I firmly believe that we are neglecting the emotional well-being of our nation’s youth. We, as school psychologists, understand that while the IQ of our students has increased about a third of a point every year, the emotional health of our students has deteriorated dramatically over the past three decades. According to the Surgeon General’s report, one out of every five children needs mental health intervention in order to be successful in school. It is an alarming fact that more teenagers died from suicide than from cancer, birth defects, AIDS, pneumonia, influenza, and chronic lung disease combined.
In November 2008, I was honored with the Florida Association of School Psychologists Willard Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award and gave a talk at the opening ceremony outlining my thoughts which are reprinted below. If elected NASP President, my major theme will be “Linking Forces to Advocate for the Emotional Well-Being of our Nation’s Youth.”
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I am most honored and deeply humbled by this lifetime achievement award. It is a true privilege to be recognized by your peers. As Woody Allen once stated, 80% of success in life is just showing up.
I have served as the Director of the School Psychology Program at Florida International University for the past 30 years. During this time, remarkable changes have occurred. Our assessment skills have improved exponentially. I used to carry all my test equipment in a satchel and now we all need a Hummer car trunk but can’t afford to buy the gas. Internships weren’t even required when I first became certified. Now, we have year long paid internships. We had no licensure for school psychology. Now we can practice in the private arena. We could not score or interpret our protocols using personal computers--because these were not invented yet.
Our knowledge base has increased to such a level that our best practices text now has six volumes and we have to take out a home equity loan to buy it. Most everything I learned in graduate school changed or no longer applies, except for statistics which unfortunately wasn’t my best subject.
Though so much has improved for our profession during the past three decades, our nation’s children have not fared as well. Since I began my practice, anxiety and depression in children has gone up dramatically. Youngsters are cutting themselves in record number to ameliorate the pain and stress they are experiencing. Every four hours in America a child commits suicide.
As the upcoming election approaches, we and our nation are facing tremendous challenges and our children are counting on us to make their future brighter. Hopefully as a recipient of this award, I have learned some lessons during my lifetime and would like to share a few thoughts with you today.
On April 20, 1999, Craig Scott’s world was shattered. His sister Rachel had been the first student killed at Columbine High School. Craig Scott suffered for many years trying to make sense out of a tragedy that does not make sense. Always asking why, he experienced the deepest forms of grief and despair. Yet out of this experience, he and his family started an organization called Rachel’s Challenge which delivers workshops to schools all across America to promote the cause of peace, love and compassion. Craig Scott epitomizes the words of John Burroughs, who once wrote, “We are made strong by what we overcome.”
I listened to Craig who was part of a panel discussion at the White House Conference on School Violence. Craig talked about how our founding fathers viewed education. First they emphasized character, then knowledge and finally academic facts.
It appears to me, that our founding fathers and the framers of our Constitution had it right--first, character, then knowledge, and lastly academic facts. Today with our emphasis on high-stakes testing, we put the accumulation of academic subject matter first. FCAT rules, all else be damned. Character education and social-emotional learning have taken a back seat—forced like Rosa Parks to ride in the back of the bus.
Yet we know as school psychologists that by incorporating social-emotional curriculums into the classroom that we can boost academic learning and improve the school climate at the same time. This is especially true because today we are narrowing the curriculum and focusing almost exclusively on high-stakes tests to the detriment of our nation’s youth. We can’t just jam facts into our students’ heads so they can pass high-stakes tests. Instead, we need to focus our education on the total child, which includes their mind, heart and spirit.
Following three school shootings within a two week period, I was doing a number of media interviews, and was called by CNN to be on the Glenn Beck show for a four minute segment. I only had about 90 minutes before the show was going to be taped and I was trying to think of the message to get across to the public. The one message I came up with was “Children are safe in school. The actual chance of being killed at school is less than one in a million. Send your children to school.”
During the first part of the interview, Glenn was asking me reasonable questions. And I am giving him facts, statistics, warning signs, and advice for parents. Then he asks, “So, Dr. Lazarus, “What’s going on with our society? Why all this violence? Are we like the Romans, feeding our kids to the lions?” Wow! How do you answer a question like that? For a moment I felt like a deer in the headlights but eventually talked about how we as a society glorify violence. We celebrate violence. By the time a child is a teenager he has already witnessed more than a half a million violent incidences on television and often can not tell the difference between the bad guys and the good guys. During the course of the interview I explained how during World War I and World War II it used to take the army weeks or months to train soldiers to kill an enemy combatant. But now with our point and shoot video games, our male soldiers have already practiced killing people before they reached high school.
