The excerpt below is taken from Time magazine July 23, 2020 approximately one month after Buffalo Public Schools made the inscrutable decision to close their remaining classroom at Western New York Day Treatment, a program for high school students with clinical mental health issues, the only program so designated in an urban district of 33,ooo kids. Yeah take a minute or two to let that all sink in before you read below what any human of measurable sentience could have predicted with heartbreaking accuracy.
...Another variable is whether a child came into the crisis with pre-existing mental-health problems. In the U.S., 7.1% of children in the 3-to-17 age group have been diagnosed with anxiety, according to the CDC. An additional 3.2% in the same age group suffer from depression. Then there are the 7.4% with diagnosed behavior problems and the 9.4% with ADHD. Silver found that in the aftermath of 9/11, adolescents’ level of distress closely tracked whether or not they had a history of such conditions. Other experts expect to see that pattern repeated because of COVID-19.
“Children who were struggling before [the pandemic] are at higher risk now,” says psychologist Robin Gurwitch, a professor at Duke University Medical Center. “You have to be careful about kids who were already in mental-health services; we have to make sure services aren’t disrupted.”
I can't resist the temptation to reiterate Dr. Gurwitch's comment though. It's not so much prescient as turd in the punchbowl obvious:
"Children who were struggling before the pandemic are at higher risk now."
I'm not a Professor of Psychiatry at Duke but I think I might have been able to see how this was going to play out. For the life of me I'm stumped how people who've chosen the education and well being of children as their life's work willed themselves not to see it.
It may come as a shock to a few that I am less involved in a pitchfork and torches cum guillotine resolution than in helping the district restore itself to sanity. Back in June the outlook was dire. June? you're saying, so what's changed? Valid point. The only thing anyone seemed to know back then was that New York State was walking around with its pockets turned out bumming smokes and hitting people up for gas money. It was pretty clear that whatever budget cash schools were counting on was going to be a pipe dream. Cuts were coming. Something akin to panic mode took hold. Buildings closed. Class sizes of disabled kids went from 6 to 8. Someone used the phrase "staff rich" to justify closing down the only remaining classroom for Buffalo kids with legitimate mental health issues. Too many adults teaching too few kids costing the district too much money. Case closed.
Through whatever lens one uses to separate egregious acts against children from the financial benefits these acts net, it could be said that closing this remaining class and kicking the kids in it back to the schools most of them barely attended before arriving at Day Treatment made good sense financially. Theoretically or financially it was the move to make. Unless of course this happens to be a district that claims to be steeped in trauma informed education. If you go to the BPS Home Page and search "Trauma Informed" an exhaustive list of resources fills the screen. Yet somehow a district that proudly speaks of being trauma informed in its practices managed to inflict more trauma on kids whose lives have already had too damned much of it.
What makes me so sure anyone was traumatized by the closure of Western New York Day Treatment? I'll fill you in on the phone conversation I had with the Dad of one of my students the other night. A guy who moved heaven and hell to get his daughter into this place and admits to breaking down at the meeting when he learned they were going to accept her. It was not an easy conversation and there is no happy ending. It hurts like hell. Stay tuned.
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