Mental Health Care Race Gaps Developing In NJ Schools: Study

NEW JERSEY — Access to school-based mental health care is slowly getting better for most students in New Jersey. But racial gaps between white, Asian, Black and Hispanic children are also developing, a report says.

Mark Weber and nonprofit think tank New Jersey Policy Perspective (NJPP) recently released the results of their study, which analyzed racial statistics for students from 2008 to 2020. The full report and its methodology can be seen here.

Concern about the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic – along with renewed fears about school shootings – have put the mental health of New Jersey’s students into the spotlight, the report says. But while access to crucial support services in the state’s schools is getting better as a whole, some students are being left behind, researchers claimed.

The report took a look at the number of mental health staff such as nurses, counselors, behavior specialists, psychologists and social workers in schools across New Jersey compared to the number of students of different races and ethnicities enrolled in those schools.

Researchers said the trend is clear: Access to mental health staff for white and Asian students has increased over the past several years, but has decreased for Black and Hispanic students.

Over the study period, the ratio of mental health staff for Black students dropped from 10.3 per 1,000 students to 8.5. The ratio for Hispanic students also went down, going from 9 to 8.4 staff per 1,000 students.

Meanwhile, the overall ratio in New Jersey’s public schools increased from 8.2 staff per 1,000 students in 2008 to 8.6 in 2020, researchers said.

“The pandemic has created an unprecedented crisis in student mental health,” said Weber, a special analyst for education policy with the NJPP.

“Unfortunately, New Jersey’s Black and Hispanic students have seen cuts in mental health staff in their schools over the past decade,” Weber said. “So just when they need these resources the most, they find their access has been diminished.”

Some people might think that these trends in school mental health staffing actually reflect a move toward “parity,” the study adds. The argument goes like this: A decade ago, white students had less access to these staff than children of color, but now their access is equivalent.

This argument, however, “fails to recognize a basic truth,” the study retorts: Black and Hispanic students in New Jersey are more likely to live in households with less money than their white and Asian peers.

According to the report:

“The poverty rates for Black/African-American and Hispanic/Latinx children are more than three times that for white or Asian children. This is critical, as a large body of research shows poverty has a profoundly negative impact on children’s mental health. Certainly, more school mental health staff for white and Asian students would be, by itself, laudable; however, the accompanying trend of less access to these staff for Black and Hispanic/Latinx students raises serious concerns.”

The report concluded that policymakers and lawmakers should immediately improve staffing levels of mental health support professionals to “meet the needs of students.”

“Setting students up for success requires equitable access to mental health and support staff,” NJPP President Nicole Rodriguez said. “This report makes clear that New Jersey is falling short of that standard, even with an increased focus on mental health in schools as we recover from the pandemic.”

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