An update.
On Thursday, December 16th, the Board of Education held its final regular meeting of the 2021 calendar year and while many speakers had signed up to speak about mental health, and many also sent emails, the Board of Education did not address this issue in depth.
The next BOE meeting will be a reorganization meeting held on Jan 5, 2022 (see details about that here). At that meeting, three new BOE trustees will be sworn in and a new president will be elected by the existing BOE trustees. Mr. Walker will no longer be superintendent, as he is retiring effective Dec 31, 2021.
- Mussab Ali - term ends in 2021
- Joan Terrell-Paige - term ends in 2021
- Marilyn Roman- term ends in 2021
- Lekendrick Shaw
- Alexander Hamilton
- Gerald Lyons
- Lorenzo Richardson
- Gina Verdibello
- Noemi Velazquez
The three new BOE trustees who will be replacing trustees Ali, Terrell-Paige, and Roman are:
- Natalia Ioffe
- Younass Barkouch
- Paula Jones-Watson
Public comment was allowed at least year's reorganization meeting, which indicates it may be allowed at this year's meeting too.
To get on the speakers' list, you can call 201.915.6074 (you'll need to leave a message) or email the BOE at [email protected].
Learn more about public comment here. You can speak in person, via zoom, or via phone. The JC BOE monthly meetings are streamed live from the district's Facebook page.
UPDATE: this petition has been updated to include the emails for Trustees Ioffe, Barkouch, and Jones-Watson.
After nearly 18 months in a mostly online format, Jersey City Public Schools returned to a full-in person learning. The district is working with its first fully budget in more than a decade and also has tens of millions of federal aid dollars to reopen and support the students. So in August, the district hired an outside vendor at a cost of $2.9 million to provide mental health professionals who could be embedded within our schools; however, in November that contract was cancelled without explanation or a backup plan.
The need for mental health services is clear, and it's on the record.
We can see laid out in the public record. The Board of Education explicitly stated this need for mental health services on August 26th, as part of its RFP (request for proposal) report for counseling services:
“The COVID epidemic has caused many social/emotional issues for our students, staff, and parents. We the District are in need of mental health professionals to come into our schools daily to work with restoring the mental and emotional well-being of all.” –RPF Contract Award Report, Aug 26, 2021
The funding is available, and it's federal American Rescue Plan (ARP) provided:
For years the district was hamstrung by continued budget cuts due to pressure from City Hall and state aid cuts. But in June 2021 the BOE broke through the political logjam and passed its first fully funded budget in more than a decade, with board trustees citing the need to support our students. What's more, the federal government provided tens of millions in pandemic aid and acknowledged that mental health services were critical for kids, allowing aid to be used for mental health services in local schools. The $2.9 million contract - with private vendor Reimagined Mind - was included in the district’s federal ARP aid / spending report:
But then the contract with Reimagined Mind was terminated at the November 2021 board meeting. No public explanation was given. The end result - what really matters here for our kids - is that our schools are now back to square one with respect to a lack of sufficient mental health services, and we are nearly halfway through the school year. Our kids need these services but we don't have enough staff. After years of budget cuts, the existing mental health professionals in JCPS continue to be spread too thin.
Some additional context.
The district defined the need for mental health professionals embedded in our schools in addition to the traditional school counselors. I'm not a mental health expert, but in talking to those who are experts, it seems extremely important to underscore the nuance related to "counselors."
Specifically, what is needed here are counselors of various types:
According to ASCA, counseling services fall into three critical domains: career development, academic counseling and social-emotional learning, the third of which has been in higher-than-usual demand in recent years. In many schools, especially those that serve younger students, one person is able to cover all three domains, typically approaching the third by offering classroom guidance that covers bullying, how to ask for help and how to talk about your feelings. That person can also work more closely with specific students who have been identified as needing short-term intervention, often in response to trauma, such as the death of a family member or parents’ divorce..." - Ed Surge, September 2019
So...we need especially need, at this time, the third type of counselor in our schools, ideally in the form of licensed mental health therapists (aka clinicians) as soon as possible. And while many current articles point out the shortage of mental health professionals across the country, 
NJ has - statistically, at least, as of June 2021 - among the "lowest proportion of their population living in areas with mental health shortages." We need to press hard locally for services.
Using existing ratios to help define the status quo paradigm vs. what's needed going forward.
I am an accountant so my bias is numbers and quantifying the paradigm.
So, if we look at a typical guidance counselor who covers the three domains noted above (career development, academic counseling, and social-emotional learning), the best practice ratio according to the ASCA (American School Counselor Association) is 250:1 (250 students to one counselor).
In NJ, the ratio in the 2019-20 school year was 348:1.
If we applied the best practice ratio to JCPS, a district with approximately 30,000 students, that means we may need about 30,000 / 250 = about 120 guidance counselors. I do not know how many we actually have on staff, but it would be interesting to find out. [A side note: I think we should know this number; as it stands, we don't know it because the district does not provide that level of transparency, at least not easily.]
However, if we are talking about licensed mental health therapists, the ratios are much lower, in the range of 50:1 or 30:1. It is important to note that this type of service is different from academic counseling; these professionals are tasked with meeting with students, building rapport and a relationship, and counseling them on a consistent basis through complex terrains of trauma, grief, and more. And, not all 30,000 students would necessarily need these types of services (the way, for example, all high schoolers should be given career counseling). Instead, the idea is a ground-up approach where need is assessed and students are referred to counseling if it's warranted.
So let's look at a school like Dickinson High School, where for two days now there have been threats of violence that have made the local news, and many parents are taking note. That school's 2020-21 enrollment was 1,878 in 2020-21; how many counselors, or what type of programming, is needed to support that school's students on a daily basis? If we assumed 10% of the population -- or 187 -- then that means they would need at last six licensed mental health therapists. Of course, other solutions may exist if the district thinks outside the box, such as restorative justice.
This is a community conversation that we need to have, and we need mental health experts to help drive it.
