I’ve done a few posts this year about the expanding role of schools as social service providers. Here’s another one….
The recent report on Adam Lanza’s mental health before he killed a bunch of school kids in Connecticut is pretty sad. The poor kid was a mess. Professionals told the Lanzas that their child needed immediate help and probably medication for a whole range of problems. He mostly likely needed residential treatment at some institution. These problems were obvious to everybody, but his parents.
His parents, particularly his mother, didn’t get him the treatment that he needed. They were in denial. And who can blame them? It’s a HUGE thing to get your mind around the idea that your child needs institutional care. So, they did things that made his mental problems worse. They let the boy isolate himself more and left guns around the house.
Let’s leave the gun thing aside for the moment and talk about the isolation. It’s very, very, very easy to become isolated when a child has any sort of disability. We touched on that a bit in the last comment thread. Between the child’s extreme behavior and the lack of community supports for people who aren’t average, the default is hermitry. It takes an enormous amount of energy and resources to prevent that from happening. I don’t blame the parents for sliding into isolation.
I blame everyone else.
We need systems in place, so that the burden for caring for children with extreme issues doesn’t fall solely on one or two people. It’s American individualism gone terribly wrong.
The report highlights the school district’s errors.
The OCA report is also critical of the educational professionals that dealt with Lanza, designing an individual educational plan for him after he was withdrawn from the normal high school classroom setting at his mother’s request.
The report found records indicating that the school system “unwittingly enabled Mrs. Lanza’s preference to accommodate and appease AL through the educational plan’s lack of attention to social-emotional support, failure to provide related services, and agreement to AL’s plan of independent study and early graduation age 17.”
Somehow, school districts have become responsible for health care related issues of children between 3-21. They hire neurologists and psychologists to diagnose everything from anxiety disorders to OCD to bipolar disorder. It’s nearly impossible for pediatricians to pick up on any problems in their five minute yearly visits. Now that school districts are responsible for educating kids regardless of their disability, they have gotten in the mental health field.
Schools do not want this responsibility. They HATE this responsibility. It’s expensive to them and outside their mission of educating typical children. So, they do whatever they can to evade this responsibility. When faced with a passive and oblivious parent, like Lanza, they do the side step away from these responsibilities as fast as they can.
Now, maybe schools shouldn’t be in the business of treating the full range of problems associated with autism, cerebral palsy, or selective mutism. Teachers don’t attend medical school. Many problems simply cannot be addressed by a 23-year girl with BA in education from a less selective college.
The problem is that somebody needs to be involved. We cannot let families float along without any help. They need more guidance. They need financial support for expensive services. They need professionals in their homes. I would say that this responsibility should fall with the social workers at state child protection departments, but they have proven incompetent too many times. New systems need to be established.
We shouldn’t do these things to avoid another Sandy Hook. Most people, even with severe mental health problems like Lanza, won’t commit a mass murder. We need to guide parents, and maybe even force them, to let their children enter state-run mental health centers, because it is simply the right thing to do.
Apt. 11d 
I do not think we can add the responsibility for getting the best mental health care to the public schools, especially in the form cited in the Lanza report — in opposition to the parents’ wishes. They already have the obligation to report abuse, a role I do support, because, as you say, schools are the place where children are seen every day. But requiring them to be medical service providers? too much.
I’ve recently spent some time talking with an elementary school teacher who has a very challenging class this year. Challenging, in that, her class contains 6+ students who are English Language Learners (in 5 different languages, none of which she speaks), 10+ students who cannot read or do math at grade level, and 5+ students who cause significant disruption in the classroom (in a class of 24+, some of the categories do overlap). The teacher is very experienced, the kind of teacher parents thank for “having turned their child’s life around”; so the teacher isn’t a naive first year, overwhelmed with the challenges. But, near a breaking point, anyway. Adding more responsibilities is going to overwhelm the system.
I do not see how the school could have stepped in in this instance to demand different treatment.
And, I don’t think we can talk about Adam Lanza and Sandy Hook (or Marysville and Jaylen Fryberg or . . . .), and the mistakes made by parents and others without talking about the guns left lying around.
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“We need to guide parents, and maybe even force them, to let their children enter state-run mental health centers, because it is simply the right thing to do.”
Do high-quality, effective state-run mental health centers exist today? And if they do exist (and they must exist somewhere), what percentage of US residents has access to one within a 2-4 hour drive of their home? And, quality aside, isn’t there a very reasonable fear that vulnerable children will be abused in those settings? That sort of institution is traditionally a haven for child molesters and abusers, whether staff or residents.
If young adults can’t be forced into mental health treatment against their will, lots of luck forcing parents of minors to put them into mental health treatment against the parents’ will. Only the most negligent and indigent parent would be incapable of digging up a psychiatrist to testify that the school’s plan of treatment was contrary to the best interests of the child.
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If schools are reluctant and slow to provide the help that parents want and fight for, I do not see the mechanism that will get them to provide help that the parents are fighting tooth and nail against. What would be the incentive to do that?
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No, you misunderstand me. I didn’t write that schools SHOULD be responsible for mental health issues in minors. Right now, they ARE responsible for mental health issues in minors. By showing negligence in the Lanza case, they could be open to major law suits.
It is nuts. But that’s the way it is, because nobody else is diagnosing kids, providing treatments, and working with families. Most schools are doing a pretty crap job at those tasks, but nobody else is helping families. School laws make them do that minimum. Health care insurance companies? Ha!! They refuse to cover basic therapies, like social skills counselling or occupational therapy. Parents of kids with severe autism spend on average $30,000 per year out of their own pocket to pay for help. State bureaucracy is pretty much useless.
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“It is nuts. But that’s the way it is, because nobody else is diagnosing kids, providing treatments, and working with families. Most schools are doing a pretty crap job at those tasks, but nobody else is helping families. School laws make them do that minimum. Health care insurance companies? Ha!! They refuse to cover basic therapies, like social skills counselling or occupational therapy. Parents of kids with severe autism spend on average $30,000 per year out of their own pocket to pay for help. State bureaucracy is pretty much useless.”
Isn’t that contradictory? The reason that parents with severely autistic children spend $30k a year out of pocket is that private parties are diagnosing, treating, and working with families. That’s not “nobody else.” If there were nobody else, there’d be no out-of-pocket expenses.
I think what you mean to say is “no other governmental entity besides the schools is diagnosing kids, providing treatments, and working with families.” And I’m not even sure that that’s true. Maybe “in the public sector, the schools are doing the bulk of the diagnosing, treatment, and work with families”?
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Parents are paying the money out to various service providers who do piece meal work for them. One guy does speech therapy. Another guy does physical therapy. In complicated cases like severe autism, there are lots of different kinds of therapies and the parents are in charge of figuring out what their kids need, finding the right people to do it, organizing schedules, and coordinating any necessary group meetings.
Parents should not be doing any of those things by themselves. It’s way too much responsibility. It’s too costly. It’s impossible to do properly unless the person is highly educated and spends hours doing it. Even then, it takes several years to learn how to do those jobs.
Now, in some cases, school do those things. It’s usually after a legal battle. I’m not sure that schools should be responsible for that job, but right now, they are.
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You need a proper and comprehensive public health system and strict gun control laws, neither of which are going to happen in the US any time soon.
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