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Dear Friend,
Now more than ever, young people, and specifically school-aged children, need support. As our country experiences an urgent youth mental health crisis the data shows that more than one in three high school students have said they experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and one in five students seriously considered suicide.
Emergency rooms across the country also saw a significant increase in the number of ER visits for mental health reasons in young people.
While this crisis isn’t new, a persistent lack of investments in school-based mental health resources, on top of the pandemic, has made it exponentially worse.
Young people in America deserve better. Tell Congress: Pass the Counseling Not Criminalization Act.
Young people who experience anxiety, depression, and worse, are struggling with mental health challenges, can be incredibly overwhelming for parents and educators to navigate.
School counselors, nurses, social workers, and school psychologists are often the first to see children who are sick, stressed, or traumatized — particularly in low-income school districts.
The benefits of investing in mental health services in schools go above and beyond the immediate support that children and young people get when engaged in these services. Schools with these services and supports see better attendance rates, better academic achievement, and higher graduation rates as well as lower rates of suspension, expulsion, and other disciplinary incidents.
Support and safety go hand and hand and too many of our schools lack the resources to provide meaningful support facilitated by trained mental health professionals.
The benefits of investing in school mental health support are clear, so clear that it would make sense for school boards, principals, government leaders, and elected officials to use every available resource to increase access to school-based health and mental health professionals.
Instead, what is happening is funding for police in schools has been on the rise on top of a national youth mental health crisis, all while schools face critical shortages of counselors, nurses, psychologists, social workers, and teachers.
Even schools offering some mental health services are still terribly understaffed.
Nationally it is recommended that schools have at least one counselor and one social worker for every 250 students, at least one nurse per 750 students, and one psychologist for every 700 students.
These staffing recommendations are a minimum requirement.
90 percent of students are in schools that don’t meet these standards, and in those schools with a significant lack of health and mental health support staff, law enforcement presence is increasing.
We too often assume that the presence of police in schools is synonymous with safety. Studies show it is NOT. And like the police outside of school, data increasingly shows that police in schools disproportionately target Black children, students living with disabilities, and LGBTQ students, pushing them into the juvenile and criminal justice system. [1]
The physical, social, and emotional health of children in schools is critical to success and safety. Yet, 1.7 million students are in schools with police but no counselors and 10 million students are in schools with police but no social workers, and 14 million students are in schools with police but no counselor, nurse, psychologist, or social worker. Many states reported two to three times as many police officers in schools as social workers, and five states reported more police officers in schools than nurses. This is unacceptable. [2]
Even more horrifying is that from 2013 to 2018, over 300,000 children under the age of 12 were arrested in the US. [3] The stories are heartbreaking. A six-year-old in Orlando had a temper tantrum and was placed in handcuffs and driven to a juvenile detention facility. A high school student's body slammed down to the ground after asking if he could call his grandmother to pick him up.
Research consistently demonstrates that the presence of police in schools serves as an entry point to the school-to-prison pipeline and disproportionately harms Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students; students with disabilities; and marginalized students. Study after study shows virtually no gains from having police in schools. [4] There are measurable ways to increase school safety that don’t promote the school-to-prison pipeline and have been proven to be successful.
These measures include restorative approaches, more mental health staff and counselors, social-emotional learning, and trauma-informed care in our schools. The presence of school-based mental health providers doesn't just improve outcomes for students, it can also improve overall school safety.
The Counseling Not Criminalization Act is an important step towards shifting resources away from practices that harm and push kids out of school into what helps students thrive, keeps schools safe, and ends the criminalization of kids in schools. The bill includes:
Thanks for all you do,
--Beatriz, Kelsey, Monifa, Kristin, and the whole MomsRising.org & MamásConPoder Team
References:
[1] THE FUTURE OF SCHOOLING: NO COPS, MORE COUNSELORS
[2][3] More than 30,000 children under age 10 have been arrested in the US since 2013: FBI
[4] Study links school safety to achievement, relationships
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