, middle and high schools throughout San Francisco. Oakes' clients, families, staff, and Board complete surveys each Spring on our professional performance and programmatic success. Our clients, families, and community have supported us for over 57 years.

We seek to provide therapy and counseling in educational settings to as many students as possible in the San Francisco community, particularly through our Partnership and Outpatient Programs. Our challenges include having the resources to aide clients to increase their individual resiliency, self-regulation, and overall mental health. Oakes also recognizes the benefit of our agency-wide professional development and training, for which we could also benefit by increased support. We continue to apply for funding from charitable organizations for our General Operations. Oakes is also currently seeking financial support of Capital Improvements which focus on client and staff safety, life, HIPAA-compliant and seismic upgrades to our current administrative and educational hub.