Last month, when New York announced the state would spend more than $5 million on public school-based mental health clinics, it joined the growing ranks of states setting aside money for students’ psychological well-being.
Earlier in January, for example, the federal health agency that oversees Medicare and Medicaid said it had set aside $50 million in grants for in-school counselors and therapists. In October, Maryland announced it has budgeted $120 million for mental health programs on grade-school campuses.
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Yet community activists and therapists who work with Black children say the million-dollar budget allocations, while helpful and attention-grabbing, aren’t nearly enough.
Given a series of disturbing trends — including rising suicide rates among Black girls, homicide as the leading cause of death among Black boys, and Black children as likely targets for hate crimes at school — advocates say the lion’s share of any mental-health money should be reserved specifically for Black students.
“Definitely — I think more needs to be served out,” says Jamila Davis, a Seton Hall University-based community activist and educator. “The rates of suicide and mental health issues and challenges that our students of color are undergoing is just quite alarming.”
Just 41% of schools actually hired new staff specifically for students’ mental health and well-being.
In recent years, educators and elected officials across the nation have begun to recognize that children and adolescents are wrestling with poor mental and emotional health. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which scrambled the education system, schools are grappling with growing absenteeism and discipline problems as well as decreases in academic performance.
When schools returned full-time after the pandemic, 67% of them reported creating additional mental health services for students, according to a 2022 Kaiser Family Foundation report. Yet, just 41% of schools actually hired new staff specifically for students’ mental health and well-being.
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Meanwhile, Black students were already dealing with serious mental health issues from before the pandemic.
In 2019, for example, suicide was the second leading cause of death for Black youths ages 15 to 24, according to the Office of Minority Health. Black adolescents and teens were 60% more likely to attempt suicide than their white peers. And a CDC survey in June 2020 found that the number of Black respondents who reported having serious suicide ideation had increased substantially.
At the same time, Black students are more likely to seek and receive counseling at school for several reasons — from lack of family health insurance to cultural misconceptions about seeing a therapist.
“The way (mental healthcare) needs to be served — I think we need to talk about that,” says Davis, who is also a research fellow at Yale University School of Public Health. “There’s a stigma that comes with mental health and mental health treatment, especially for people of color. So even if you have a resource there, if it’s not something that is attractive to kids, or that they feel okay and comfortable with, we might be spending money on a resource that’s going to be greatly underutilized.”
Along with more money exclusively for Black students and under-resourced schools, Davis believes the grants and funding should give educators — and students — the freedom to design or tailor mental health programs that meet their needs. That includes everything from peer-to-peer counseling to therapy that incorporates art, dance, and music.
“One of the things that we do with our work is empower our students to have a voice,” says Davis, describing a mental wellness-peer coaching program she helped design at a high school in East Orange, New Jersey. “Instead of telling them what they need we speak to them, and they help us to figure out how to get them what they need.
“If students are able to have a seat at the table, we’ll really be able to create some things that will be life-changing for our community,” she says. “People closest to the problem are closest to the solution, right?”