I think that at this point any reasonable person would agree that our children’s mental health has faced some pretty severe challenges over the past few years. A recent survey taken locally revealed that 28% of students in grades seven through twelve have considered hurting themselves and 14% have considered suicide to the point of having a plan in place. I don’t know what these numbers would have been prior to a global pandemic and everything else that has gone on but it’s been reported that there has been a 50% increase in students going to the nurse for reasons relating to anxiety, depression and PTSD. The cries for help couldn’t be any clearer.
Administration seems to be listening. There are school counselors whose job it is to try and help students prepare for their academic and vocational futures but the contract of the licensed therapist trained to deal with mental and emotional issues expired and wasn’t renewed while the schools were closed due to Covid. For over a year our district has been working on a plan to partner with a local medical group to implement a behavioral health clinic, something that another twenty seven of the two hundred Connecticut school districts already have up and running.
There would be no charge to the school district or the town for this service. My understanding is that parents or guardians would be notified after initial contact and consent would have to be given in order to bill insurance. I’m assuming there would be some sort of confidentiality in place to make the students comfortable coming forward but I know that it is state law that after six sessions of counseling for any minor there are major conditions that must be met for it to continue without parental involvement.
Going forward with this initiative should be a complete no-brainer, right?
Should be, but then why were there approximately eighty people or so standing out in the wet snow with signs before the Board of Education meeting tonight trying to convince them to at least put it on the agenda?
I’ll refer you back to my first line when I used the phrase “reasonable person.”
As I’ve mentioned before I don’t find most of our Board of Education or Town Council to fall into that category. Instead of listening to the faculty, parents and students themselves, the people they are supposed to be serving, they seem to be listening to Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro and whatever other far right media personality is currently making up things for their conservative audience to be outraged about. The concern seems to be that the radical left in this town is trying to install access to information about abortion and homosexuality behind the backs of the parents of these poor, easily manipulated children.
I wish I was exaggerating or trying to be humorous but I’m not. There is nothing funny about people that are more interested in fighting imaginary culture wars than they are in doing their damn job. Its a major problem in our federal Congress and has oozed it’s way all the way down to the local level.
Listen, if somebody wants to argue that schools are meant purely for education and that there are other avenues available for these children to get the help that they need I’m willing to have that conversation. I wish that were the case but don’t believe it to be. The stigma around mental health seems to be much less prevalent among our youth but it’s still a very real thing and the truth is that us parents don’t always get our responses right. We think that we know what they need but we don’t always and they know that. Almost six years ago I wrote this apology to the oldest. I wonder how much pain and heartache might have been avoided if we’d admitted earlier that things weren’t OK.
Instead we get rants about genital mutilation and critical race theory and whatever other bullshit needs to be thrown against the wall until something sticks for a moment and the libs get owned. We get a handful of people who somehow have gained a ridiculous amount of influence over our children’s lives who don’t seem particularly interested in what’s best for those children. I titled this post “Kids Before Politics Please” but this isn’t even really politics. This isn’t a disagreement about allocation of funds or resources or about taxes or the best way to keep our community safe and thriving.
It’s just nonsense and made up garbage and somehow that seems to be what politics is nowadays.
The kids are asking us for help. They are out here in the snow and the rain begging for it. The least we can do is listen to them.
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Previously Published on thirstydaddy.com
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