(Image courtesy Pexels)
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Education.]
By David Younce
Real Clear Education
President Biden’s budget proposes $1 billion in new funding for schools to hire counselors, school psychologists, and nurses – a big investment in arresting the mental health epidemic afflicting our young people.
There’s just one problem: there aren’t enough qualified people willing to fill those jobs.
Those of us who have been working in schools have seen student mental health challenges grow for years. The dislocations caused by public policy responses to COVID-19 made the problems worse while also pushing them into broader view.
In 2019, before the pandemic began, the Hopeful Futures Campaign reported that more than a third of high school students had “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.” The CDC found that that number jumped to 44 percent during the pandemic. About one in 11 high school students reported having attempted suicide.
Schools have been racing to hire staff to help these kids, but it’s hard to find enough counselors, social workers, and psychologists who want to work in schools. We faced this problem in my own district. After the board agreed to fund additional counselors, nearly doubling the number we would have on staff, we simply couldn’t find the people to fill those roles.
This is an immediate crisis but one with long-term effects. To get more mental health support into the K-12 ecosystem, we must dramatically expand the pipeline of staff who work in these areas.
To fill the short-term gap, we need to waive the extremely cumbersome licensing requirements that hold back qualified individuals already working in these fields from taking jobs in schools. Working in a school setting usually requires one to pursue additional licenses, and such licensures vary from state to state. This has to change.
Schools will also need to consider solutions that don’t involve hiring more full-time staff. Much of the federal funding allocated to schools to deal with the aftershocks of the pandemic –commonly referred to as “ESSER funds” – will disappear within a few years. It’s dangerous to school budgets and local taxpayers to make long-term hiring commitments using one-time funds.
Partners in the private sector can provide personnel cross-trained in specific skill sets to fill any needs that might arise in the school during this adjustment period. These personnel would work closely with the social work and counseling staff to address student needs.
Over the long term, we need to produce more individuals with degrees in these fields, and that will involve bolstering incentive programs and making them more reliable. The current debt-relief incentive program, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Program, cancels loans after ten years of service to support teachers, nurses, and other critical community members and public servants. But ten years is a long time to wait to acquire a benefit, especially when that benefit has been historically difficult to obtain even after someone has reached the ten-year mark. If we reduced the time to five years of contribution, and streamline the approval process, we would improve retention and encourage more people to take on these high-need jobs.
These past few years have conditioned many students to anticipate and expect bad things. When I was in my teens, that was definitely not the mindset that I had. The long-term ramifications of such a bleak worldview are alarming. We have to do better for our young people – and fast.
The post Mental health crisis made worse by shortage of school staff members appeared first on WND.
