Next to the extreme importance of changes in gun regulations, when it comes to mental health and school safety, many critical conditions are thus far overlooked or ignored by policymakers. The first and most important is to know every student at the school.
Parents should ask, do they know my child at school? Educators should ask, do we know the students, each one, at this school?
When discussing mental health, policymakers should look at creating better-personalized schools, not focus on technology and data collection. Students should get the best education and emotional and behavioral support.
Know Every Student should be the school mantra. Too often, schools become cold and impersonal due to past reforms.
Here are five ways this can change.
1. Class Size
Some high school teachers have upwards of 150 students or more! Even kindergarten classes where students get their introduction to school might be 30 students. Many students fall through the cracks when schools and classes are large. Class sizes should be manageable so that teachers can know their students well.
In inclusion classes, students with emotional and behavioral disabilities might need more attention from the teacher, who must have support. If this doesn’t occur, students miss out on the attention and assistance they deserve under IDEA.
Smaller classes can help teachers recognize and address bullying behavior.
If schools don’t have the funds to lower class sizes, and even if they do, they should bring back homeroom, where students can get some individualized attention and know they have a school adult in their corner who will go to bat for them. See here, and Gregory Sampson, Grumpy Old Teacher, also recently recognized the value of homeroom.
2. Community Services, Including Residential Placement
Communities must provide a blanket to assist students with severe mental health problems by establishing good mental health care centers with specialists and schools and residential placement in extreme cases.
Instead of shutting down residential facilities like they’re doing in New York, forcing parents to call the police when they have a crisis with their child, New York, and other states should improve their community services, including residential placement.
We should not return to the terrible mental health facilities of old, but to better modern facilities where parents and children receive longer-term support from real professionals and well-paid trained staff.
Some students need to step away from their families or families need to work along with their students to improve the overall situation. They require a longer time to identify difficulties with psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, and special education teachers.
There should be no stigma attached, only professional assistance to help children and families get the support they need to have a better life.
Students denied services remain at risk.
3. Qualified Teachers
Every general education teacher should receive university education preparation to identify characteristics that indicate when a student has emotional or behavioral disabilities.
It’s one of the reasons fast-track-prepped teachers like Teach for America aren’t good enough and why collecting online information about students has little value.
In the past, there have been paper checklists, and behavioral assessments, to assist with this. There should be no need to enter this information online. The individuals that can help are at the student’s school working face-to-face with the students.
The student’s behavior can be carefully documented at the school and shared with the parents.
4. Special Education Teachers
Under special education, teachers require additional university instruction to work with students who present emotional and behavioral disabilities.
They might be resource teachers, self-contained, or team-teach to work collaboratively with general education teachers.
5. Support Staff
Teachers should be able to turn to counselors, school psychologists, administrators, and special education teachers who understand emotional and behavioral disabilities to provide resources or full-time exceptional education support.
Special education has always involved evaluation, referrals, and placement committees involving the parents so that it isn’t one individual making all the decisions affecting the students.
Every school must have support staff to immediately help identify and assist students with emotional and behavioral disabilities and to write Individual Educational Plans.
6. Whole Curriculum
Some students are not academically inclined or have learning disabilities that hold them back. Along with resources to help students with disabilities learn, schools must provide alternative programs that are helpful to students and society, including career-technical education and the arts.
Students need to know they have career options, and high schools would benefit by providing career counselors who help students find their niche.
These are a few suggestions to make schools more receptive to those who present emotional and behavioral disabilities and for schools to Know Every Student.
Perhaps you have more or different ideas. Please feel free to share them here. Public schools are your schools.
I’m 53 and left public school after 7th grade for this reason. I was not too fond of the change from having a teacher who knew me and ensured I got some challenging work and at least a little nod of acknowledgment here and there. In my large Junior High, it was a sea of kids who didn’t care about school in the least. Most of the teachers had given up and handed out “dittos.” The atmosphere was terrible. I went to private school for high school and loved it. The school where I taught was great on this front. Our principal tried to learn every child’s name, and she told us we were not just responsible for our class but for everyone’s. If we saw something, we were to intervene as if it was our student. It had that “old neighborhood” effect – when you knew your friend’s mom watching was the same as your mom watching. Our students behaved well because they knew everyone’s eyes were on them. We were kind, though. We mostly talked to them and gave warnings, but they knew we cared.
