A mental health stumble
Schools across New York state have failed to implement required mental health training for staff.
It would be troubling in any circumstances to learn that New York schools are failing to adequately train teachers to recognize possible mental health problems among students and know how to handle the situation.
It’s even more disturbing to find this out right now. The nation has been rocked repeatedly by mass shootings by clearly troubled young men. The isolation and disruption of the COVID -19 pandemic seems to have only deepened growing mental health issues among school-age children over the past decade or so. And there’s an acknowledged shortage of mental health providers.
Back in 2000, the state enacted the Safe Schools Against Violence in Education (SAVE) Act, which, among other things, required schools to do annual safety training for staff. The training is supposed to include 12 mental health components recommended by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — warning signs of 10 kinds of disorders; information on whom to turn to with questions or concerns about a student’s behavior; and how to access crisis support and other mental health services.
But as the Times Union’s Rachel Silberstein reports, an audit by state Comptroller Tom Dinapoli’s office found that in the 2020-21 school year, out of 20 districts sampled around the state, none met the state Education Department’s Sept. 15 deadline to have staff fully trained. Only two — Burnt Hills-ballston Lake and Canandaigua — offered staff the full required training. About a third of the districts did no training. Among districts that did do training, some kept records of who received it, some didn’t.
If the audit’s findings reflect the situation in the state’s more than 800 school districts, it would mean that more than 720 haven’t fully trained their staff, and some 260 or more have provided no mental health training at all.
Schools mainly blame the pandemic, and certainly, that year was an extraordinary one, with many schools teaching remotely or in hybrid arrangements. And while one might argue that the mental health training was all the more necessary during such a high-stress time, it’s understandable that with everything else schools had to adapt to, some things just didn’t get done.
But with schools fully reopened, there is no excuse now, and all the more urgency that schools don’t let this training fall through the cracks.
That said, however, the state has its part to do, particularly in addressing the shortage of mental health providers in New York. The state budget included about $143 million more for mental health-related programs, but most of it is for such things as a crisis hotline, inpatient hospital beds, homelessness outreach, and staffing at state-run psychiatric centers. It doesn’t deal with the broader shortage of mental health professionals and staff in mental health facilities.
Training school personnel to identify children with mental health issues will do little good if there aren’t enough people to treat them. Consider this unfinished business for a Legislature that may well have to return to Albany for a special session before the start of another school year.