$20M slash to McCray’s psych effort

The massive budget deal reached Friday between the City Council and Mayor de Blasio slashes $20 million from his wife’s embattled mental health initiative and uses some of those funds to put more social workers in city schools.

In a joint press release describing the cut as a “restructuring,” de Blasio and First Lady Chirlane McCray said $11 million of the money stripped from the ThriveNYC office is being “reinvested” into a social worker program.

“ThriveNYC’s goal is to ensure that every New Yorker who needs mental health support has access to it,” McCray said. “Adding social workers to schools in need will increase the effectiveness of current services and go even further to reach New Yorkers where they are, ensuring that people have access to services in familiar settings and often in their primary language.”

The ThriveNYC downsizing will allow the Department of Education to hire another 85 licensed social workers, bringing the total number of new social workers the administration is adding to schools in the next fiscal year to 200, according to the press release.

Hiring for those positions will begin this summer, de Blasio said.

ThriveNYC, McCray’s signature project, has faced scrutiny for falling short of its stated goal of making mental health services widely available, particularly as it pertains to city schools.

Queens Councilman Daniel Dromm grilled McCray during a hearing in March, noting that more than 200 schools were going without full-time guidance counselors and over 700 schools without full-time social workers.

“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?” Dromm asked at the time.

McCray stumbled a bit in response: “We are, I would say, it’s something that we’re looking at. I’m not ready to talk about it right now.”