Our schools have more police officers than counseling staff. Some schools have an assigned officer, but not a single counselor. This indicates an insane and immoral misallocation of very limited school resources. As a society, we need to value mental health far higher than we currently do, and it’s pretty obvious we’re missing the mark based on these numbers.
How many “behavioral incidents” in schools could have been mitigated by having more trained counseling staff? Instead, because of media- (and lobbyist-) fueled hsytery over (thankfully rare) school shootings, we’re spending more and more on security and in-school police, which has created its own problems. The constant push for more security increases stress and fear at schools, making behavioral issues worse. And the introduction of “school resource officers” has meant that we’re now jailing kids for behavior that used to result in punishment like detention (and there’s a lot of evidence that this ramp-up in legal punishment isn’t racially neutral, either).
In 2012, police arrested a student in Milledgeville, Georgia. The student was crying and flailing in the principal’s office and was inconsolable. The student was charged with battery. The school was Creekside Elementary School. The student was a six-year-old girl in kindergarten.
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As school behavior is increasingly the purview of criminal prosecution, fewer counselors and mental health professionals are around to help students, according to findings from a series of studies conducted by UCLA and the American Civil Liberties Union.
The American School Counselor Association recommends one counselor per 250 students, but 60 percent of schools did not meet this standard. Instead, the average is one counselor serving 444 students. But for 1.7 million students, there are no counselors, only cops.
According to the ACLU, schools nationally reported 27,000 sworn law enforcement officers, but only 23,000 social workers. And this has caused the issue of school discipline to change the scope of punishment from detention to prosecution.