Our community has a very important opportunity to ensure that Lebanon public school students have access to social services, especially during the pandemic years in our nation and in their individual phases of life.
The Students of Color Collective at Lebanon High School has written that “we need counselors, and mental health providers and people who are trained in youth development.” I strongly agree and align with their needs. Like nearly everyone else, I have had family members and close friends struggle with mental health issues.
I have also worked with a local startup that is helping detect suicide risk in the military, veterans hospitals, universities, and prisons, and have advised a nonprofit startup focused on providing financial support for long term mental health care.
The mental health crisis must be addressed. The rate of mental health issues has escalated in this new generation, especially during the isolation and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. Students need social workers who support and uplift students. They don’t need a school resource officer who has the intimidating power to arrest a student. That intimidating power is typically unjust and systemic, focusing on young people who are Black, Indigenous and people of color.
As I understand it, the School Board has given Superintendent Joanne Roberts the green light to remove the school resource officer and replace him with a much needed social worker. Roberts should do just that, as soon as possible. It will be an exciting new day when she takes that action, action that the community wants to see.
Many of our fellow citizens still stubbornly refuse to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
Medical experts say that by helping to spread the virus, these individuals are responsible for many thousands of unnecessary deaths. Asserting their own personal freedom, they have also slowed our recovery from the pandemic and impaired everyone else’s freedom.
Appeals to recognize their shared responsibility for the health of the whole community have mostly gone unheeded. Cash payments and even loss of employment have been only partly successful in getting them to roll up their sleeves. Meanwhile, most elected officials have shown little appetite for a universal vaccine mandate. Now infection rates are at all-time highs, and a new Omicron variant is on the way. Hospital ICUs are jammed with unvaccinated COVID patients. Without some additional incentives, it seems unlikely that vaccine holdouts will do what’s needed to end this continuing crisis.
I would not wish this terrible disease on anyone. But when overburdened hospitals engage in triage for critically ill patients, unvaccinated individuals with COVID should go to the back of the line. And they should not be allowed to rely on insurance to cover their medical expenses. These small measures would make them bear at least some of the health care and economic burdens that the rest of us would otherwise have to carry. They might even convince a few more of them to get the shot.
I think schools should advocate strongly for parent involvement. I have in mind the kind of involvement that acknowledges the shared purpose of parents and teachers working for the benefit of students. Fostering collaboration benefits both: parents provide insights about their child to inform the teacher’s work and parents learn about what and how their child is being taught. Research has shown that when educators and parents work together, the children achieve better results in school, stay in school longer, and like school better.
Currently, collaboration between parents and educators is derailed by fears that educators are hijacking the curriculum, teaching left-wing racial ideologies, providing books that are sexually explicit, and focusing on past historical problems that will corrupt students into doubting our country’s greatness.
Engaging parents in classroom matters will help to ameliorate these suspicions. I would urge schools to use the model of parent involvement set forth in special education. Special educators work with both the student and parent(s) to develop an individualized education plan that addresses the student’s academic, social, and emotional needs. The student’s academic performance and social/emotional status are assessed, which provides a relatively accurate picture of the child.
Having been a special education teacher and parent advocate, I can vouchsafe for the benefits of engaging parents and teachers in collaboration. Two examples: parents of a fifth grade boy criticized their son’s teacher for being too lenient in dealing with his boisterous and unruly behavior. They felt that he needed to be disciplined as he was at home. Conferencing between parents and teacher allowed them to reach consensus on a behavior plan. Then there was the mother who was angry because her sixth grade daughter’s writing skills continued to be deficient. She questioned the adequacy of the writing curriculum. A meeting with the teacher calmed the mother as she learned what the writing program entailed. The mother also provided information about her daughter’s interests for use as writing topics.
Encouraging collaboration between parents and teacher allows for information sharing, provides parents the chance to constructively advocate for their child, and for the teacher to educate the parent about the curriculum.