Have you guys seen this? What do you think?
 

http://www.uticaod.com/article/20160214/NEWS/160219719

It's an article about a few new bills to get more mental health action in the schools.

mental health bills
 

I have not heard about this! It's nice to know that schools are realizing that mental health can play a role in a child's day which can affect their academics.

The only thing I'm hesitant about is the school taking on too much. First of all, I think schools as academic places for learning are lacking as it is. Now they will be forced to take on another duty? Unless it is completely funded, I'm skeptical that it will be done well.

The second thing is that mental health is a spectrum and I don't want to see the schools being responsible for medical issues. The school nurse does screenings and some medication administration. Anything more serious and she refers to a physician. I think the extent of mental health services should should be similar to that of the school nurse. Screenings and minor interventions and that's it. Anything else should be referred out. The article made it sound like therapists would be available.

But then again, I'm a skeptic in general, so maybe it will be fine! <!--eyebrow-->

I completely agree that it's great to see the recognition of how important mental health is. I also worry about the liability of schools.

But I feel like school is the great equalizer. I would love to see more clinical services brought into the schools to service kids where they are. The hard part is that I don't think it should necessarily take away from the academic subject areas.

I've thought about this a lot in terms of the whole problem with lower ses not having equal access to clinical services (e.g., actual diagnoses for things like mental illness/emotional disabilities and ASD and ADHD, etc.) I would love to see these services offered in the school setting (by qualified personnel, of course) so that everyone has an equal chance to get services.

Does it have to be a Curriculum...
 

I would love to see character education come back to schools, especially K-5. But then again I also want to see sex ed come back to 6-12 that isn't, "DON'T DO IT."

The article also talks about how there isn't enough staff to go around. Part of the problem is Social Workers especially MSWs have huge caseloads and multiple schools to manage. They don't get involved in the school community.

I would like to see every school in the country have 1FTE Social Worker and a .5FTE School Psych, that do more than assessment. Have them working with groups and just working with kids. Teachers too!

Funny about character education. I remember when I started teaching in 1993 and our school got into character ed shortly thereafter. I hated it at the time. I felt like teaching character was a parent's job and my job was teaching academics. But there are too few parents who are teaching the kind of character that makes for a positive society, so I guess it's ok to have it in the schools.

I've only worked in one district with school social workers, and we had two for about 15 schools. We had 2.5 school psychs for the same number of schools. At one point, I was responsible for 5 of those schools, one a 1100-kid middle school and one a 1100- kid elementary school :rolleyes: All they wanted us to do was assessment, but I managed to fit other things in there along with it. School psychs are trained in so much more than assessment, and I hate when they are seen and used as "district testers." Our social workers (both MSW) were basically set up to home visit truant students and visit families to do the Vineland adaptive assessments. Such a waste of their time when they had so much more to offer.