Yet, the next day, I could not get Glenn Beck’s question out of my mind. And I wished I had said. “The reason this all is happening is because our society is out of whack. We have neglected the emotional well-being of our nation’s youth. We can do better. We must do a lot better.”
I see school shooters as the canary in the coal mine. Canaries warn miners if there is a gas leak or if the air in the mine is becoming toxic. When the canaries die, the miners get the hell out of the mine. These school shooters are like scouts telling us that something is wrong. Get out. Go in a new direction. Yet we are still not paying attention. So I ask you, “Do we feel that our children are any safer in schools than they were ten years ago when we had the rampage at Columbine?” Do we believe that the emotional health of our youngsters has improved during the time of No Child Left Behind?
Who in our schools recognizes that something is amiss? Who understands that one out of every five children needs mental health intervention in order to be successful in school? Who understands that while the IQ of our students increase about a third of a point every year, the emotional health of our students has deteriorated dramatically over the past three decades? Who understands that more teenagers died from suicide than from cancer, birth defects, AIDS, pneumonia, influenza, and chronic lung disease combined?
School psychologists understand. School psychologists serve as advocates for the emotional well-being of our nation’s youth. We know more about education then anyone is psychology and more about psychology than anyone in education. We understand the connection. And it is all connected.
Let me cite just one example. For educators retaining a child is an academic decision. But we understand that retaining a child is not just an educational decision but a social-emotional as well. Retention has a dramatic impact on the fragile psyche of a young child.
Sixth grade students reported that being retained was as stressful as the loss of a parent or going blind. Moreover, when prisoners were interviewed during incarceration, they remarked that being retained was more emotionally painful to them than going to jail. And under No Child Left Behind, we are leaving more children behind.
One principal in Miami said “I’ve told all my 2nd grade teachers, that if they thought a child was going to have a problem with the FCAT in the third grade, they should fail them.” Consequently we have entire classes of children in Miami of retained second and third grade students. They fail the students before they take high stakes tests and fail them after if they are unable to pass. And if a child is retained twice their chance of graduating from high school is only one out of ten? We are making our children feel like failures before they reach third grade.
I do not believe that the public even knows that we are neglecting the emotional well-being of our nation’s youth until it is exposed. It is like Walter Reed hospital. Patients that got services there knew the system was failing them. But the public had no idea. Unless there is awareness, there will never be change
Due to a 284 million dollar shortfall, Miami-Dade County gave 41 school psychologists a pink slip—essentially firing them. Consequently, we made sure that the public and the school board knew exactly what school psychologists did and how the reduction of school psychological services would impact our most needy and vulnerable students. One strategy we used was to bombard all School Board members with personal letters describing what we do as school psychologists and what the impact of the loss of psychological services would mean.
One former FIU graduate, Luz Amesty wrote a most poignant letter and here is just one paragraph. “I have established partnerships with parents who were not able to understand why their youngsters stopped developing normally after the age of 2 and were later on identified with a Pervasive Developmental Disorder. I have also dealt with many parents who can not assist their children with homework not only because of a language barrier but also because they are illiterate and lost in a school system that is completely novel to them. This particular school year, I have been dealing with students who are acting out in the classroom because their families lost their homes and had no choice but to live on a shelter. I will never forget when a student came up to me asking why his brother was shot on the way to his house on the day of his birthday. I have been called many times to intervene in cases where a child loses control, throws chairs, and uses profanities in the classroom while threatening himself and others. I wonder who will be there to provide mental health and instructional support for our children and youth when I am gone.”
Eventually by advocating for those children without a voice, and by letting the School Board and the public understand what we do on a daily basis, all school psychologists were rehired. We prevailed, and will continue to prevail, but the challenges are not over.
Today our profession is being threatened by the fiscal crisis, the APA Model Licensure Act, Scientology, and the RtI initiative which has the potential for school districts to hire less expensive professionals. With the coming financial crisis there will be a need for more psychological services not fewer. Already in Florida during the past year, there has been a 19% increase in homelessness and we know homeless children have significant emotional needs. Consequently, this is the time for all of us, and I don’t mean some of us, but for all of us to stand up and be advocates for the emotional well-being of our nation’s youth. I believe in the promise of our profession and the audacity of hope. Neil Postman once remarked, “Children are the message we send to a time we will not see.” We must get the message out that we are neglecting the emotional health of our children. And if we do not, then who will? The time to act is now.
As Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.”
In closing, I would like to thank every person who served on the FASP Executive Board with me over the years and all the current students and graduates of FIU who taught me so much. And most of all, I wish to thank my beautiful wife Jane who has been my moral compass and true north. Thank you all for this high honor.
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Lazarus, P. J. (2009). Neglecting the emotional well-being of our nation’s youth. The