According to the Department of Public Instruction, school social workers have a duty to "social justice" which will worsen the youth mental health crisis.
by: Sloan Rachmuth
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt’s first announcement of 2023 was that her department won $17 million in Federal grant funding for “building capacity for mental health service professionals in schools.” According to a DPI press release, the funding will increase mental health services in 15 districts with demonstrated needs for social workers.
According to Truitt's agency, it plans to lobby the General Assembly for another $100 million to flood low-income Tier I & II schools with even more social workers.
School social workers are trained to deliver mental health services and are licensed by the DPI. Some school districts hire social workers, but a cursory search of Indeed's job search site reveals that many districts rely on contract employees for services.
It's true that some young people need the mental health services that school social workers can provide. However, North Carolina's social work profession has succumbed to the notion that schools (and homes) suffer from “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.”
According to DPI’s website, school social workers are required to adhere to the National Association of Social Work (NASW) Code of Ethics demonstrating the core value of “social justice.”
The divisive racial ideology that has plagued American politics for the past decade has infiltrated and poisoned the school social work profession. For proof, let’s turn to the North Carolina NASW chapter website. In bold callouts on its homepage, NASW offers critical race theory (CRT) resources to use with students, as well as tools for social workers to promote abortion with their “clients.”
Those expecting to find resources on helping students improve their coping skills, reduce anxiety, or boost academic performance are in for a rude awakening. Those resources don’t appear on the NASW website.
However, those looking to fulfill NASW’s directive that social workers fuel the Marxist struggle between student collectives of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) against white, Jewish, and Asian students’ “hegemonic system” will be pleasantly surprised at the cornucopia of guidance they’ll find on the website. School social workers will learn:
Students of one race, color, national origin, or sex are morally superior to another.
Students, by virtue of their race, color, national origin, or sex are inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously regardless of their outward behavior.
Students' moral character or status as privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by their race, color, national origin, or gender.
By virtue of race, color, national origin, or sex, a student is responsible for or is entitled to receive adverse treatment because of, past actions committed by others of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.
Up until 15 minutes ago, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) was the gold-standard approach to improving mental health malaise, and by extension, academic performance. CBT views psychological issues as partially caused by unhelpful thinking patterns and by learned unhelpful behaviors - i.e on what people can change, regardless of their race, color, or gender.
How well does this approach work? Youth anxiety disorders can be effectively treated with CBT according to one popular study. Another study found that even CBT delivered via computers significantly reduced depressive symptoms in youth. CBT has been proven to give children a sense of personal control that can improve schoolwork, which should be the point of in-school counseling.
Yet the NASW model directs school counselors to ignore differences in children's thinking, explanatory styles, and behavior. The focus, NASW says, should be on establishing racial and sexual hierarchies that divide students by oppressors and victims.
It is paradoxical that NASW's Spring ethics conference is themed around social workers breaking the law to serve their clients. In one of two Keynote presentations, participants will undergo struggle sessions where they will come to grips with their complicity in perpetuating “white supremacy, colonialism, and racism” by virtue of being a social worker. In another Keynote, school counselors will learn how to “ethically resist in a world of unjust laws,” namely abortion and youth sex-change regulations.
The fact that LGBTQ activist Ellen Essick will oversee North Carolina's new army of school social workers makes the situation even worse. As DPI's Section Chief for Healthy Schools, Essick introduced the Gingerbread “Person” to teachers in North Carolina back in 2015. Then, she unveiled the “Gender Unicorn” in 2016. She is the vanguard of injecting queer gender theory into K-12 classrooms. Essick has hijacked all CDC school programming to prioritize “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/ or questioning (LGBTQ) students” and the school counseling will follow this framework.
Superintendent Truitt and others flooding schools with social workers, who are required to pursue Marxist goals, are making a risky bet. Neglecting real mental disorders that underlie depression, substance abuse, and suicide while focusing on indoctrination has grave consequences that will worsen the youth mental health crisis.
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We need to get rid of both Truitt and Essick NOW.