- Joined
- Jul 9, 2008
- Messages
- 30,277
- Reaction score
- 17,796
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Centrist
Of particular interest to me:
If you want that report mentioned above, it's here: http://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20180319/DIV H LABORHHS SOM FY18 OMNI.OCR.pdf
Big boost of funding, but the particulars matter most. I'd be cautiously optimistic when reading further.
First: No doubt everyone is thinking about school safety after the school shootings. Now, it does fund that. However, on the side (because this may have far less impact on those dangers than the media and the gun control debate have let on) schools will be able to potentially boost mental health services and/or coordination. You're talking about at least 10% of the children's population potentially receiving the most benefit from this.
Coordination between schools and the human service sector is notoriously bad across the country, so even on the bureaucratic end this could help some. On the education side of things, there's a lot of problems going on in how schools feel prepared in dealing with mental health (because, I'll be frank, they suck at it and unfortunately treat it like it's something that they may not want to touch or address) and there's a lot of problems going on with how schools actually treat kids with mental health issues. On the low end, you get poor academic performance, upwards of 40-some percent of seriously emotionally disturbed kids dropping out of school, but then you also have a massive rise in arrests or referrals to the court system after zero-tolerance policies and SROs were instituted in the 1990s. Then you also have an incredible amount of physical discipline use on students with disabilities that is still going unreported across the country, but we already know happens over a quarter million times a year with about 70,000 kids (or 1 out of 100 special ed kids). Then we can talk about the lackluster amount of community-based services for these kids. We don't treat mental health like we do any other chronic health condition like diabetes. We often reserve treatment for emergency situations, and even there, we have been lacking.
Second, IDEA funding. Back in 1975, the federal government instituted a beefed up version of what most states had already passed into their statutes. Students with disabilities had the right to a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment. The federal government was supposed to take 40% of the funding, and the states pick up the other 60%. They never did. Federal funding has hovered at around maybe 15%. This bill would provide a boost---a very small boost--but a boost nonetheless.
Third, OCR funding. OCR may have received a lot of press coverage for sexual assault and the controversy surrounding that. However, for women and minority students, OCR has been absolutely pivotal for ensuring student civil rights are protected and are enforced. In the work I do, we try damned hard to not file complaints, but sometimes we have to. And yes, we do call our regional OCR offices for help. When the Trump administration shrunk the profile and staffing of the OCR offices in the DOJ and the Dept. of Ed, we knew what that meant and it's not good. Hopefully this reverses the trend we saw there.
Last edited:
