New Jersey's Black Students Have Reduced Access to School Mental Health Staff
“In New Jersey, students of color are more likely to live in poverty and attend a school with harsher discipline...The solution to this isn’t to cut back on their access to mental health staff; it’s to give them more access to the professionals they need.”
Report Author Mark Weber, Ph.D., New Jersey Policy Perspective
Over the past decade, access to mental health staff for Black students decreased, while white students’ access increased. This occurred in spite of the increased focus on mental health for students since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
New Jersey’s Black Students Suffer a Decline in Access to School Mental Health Staff, is the report that tracks the number of mental health staff in schools across New Jersey.
Mental Health staff include:
- nurses,
- counselors,
- behavior specialists,
- psychologists, and
- social workers
The report reviews the number of mental health staff in schools to the number of students of different races and ethnicities enrolled in those schools.
The report concludes that policymakers must improve staffing levels of mental health support professionals to meet the needs of students.
Read the full report here.
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