8Health touts & doubts
McCray, foes tangle on psych aid for students
Mayor de Blasio’s administration boasts its mental health program has brought services to every city school — but critics say ThriveNYC is falling short, with scores of schools still without full-time staff social workers, guidance counselors or psychologists.
“For the first time, we have some kind of mental health support in all 1,800 of our schools,” First Lady Chirlane McCray, the public face of the program, said at a City Council hearing Tuesday.
Yet de Blasio’s preliminary budget didn’t include funding to continue a program providing social workers for homeless public school kids.
And the city’s own data show that in a system with more than 1.1 million students, there are just 1,335 social workers, 2,958 guidance counselors and 560 school psychologists on the payroll.
“There are over 200 schools without a full-time guidance counselor, and over 700 schools without a fulltime social worker. From a mental health perspective, is this good policy, and what is Thrive doing to increase the number of guidance counselors and social workers in schools?” Councilman Daniel Dromm, chairman of the finance committee and a former public school teacher, asked McCray.
“We’re looking at it very carefully, we know the need is there and it’s urgent,” McCray replied. “We are, I would say, it’s something that we’re looking at. I’m not ready to talk about it right now.”
Rather than social workers or guidance counselors, McCray and Thrive’s executive director Susan Herman emphasized “mental health clinicians,” saying they’d added hundreds to city schools.
In her testimony, Herman said before Thrive, 195 schools had a clinician onsite. Through Thrive, another 173 schools now have them.
Afterward, Herman explained clinicians represent a “range” of professionals, with some being licensed social workers and others “licensed mental health care workers.”
All are tasked with “providing counseling and services directly to individual students,” but also train staff, Herman said.
She also testified “over 900 more schools have off-site clinical care in place.”
An education spokesman explained 900 schools share 100 “mental health consultants.”
But Scott Bloom of the DOE’s Office of Mental Health said the consultants provide training to staff or connect schools to other mental health agencies — and don’t provide mental health help themselves.
“So they cannot provide direct services to our children?” asked Councilman Mark Treyger, head of the education committee.
“At this point no, but they do lots of consultations, they do trainings for our teachers on-site, and they bring that information back, as we said, sometimes we do then bring clinics in,” Bloom said.
Treyger countered that principals he’d spoken to complained about access to direct services.
“I am confused when I hear that there are clinicians available to schools, when I’m hearing the exact opposite from the school community,” he said.
Including non-Thrive programs, there are 660 schools with mental health clinicians on-site who can provide direct services, an education spokesman told the Daily News.
That includes 220 sites with school-based mental health clinical services, and 266 schools that have schoolbased health centers that provide mental health services outside of Thrive.
It’s not the first time Thrive critics have pointed to the lack of mental health services in city schools.
When city Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza tweeted March 22 that Thrive was working in city schools, parents and staffers pushed back.
“Even students with mandates for counseling don’t have enough counselors with enough time for the students needs,” wrote one teacher. “The chancellor needs to know NYC.”