As someone who is involved in researching bills and testifying in the Maryland General Assembly to support or oppose certain bills, I often send out information to people about these bills and occasionally people will challenge my support or opposition.
I sent opposition to House Bill 740 this week. The bill would require ALL Maryland public schools to have a full-time mental health therapist. This is the bill:
Here is an example of the pushback we got:
Why are you opposing therapists in public schools? There are many children who don’t have access to therapists who desperately need them.
This is so typical of good people who support the constant expansion of public school “duties” and “responsibilities.” They find a ” blanket fix” for a “problem” that probably doesn’t exist in the majority of the public-school students and then insist that the “solution” should be provided in EVERY SCHOOL regardless of needs and cost. That solution usually requires a costly program, another full-time staff member or two, and a huge salary hit for the district. Proponents will claim that “if it saves just one student” it’s worth it.
This attitude is what has made our schools full of expensive kitchen sink programs that don’t work.
This is overkill and the one student who needs the services could be saved with a better, more common sense, economical solution designed by an individual district or school. It could be a solution that is already in place.
Liberals don’t see it that way and think that those who oppose such measures don’t care if some kid needs mental health assistance and doesn’t get it. It’s either all or none for them. Either all schools hire a full-time mental health therapist or kids will suffer and die.
While there may be schools/districts who choose to do this because they see a need in their students, there are others which don’t have an overwhelming need and can address student mental health issues via a partnership or alliance with a county mental health organization.
People ignore that fact that every county in Maryland has mental health resources for citizens to use at low or no costs. From the Mental Health Association of Maryland:
Every Maryland County has a public entity for mental health.
Each county is designated as a core service agency, responsible for planning, managing, and monitoring publicly funded mental health services in their area. Additionally, there are Behavioral Health Authorities across the state that assist the public in accessing treatment and recovery for mental health and substance abuse disorders.
Mental Health Association of Maryland+1
Putting a full-time mental health therapist in EVERY public school in a district is REDUNDANT and NOT NECESSARY.
More important, it also encourages students who don’t need therapists to think they do. It creates a culture of dependence.
In her book, BAD THERAPY WHY THE KIDS AREN’T GROWING UP Abigail Shrier writes:
Talk of a “youth mental health crisis” often conflates two distinct groups of young people. One suffers from profound mental illness. Disorders that, at their untreated worst, preclude productive work or stable relationships and exile the afflicted from the locus of normal life. Theirs is a crisis of neglect and undertreatment. These precious kids require medication and the care of psychiatrists.
This book is about a second, far larger cohort; the worriers, the fearful; the lonely, lost and sad. College coeds who can’t apply for a job without three or four calls to Moms. We tend not to call their problem “mental illness,” but nor would we say they are thriving. They go look for diagnoses to explain the way they feel. They think they found “it” but the “it” is always shifting.
We shower these kids with meds, therapy, mental health and “wellness” resources, even prophylactically. We rush to remedy a misdiagnosed condition with the wrong sort of cure.
In her book, Shrier goes on to talk about how this focus on providing mental health therapists for kids who are having normal life worries and anxiety is creating young adults who are dependent on therapy, unable to cope with adversity, and generally more unhappy than any other generation in our history.
This is what the mandatory full-time therapist in schools would continue to create.
Like most employees who like their job and want to collect their check but don’t have enough work to occupy their 8-hour day, these full-time therapists would need to find “justification” for their full-time status and would go on a search mission to find or even create patients in their schools.
In 2024, The Easton Gazette wrote about our local school system getting a federal grant to hire more mental health professionals in their schools and the results are similar to what will happen with mandatory mental health therapists in every public school:
Are The Kids Crazy? – The Easton Gazette
Article Excerpts
School districts including our local system, are hiring mental health professionals as quickly as possible. In fact, it seems that recruitment of mental health professionals and school psychologists is almost as big a priority as recruitment of teachers. Nationally, the percentage increase in school based mental health staff is astonishing.
And yet, school districts are being told it’s not enough.