Thanks, Beth. Private schools can be good, but it’s important to remember that they can also control the environment. Public schools accept all students and reject no one. It’s up to the leaders in this country to adequately fund those schools and regulate them so that every student has access to qualified teachers and humane and safe working conditions.
“Public schools accept all students.” I would correct that to “Public schools enroll all students.” Acceptance is the opposite of what my children and I felt. I didn’t mean to say that the solution is to send everyone to private school. This and homeschooling are the only options when your district does not offer inclusion programs and refuses to help your child in any meaningful way.
I’m sorry you and your children had a bad experience with public schools. Whatever you call it though, most prestigious private schools and many religious schools do not enroll students with disabilities, especially developmental disabilities. If they do, it is usually a segregated special school.
There are many public schools with teachers who do try to accommodate children with disabilities included in the inclusive classroom.
Idiotic liberals through legislation like the Lantermen act had forced to close public Institutions for Mental Disease because of “racism” “social justice”
Quickly after these closures conservative business people found their new money making niche by creating private mental hospitals and community clinics that deal with mental and behavioral disorders because of these closures. Disabled children suffer from poor quality care because of this. Police brutality and abuse in schools once again became and issue because of the closure of mental hospitals for children as these children and young adults were more likely to come in contact with police and irate school staff whoa are not trained in mental illness. Reopen the similar developmental centers California
I am interested in state hospitals. Could you share with me where you got this information? I don’t see anything about racism or social justice in the Lanterman Act.
Thanks for your comments, Will.
https://www.dds.ca.gov/services/state-facilities/dc-closures/
Thanks, Beth. I know many see institutions as bad places, but I knew of some that were managed well in the past. Certainly, whenever possible children need to be home or in smaller well-staffed facilities where they get the best of care.
But sometimes children might benefit from residential placement. Families might need them. These facilities need to be well-staffed and accountable to families and the public.
CA (and other states) have significant problems with their Homeless population, and I wish they’d invest in humane state hospitals.
https://mn.gov/mnddc/parallels2/pdf/00s/01/01-TEW-FDL.pdf
I found this link if it will come through. It explains the history behind all of this. There ARE options for children and adults to live outside the family home. I am the mother of two children with autism. One of my children lived in group homes for about 5 years, beginning at 17. There are more intensive programs for kids with more needs, but these large institutions – which were initially asylums – were found to be mentally and physically unhealthy. There is still work to do to keep the group homes safe, but at least the clients are in a home setting and taken into the community, not locked up – yes, they were locked up – in a building with people who had severe mental health conditions with no hope of receiving appropriate care or education. My son was also in residential treatment for 12 months. It is not the same thing at all. That is an organized program to help kids. His was a mostly outdoor therapy program in a rural area. These are still available, too. What were closed were institutions like Agnews.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/03/24/after-more-than-120-years-agnews-is-closing-this-week/
I look forward to reading, Beth. Thanks!
There have been some terrible institutions, and no one should be locked up as you put it, but not everyone has a loving family or a group home placement. I’ve been to San Francisco, LA, and San Diego. CA needs to do something to assist the mentally ill, and the homeless on the streets. I believe states need humane institutions that must prove accountability or better group homes. We must not return to the institutions of old but make them better and more humane, getting the homeless help.
We don’t want our children institutionalized. I don’t know why that is “liberal?” Lanterman gives them the right to make their own decisions. They are not mentally ill. They are developmentally delayed – autism, Down syndrome, that sort of thing. No reason to lock them up in asylums!
There are some children who might benefit from residential treatment centers. I would not equate this with locking them up. The key is to staff such facilities with well-prepared professionals and ensure accountability.