Amid growing concern about mental health among teens, Oakland health insurer Blue Shield of California has committed $10 million to improve access to mental health services in the state’s public schools.

It marks one of the company’s first major investments in Oakland since moving its corporate headquarters there from San Francisco this year, and comes amid a rise in rates of suicide, depression and anxiety among adolescents and teenagers.

The majority of the money is funding the salaries of mental health specialists at 19 high schools and middle schools, including nine in Oakland and San Leandro, for five years.

It is unusual for insurance companies to directly pay for therapists or counselors in schools, even though they often cover mental health services in doctors’ offices.

“We liked the idea of starting out being close to home and trying to influence the community so many of us are spending our professional lives in or near,” said Blue Shield of California CEO Paul Markovich. “There is a lot more adversity children are facing. The ability to have resilience to deal with that adversity is crucial to their long-term health and happiness.”

Most of the $10 million is being donated to Wellness Together, a Sacramento nonprofit that employs and places mental health clinicians at K-12 schools across the state. The nonprofit is hiring one clinician to be placed at each of the 19 schools.

At many of the schools, the clinicians are supplementing existing staff, such as social workers. Besides the five in Oakland, four schools are in San Leandro and 10 are in San Diego County. Most of the clinicians are already in place, having started at the beginning of the school year.

The program, which Blue Shield is calling Blue Sky, will also help train 6,000 teachers and staff at schools across the state over the next 18 months to recognize signs of trauma. Some funding will also help expand student-led groups affiliated with the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which promotes greater awareness of mental illness, and DoSomething, which helps organize campaigns around social causes.

Blue Shield, which last year reported $20.6 billion in revenue and employed 6,800 people, has contributed to school programs before, including events for East Bay students that encourage healthy eating and lifestyle habits. But the company’s $10 million mental health pledge is the largest investment it has made in school health programs.

“Not all of the solutions to address the long-term impacts of adverse childhood experiences are going to happen in the exam room,” said California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, an advocate for early intervention in childhood trauma such as neglect and violence. “So many of them have to be happening at the places where our communities are — in schools, in programs that happen in the community. The governor and our team has been working on increasing availability of mental health services and engaging private business in this effort. We see this as a wonderful first step in getting private partners to step up.”

Just 35% of California kids who reported needing help for emotional or mental health problems receive counseling, according to the 2018 California Children’s Report Card, an assessment by the California advocacy group Children Now. And mental illness was the top reason California kids were hospitalized in 2018, the report found.

“Young adulthood is a really difficult time. These kids have really involved lives and adult problems,” said Rosalind Kingsley-Hurst, a mental health specialist at Coliseum College Prep Academy in Oakland, whose position is being funded by the Blue Shield program. “There’s a lot of unawareness of how extreme the lives of young people are.”

Kingsley-Hurst is working for Wellness Together as a trainee. She is working on her master’s degree in counseling psychology at Holy Names University in Oakland.

Kingsley-Hurst often hears from teens struggling with academics, grief over the death of a family member, romantic relationships, unhealthy friendships and worries over immigration and family separation. She said she recently counseled a student about a conflict she was having with a former friend with whom she’d had a falling-out because the friend had told others about a sexual assault she’d wanted to keep private. Young people often just need someone to talk to who will keep matters confidential, she said. It’s not uncommon for students to come to her office and simply sit in silence for 15 minutes to decompress.

“They just need someone to hold the space for them,” she said.

Blue Shield is working with researchers at UCSF to evaluate the program’s success, by comparing participating schools to those not in the program. A previous statewide mental health program called Project Cal-Well, which was funded by a federal grant and used some of the same intervention tactics in Southern California schools, showed promising results, according to Samira Soleimanpour, co-lead researcher who is evaluating the Blue Shield program.

Catherine Ho is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cho@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Cat_Ho