These stats are scary and they’re getting worse.
If you look at the slides (these are viewable on Instagram) a very thorough WaPo article I shared in Stories that gives a lot of the facts as to how we’re falling short on K-12 mental health resources. This first stat – yes is concerning: recommendations for School Psychologists to Student ratio is 1:1500. The national average is 1:1, 160. Short more than two times recommended.
If you go further into the slides – “School Counsellors” (social workers, guidance counsellors etc), the recommendation is is 1:250 but the national average is 1:415. Almost 2.
We have a shortage of school professionals. Some on HERE. You’re stressed, overworked, have huge case loads, don’t have time to build programs…and here’s the kicker – even IF schools had the resources/money to hire more professionals, there just aren’t that many out there. The supply/demand equation is way off. It’s hard to hire.
We were at a school at the end of last week: Silver Creek, by Buffalo. We work with the whole district, K-12. And after our 6 sessions with the students in one day we had a debrief with all three principals: Elementary, Middle School and High School. And what I heard from the Elementary Principal was music to my ears addressing the issues above.
We were talking about the SameHere scale and the STARR exercises and I brought up how some schools get concerned: “You’re gonna help us find MORE kids who may be silently struggling, and we don’t have the professionals to handle that”.
Here was this Principal’s response: “What? That is WHY we are doing this program. So there is common language and known resources for: students/teachers/parents, so we can be a PEER support NETWORK – so that in the long run, we have more who can help each other, and less who NEED the school professionals because of severe cases”.
Silver Creek gets “it”. This problem takes educated PEER networks to get solved.