It was not a good idea in September 2020. It is not a good idea now.

Earlier this month, in a meeting so hastily arranged that many of the invitees were unable to clear their calendars to attend, the Department of Children and Families joined the Department of Education to announce an expansion of mental health supports to all of New Jersey’s elementary and secondary students. No one disagrees that this is necessary. After breaking the bottle across the bow, however, the DCF and DOE quickly maneuvered to hide the leaks under the surface.

For decades, the DCF has funded nearly a hundred programs that provide mental health services and education to students in school districts like Trenton, Hunterdon Central, South Brunswick, Phillipsburg, Highland Park and many more. These programs offer critical and even lifesaving help to thousands of our children. Most notably, the programs are embedded in schools, with immediate access to kids, their teachers and their parents. Through time and good work, school-based programs have woven themselves into the community and into the intricate fabric of assistance that each of the host schools wraps around its children in this stressful time. This embedded support flows in line with best practice for building successful clinical relationships — practice that continues to receive full-throated support from the federal government for schools, the military, and other institutions, particularly when there is danger of self-harm or suicide.

Two years ago, as schools moved very carefully into the opening of the uncertain 2020 – 2021 school year, the DCF attempted to defund these school-based programs. The reaction was so loud that the unthinkable happened. New Jersey went back on the cut. The programs survived and helped our kids through one of the sharpest mental health crises we have seen in our lifetime.

Overambitious to nth degree

Now, as the COVID-19 crisis still plays out in the academic recovery and mental health and wellness of our kids, it is clear that the fix is in. Those programs are under threat of elimination once again. New Jersey will disband them, sacrificing them to a new, massive and mysterious model that we are to believe will move from its current state as a thin concept paper to a fully implemented and robust machinery of hubs and spokes, charged with keeping all of our kids safe and healthy, by the opening of the 2023 school year. Envisioning, planning, procuring, staffing, equipping, training, publicizing — all of it, they say, will be done in less than a year. That would be an unprecedented achievement for any large initiative in New Jersey, but is simply impossible when it intends to operate in a field wracked by a severe shortage of trained and licensed professionals.

Any parent seeking mental health support for a child knows how bad it is out there.

Do not be fooled into thinking that the timeline of the miraculous launch that the DCF is proposing represents any kind of grace period for schools to figure out how to plug the hole. The ripples of this decision are already rocking the boat. School-based clinical staff are wisely seeking new opportunities in a run to the lifeboats. Caseloads of students — some of them our most fragile children — are already left in the lurch without their school-based partners and mentors. Important substance-use prevention programs, resources to combat teenage pregnancy and academic support programs join the therapeutic services that are aboard this sinking ship.

It was not a good idea in September 2020. It is not a good idea now.

And in a most upsetting turn, schools will be barred from competing for the funds to operate programs within this new model. School-based programs, the DCF says, do not work.

But the DCF has failed to prove it.

Waiting for the facts

School leaders across the state have asked for evidence to support the DCF’s brazen claims about the school-based system. We have asked for the analyses, survey results and research behind the decision to disband these programs rather than incorporate them into the new system, or at least transition away from them in a responsible and caring way. In the scant material that DCF has provided, we are unable to determine who, if any, of our colleagues even sat in on the conversations to provide feedback and input. Defending its claim of broad stakeholder engagement, the DCF has referred to a small task force to say that consultation happened and to an informal and unscientific survey of students from 2020, when many people were unwilling to do anything in-person, to say that students in 2022 do not want to seek therapeutic services in schools. What’s worse is that they cribbed that survey from another project, taking it far from its purpose of improving school-based services.

In short, the DCF cheated on its homework.

Not only do our programs have waiting lists, but also we are hearing from parents and students who are afraid for a future without these school-embedded programs. They tell us that these skilled professionals have saved lives. Significant barriers in availability, affordability, trust and parental acceptance interfere with children receiving needed services in the community and will certainly plague their ability to get what they need from a mysterious and potentially distant “hub,” leaving school as perhaps the most important place for them to get help.

Instead of bravely facing continued tough questions about all of this, Trenton is waffling. Legislators, educators and more are joining a growing outcry. Officials in Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration are now insisting that no funding decisions have yet been made, despite the fact that they have been clear about the end of these programs. They are saying that the governor’s budget is still to be developed, even though schools must begin developing their budgets for next school year right now and must now scramble to find resources to manage even a fraction of the current service.

New Jersey has no qualms continuing meaningless testing of students that yields no useful data for schools, expansive curriculum changes that draw time and resources from schools, and other nuisance mandates and pointless procedures that stand in the way of pandemic recovery. But time-honored programs to provide mental health support for suffering students–programs that are each among the sharpest arrows in the quiver in their schools–are not fit for a place in a plot to broaden services to all. And, as school-based programs fall away, the necessary effort to broaden services to all children seems half-baked and equally ill-fated.

Little is certain as Trenton plows forward on this sloppily charted and poorly-communicated course.

Except one terrible thing — children will suffer, and that will have been avoidable.

Some of them may perish.