The San Francisco Unified School District has wellness centers across its 16 middle schools, but the future of those spaces is in jeopardy. 

The initiative was launched five years ago, when a private donor funded $15 million for the construction of these rooms. But district leaders said the funding is set to expire.

There are three staff members in each wellness center: a nurse, a social worker and a community health outreach worker. 

Cerenity Wilson, who is in the eighth grade at Hoover Middle School, said it's an issue she is concerned about.

"You can come in here like if you need a break, like I'm in here for right now, I play with toys. Or if you're injured, need to talk to somebody," Wilson said, playing with a fidget toy in the wellness room. 

"If I'm with my friends, and we walk past, like 'Hey y'all, let's go see what's in the wellness center, let's go do something in there,'" she added. 

Rather than lingering in the hallways, she comes into this safe space where she and her classmates can decompress. 

"Across all middle schools in SFUSD, we provided 56,000 instances of services through wellness centers. That is an increase over the prior year, it was 18,000 instances of services that were provided," Julia Coffa, the assistant principal of student services, told CBS News Bay Area. 

"Qualitatively, we can all see and feel it. The level of need that was presented after the pandemic. There was a huge jump over what was there before," she said. "These kids need us."

Coffa said she hopes that the district can secure funding by the end of the academic year. 

"I started my career at Hoover as a math teacher," she said. "Everyone can make sense out of math. The reason we don't is almost inevitably emotional. And so, what I found and the skills, the root skills, that we're really trying to learn here in middle school are the social and emotional skills of learning. How do I handle frustration? How do I handle confusion? How do I handle boredom?"

While the future remains uncertain, students like Wilson can only hope for the best. 

"The wellness center has helped a lot of kids that you see in the hallways," she said. "Back when I was in 6th grade, and beginning of 7th grade, those kids found that being in the wellness is like a good thing to do, instead of being in the hallways, skipping class, chilling in the lockers."

Although she won't be walking through these hallways this time next year, Wilson hopes the wellness center will continue to stay open to help the next generation of students. 

"I want to go to college, I want to be a cardiologist surgeon to help people with heart problems," Wilson said.