A large crowd gathered at the PUSD Wellness Center on Thursday, May 30 to honor Viki Salazar, the inaugural recipient of the Brooke Zimmerman Award. Salazar, who works in the Wellness Center greeting and serving students, received the award in recognition of her outstanding service and contributions.
Wellness center co-founder Brooke Zimmerman, a former PUSD teacher who started the center more than 16 years ago with the help of a small committee, attended the event with her granddaughter, Javier Leonard, a seventh-grader at Piedmont Middle School.
“Sixteen years ago, we received the results of Piedmont’s annual California Healthy Kids survey,” Zimmerman says, “which showed that Piedmont students were experiencing off-the-charts levels of stress and anxiety. The Wellness Center was born from those results because we wanted to provide our students with the resources they needed.” The new Wellness Center quickly became a safe place where students could come regularly for support.
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Wellness Center founder Brooke Zimmerman and her granddaughter, Havia Leonard -
Viki Salazar Wins Wellness Center Award -
Viki Salazar, Dr. Sari Sanghvi, and Dr. Alisa Crovetti -
Wellness Center and Support Committee Members Celebrate
Vice Principal Joseph Malik outlined the support the Wellness Centre has provided to students in the 2023-24 school year. The Wellness Centre has received referrals of over 150 students who received regular mental health support. The centre has also provided 2,000 hours of therapy to other students needing short-term support and provided hundreds of hours of support during student drop-ins.
Neha Gupta, chair of the Wellness Center Support Committee, also spoke about the financial support needed to continue providing the current level of services to Piedmont students: The Wellness Center operates on a shoestring budget, but needs to raise at least $50,000 from the Piedmont community to provide the same amount of student support in the 2024-2025 school year.
Sari Sanghvi, co-director of the center, read out a series of unsigned “thank you” notes to Salazar, part of a long-standing tradition of Wellness Center staff anonymously sharing gratitude for their colleagues. Salazar’s words of gratitude speak to her deep dedication to Piedmont students and the Wellness Center. “Your care for the students is obvious,” one colleague said. “You hold the Wellness Center together and do your job with so much care and compassion,” another said. “You are the glue that holds us all together. We are so grateful for all you do every day to keep things running smoothly at the Wellness Center for both students and staff. We couldn’t do it all without you.”
The work Salazar and others do at the PUSD Wellness Center is the foundation of the important role the center plays in providing mental health support to Piedmont students. “This is such an important resource for our students,” said Assistant Principal Joe Maric. “If students aren’t mentally healthy, they’re not going to learn.”