Personnel shortages are among the leading factors that limit schools’ ability to effectively provide mental health services to students. Many schools do not meet recommended ratios for psychologists to students (500:1) or counselors to students (250:1). Going into the 2022-2023 school year, 19 percent of public schools have vacancies for mental health professionals. Among schools with these vacancies, 84 percent reported it will be somewhat or very difficult to fill these mental health positions. –Raise the Bar: Mental Health and Wellbeing | U.S. Department of Education
What is equally interesting is that schools/government officials will give you many different reasons for this. Many will tell you that is because of the Covid Pandemic. Others will tell you that it is because of influence of social media that causes kids to feel like they are inferior to others and disconnected from friends. They also cite the bullying that can happen on social media that will extend the effect into school hallways. Others blame it on parents who are too busy to spend time with their children. One site says that the problems are due to “gun violence.” The final reason is that children are being denied the right to adopt their true “gender” based on their feelings.
Each item taken on its own may contribute to the problem. Some of them are on the list for political reasons.
From the summary of BAD THERAPY on Amazon:
In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z’s mental health is worse than that of previous generations. Youth suicide rates are climbing, antidepressant prescriptions for children are common, and the proliferation of mental health diagnoses has not helped the staggering number of kids who are lonely, lost, sad and fearful of growing up. What’s gone wrong with America’s youth?
In Bad Therapy, bestselling investigative journalist Abigail Shrier argues that the problem isn’t the kids—it’s the mental health experts. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with child psychologists, parents, teachers, and young people, Shrier explores the ways the mental health industry has transformed the way we teach, treat, discipline, and even talk to our kids. She reveals that most of the therapeutic approaches have serious side effects and few proven benefits. Among her unsettling findings:
- Talk therapy can induce rumination, trapping children in cycles of anxiety and depression
- Social Emotional Learning handicaps our most vulnerable children, in both public schools and private
- “Gentle parenting” can encourage emotional turbulence – even violence – in children as they lash out, desperate for an adult in charge
In August of 2022, an article on Radio Free Oxford, “Destabilizing Children: Are Schools Conducting a “Psy-Op” on Our Kids?” described the mental health program in place in the Talbot County Maryland Public Schools.
The article was about the concerted effort in the public schools to alleviate mental problems among children while actually promoting them. Here is a portion of that article describing a grant the Talbot school system received from the Federal Government:
Talbot County Public Schools is one of three school districts in the State of Maryland to be awarded a Maryland Advancing Wellness and Resilience in Education II (MD-AWARE II) grant by the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE). The purpose of the grant is to develop a comprehensive, coordinated, and integrated model for advancing wellness and resilience in educational settings for school-aged youth.
TCPS will use these funds to expand the school district’s Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) framework to provide sustenance for social, emotional, and behavioral needs of students. This initiative places a strong emphasis and priority on mental health services. The goals of the program may include but are not limited to: access to mental health, mindfulness, trauma informed, wrap around, parent navigators, teacher consultants, behavior specialist, Youth Mental Health First Aid training, and restorative practices. This is a 5-year grant for $300,000 per year, pending continued available federal funding. Planning has begun for the expanded services to begin in early 2021.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Who would turn down 1.5 million dollars? Also, this grant promises better behaved students, more mentally stable students, and a kinder, gentler school system that will solve the mental health issues of the children. The school system did a video with Principals proclaiming how great the program was, how it helped with discipline, etc. No one could question the great things happening because of this testimony. Except there’s a catch. One is shown in a clip of a Kindergarten teacher doing mental health exercises with her class.
