By Valery Tsekov
18 March 2019
On March 4, the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) published a devastating report which
exposed the increasingly militarized state of public schools in the United
States and chronic underfunding of school support staff.
The report, “Cops and No
Counselors: How the Lack of School Mental Health Staff is Harming Students”
provides a state-level student-to-staff ratio of employed student counselors,
nurses, psychologists, and social workers and contrasts these numbers to the
increasing presence of police officers in public schools, especially in
lower-income neighborhoods. The statistics revealed in this report are
harrowing.
The ACLU found that over 90
percent of individual schools in the US do not meet the one to 250
counselor-to-student ratio recommended by professional standards and the US
Public Health Service. On average, all of the schools in the country employ
close to half of this number of counselors: one for every 444 students, with
Arizona having the worst ratio in the country at one counselor for every 758
students. Only three states out of 50 meet the recommended ratio.
Student-to-counselor ratios
The report went on to note
that there are 1.7 million students in the US who attend schools where there
are police on campus but no counselors at all; 6 million students attend
schools where police are present but not a single school psychologist is
employed; and finally, 10 million students have police in their schools where
not a single social worker is employed.
Many schools in the US do not
have any nurses on campus. The nurse-to-student ratio recommended by
professional standards is one nurse for every 750 students. Twenty-nine states
do not meet this standard. Michigan and Oregon employ the fewest school nurses
in the country. The ratios of students per nurse provided in the report for
these two states are downright criminal: both are above 4,100 students per
nurse. Three million children in the country attend schools where there are
police officers on staff but not a single nurse.
Student-to-nurse ratios
These statistics are
staggering. Even as they are being starved of much needed funds, working-class
schools are being turned into armed camps replete with metal detectors, online
video surveillance and even military equipment.
Examples can be found
throughout the country.
· The impoverished Detroit
Public Schools spent $41.7 million on a district-wide security upgrade in 2011,
creating a 23,000 square-foot Police Command Center and Headquarters for the school
system.
· Just last week in Chicago at
a mayoral forum, Democratic candidate and former president of the Chicago
Police Board Lori Lightfoot suggested turning the city’s 38 recently shuttered
schools into police-training sites.
· Capitalizing on last year’s
horrific massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, the Florida
state legislature recently passed a bill allocating $58
million toward arming teachers throughout the state.
Detroit Public School Control
and Command Center
While millions of dollars are
easily found to militarize public schools, teachers and students are told by
Republican and Democratic politicians alike that there is no money for much
needed resources like nurses, counselors and other support staff. These
conditions have compelled hundreds of thousands of teachers to go on strike, in
a wave of teachers struggles across the US and internationally. In every case,
teachers have made the demand for more support staff a central issue, and in
every case the unions have facilitated the ramming through of concessionary
contracts that do nothing to address the fundamental issues.
Most recently in Oakland, in a
state dominated by the Democratic Party, the union rejected demands by
rank-and-file teachers to include opposition to budget cuts in the strike
demands, even though the district planned to pay for any pay increases by
slashing millions of dollars from educational services and closing schools. The
contract the union hailed as “historic” left untouched the staffing ratios for
nurses in the district, which currently stand at one for every 1,350 students.
The effect of these dual
processes, the chronic underfunding of education and the further militarization
of schools, has devastating effects on students. The ACLU report notes that
there is no research to substantiate the claim that having police present in
schools has any positive effect on delinquent behavior and school safety. On
the contrary, the report notes that "in many cases, [the presence of law
enforcement staff in schools] causes harm. When in schools, police officers do
what they are trained to do, which is detain, handcuff, and arrest. This leads
to greater student alienation and a more threatening school climate."
The ACLU found that schools
where police are always present have reported 3.5 times as many arrests per
10,000 students as schools without police.
To the extent that the
American government invests in public schools, hiring additional police is
promoted by the political establishment as a necessary response to increasingly
frequent school shootings. However, filling school campuses with cops does
nothing to address the underlying societal ills that are the root causes of
violent and antisocial crimes committed in the first place.
Student-to-social worker
ratios
Outbursts of mass violence,
along with other causes of early death among teens such as drug overdoses and
suicides, are bound up with the growth of social inequality and the miserable
conditions under which the bulk of the working class is living. Since the
economic recession of 2008 and the decline of full-time employment that
followed as a result of the restructuring of many major industries under the
Obama administration, economic uncertainties in working-class families have no
doubt plagued millions of children in the last decade.
Children in the US today are
growing up in a country that has been at war during the entirety of their
lives; wars that have destroyed entire societies and whose victims are treated
with callous indifference in the bourgeois media. These experiences sweep into
social consciousness in innumerable ways.
In fact, the ACLU report cites
a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which found that the
suicide rate among children ages 10 to 17 increased by 70 percent between 2006
and 2016. Approximately 72 percent of children in the US will have experienced
at least one major stressful event—such as witnessing violence, experiencing
abuse, or experiencing the loss of a loved one—before the age of 18.
Under such conditions, the
need for school nurses, psychologists, and counselors can quickly become life
and death questions for students.
The authors of the report note
the substantial amount of research done on the benefits of having health care
professionals trained to work with children in schools: “School counselors,
nurses, social workers, and psychologists are frequently the first to see
children who are sick, stressed, or traumatized.” The report goes on to state
that “schools with such services see improved attendance rates, better academic
achievement, and higher graduation rates as well as lower rates of suspension,
expulsion, and other disciplinary incidents.”
The data cited in the report
shows that school-based mental health and special learning needs services, when
made available, improve the overall safety of schools and promote student
participation in interactive educational initiatives.
The resources to provide all
of these services and much more exist in society. However, to secure a healthy
and productive learning environment for teachers and students requires a
frontal assault on the wealth of the ruling class and the social and economic
system it defends, capitalism.
The defense of public
education requires a fight for socialism, which above all means the establishment
of a society based on social need, not private profit, in which the wealth
produced by the working class is owned and controlled democratically, and in
which every individual has the right to an education, a decent job, a livable
income, health care, a healthy environment, and access to culture.
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