The short clip showed a kindergarten class where a teacher asks how many of them are “sad today.” They ALL raise their hands (some after they check out what everyone else is doing), so the teacher tells them to lay on their backs and “belly breathe.” They are taught to embrace their sadness, put it aside, and “self-regulate.” One needs to self-regulate in order to prevent disruption to the group. No doubt that children will eventually be evaluated on this ability. At the very least, teachers will be evaluated on their abilities to deliver SEL (social emotional learning). (Special Note: This is part of the “social emotional learning” component of a kindergarten class. Social Emotional Learning, or SEL, is the government’s way of teaching children the values of the government, not the parents and families. It is a way to separate kids from the beliefs of their families. “It’s one thing to direct your own moral, ethical, and emotional development or that of your children,” said Jane Robbins, co-author of “Social-Emotional Learning: K-12 Education as New-Age Nanny State.” “But having a government vendor or unqualified public-school officials implement an SEL curriculum based on coffee-table psychology is quite another.”)
The teacher here doesn’t have ill intent. She is doing what she thinks is right for kids. If she can teach them to suppress and ignore their emotions and intuition, life will be better for them and her, right? Not necessarily.
This program, like so many other government programs, is built on a slim layer of good intentions and visions. Unfortunately, when reality hits, the program won’t deliver and in fact can do harm to children.
The intent of the program is better behaved students, more mentally stable students, and better academic progress. Sadly, this is not what is happening. Last year, bomb threats and fights were rife in the system and teachers tell of students as young as kindergarten who are “out of control.”
For the system, the reward in the grant is many new counselor positions and over 400 mental health incidents for them to handle in the schools. They are pleased about since this exceeds the total cases they have had for twenty years. They laud the fact that they are better trained in spotting mental health problems. It’s similar to how the thresholds on the original COVID tests were made more sensitive to find more cases of Covid, even if they didn’t really exist. It’s also called job security and a way to demand more money from the state.
Stifling a child’s intuition and gut feelings is dangerous. Children have to learn to trust their intuition and their parents’ warnings to differentiate right from wrong, good from bad. We used to train kids that if their intuition tells them something is wrong, they need to follow that intuition. It’s what helps them stay safe from predators. SEL and the accompanying mental health initiatives gets rid of that intuition and individuality. It tells students to act as the “collective” and follow the crowd.
Years later, the program in the district has not reduced the mental health issues in the system. In fact, the problems are increasing and the demand for mental health counselors and school psychologists has grown. (Note: Part of this is because the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future demands more counselors in schools.) Student behavior is even worse than it was coming out of the pandemic. Like everything else government does, they didn’t solve the problem, they made it bigger.
In reality, if the kids are “crazy” it’s because the adults made them that way. The adults are the ones who presented suicide ideation, gender ideology, gender doubt, and confusion about who kids can and can’t trust. Some of these adults are well meaning but are ill equipped to help so they do and say exactly the wrong thing. In teaching we used to call it compassionate malpractice.
The sad truth is that more of our kids ended up suffering mental illness, approximately 40% more in 2022 than ever before.
House Bill 740 Will Add To Problem and Create More
We haven’t even approached the logistic and focus problems that will arise with school mental health therapists in every public school in Maryland. Every time a new initiative is added in a school, time is stolen from classroom instructional time for students. Certainly, these mental health therapists will want time to come in classes and present their “therapy” to the general population of students. That means less instructional time, unsettled routines, and disruption to an already fragmented school day.
Test scores show the devastating effects of those disruptions.
Additionally, when mental health therapists are mandated in public schools, parents will lose any control or say in the treatment their children receive, particularly those who are twelve years old and older. State law gives those children the right to make decisions about their mental health without parental approval. We have seen examples of schools hiding gender transitions and other vital information from parents. This law would just make that more rampant.
It could also potentially be an invasion of student, parent, and family privacy.
I know the person who pushed back on my Facebook post really believes that this bill would help students. In reality, it would do great harm in many ways.
Finally, the questions that need to be asked and answered are “Who will make money off the implementation of this bill?” Will it be the mental health industry? The drug companies as more drugs are prescribed to these captive student patients? Will certain unions gain more members?
Unfortunately, we believe the answers to all those questions are “yes.”
Let’s hope this unfunded, damaging mandate isn’t passed.
-Jan Greenhawk, Author
The post A Damaging Unfunded Mandate For Maryland Schools appeared first on The Easton Gazette.
