Increased Student Achievement through Increased Student Support Act Congressional Briefing
Thursday, July 10, 2008
11:30 a.m.
2261 RayburnHouseOfficeBuilding
Remarks of Dixie Bryson, NCSP, SPS, LPE-I, Conway Public Schools, AR
Good Morning. It is a privilege and an honor to be here with you today to talk about how we can increase student achievement through increased student support services. I want to personally thank Senator Lincoln for inviting me to speak on this distinguished panel. I would also like to thank RepresentativesTowns and Sanchez and their staffs as well as the National Association of School Psychologists and other coalition partners for working together on this very important legislation.
The nation as a whole, and certain states and school districts in particular, face a serious shortage of school-employed mental health professionals. School counselors, school social workers, and school psychologists provide essential services that support both students’ ability to learn and teachers’ ability to teach. It would be a rare instance, if ever, in which a school could function to its highest level without these professionals.
Currently, there is only one federal grant program that provides funds for schools to hire school mental health professionals; that is the Elementary and Secondary School Counseling Program. This program is currently funded at $48.1 million dollars and is the flagship for supporting children’s mental health in schools. It specifically provides funds to improve the ratio of school counselors, school psychologists, school social workers, and otherwise qualified psychologists and psychiatrists to support students in need of counseling services.
The Increased Student Achievement through Increased Student Support Act compliments this program by addressing the shortages that exist in difficult to staff areas by building the pipeline for employment through strengthened relationships between graduate programs of study and low-income local school districts. This higher education partnership and the prioritization of funding for low-income schools are unique to this bill. Truthfully, many schools operate with inadequate staffing levels in one or more of these professions, and I think it would be optimal to have such a pipeline to address the shortages in all schools. However, this legislation appropriately focuses on highest need first, targeting, rural and inner city urban settings where recruitment and retention are most difficult.
The need for this program is apparent in many ways. NASP research shows that the average number of school psychology specialists and/or school psychologists in Arkansas is more than 2.5 times our national maximum recommended ratio of 1 to 1000 general education students. (The district in which I work is more fortunate than most in Arkansas. We have a ratio of 1 to 1637 general education students, but working this past school year at the 9-12 grade levels, my ratio was 1 to 2685.) The school counselor data also shows ratios above their maximum national recommended level of 1 to 250. In Arkansas the average is 1 to 360. I don’t have the data on school social workers in Arkansas, but I can tell you that the need for social workers who are trained in school based services is a critical need across our state and in my own school district.
Research has shown that student involvement in school-based social emotional programs has positive effects on student achievement, school climate, and student attendance. The research also shows that low-income families with children with social, emotional and behavior concerns struggle to be successful in school. Their issues often create barriers to learning and jeopardize relationships with peers, parents, school personnel, employers, and other community members. High school students from low-income families drop out of school at six times the rate of their peers from high-income families. Incredibly, over 5% of children under 17 years of age have a persistent emotional, developmental, or behavioral problem lasting for 12 months or more, according to the National Health Survey of Children’s Health, the largest and most comprehensive survey of the health of children in the United States. The proposed legislation acknowledges the importance of removing the barriers to learning that are created when students struggle with a personal life crisis, mental health issues, or social, behavioral, or learning problems. It also provides direct services to students to help them overcome these barriers to learning and achieve academically.
A particularly critical area of service lies in the problem solving approach to identifying and intervening with barriers to learning. Problem solving is a key component of positive behavior supports and Response to Intervention, that latter of which Arkansas calls “Closing the Gap”. We have used problem solving as a basis for student support in Conway as long as I have been there. In particular, when a student is referred for a special education evaluation we take a broad look at what the underlying cause of their learning or behavioral difficulty might be before jumping immediately to a test and place process. Somewhere around 18 years ago, I evaluated a 1st grade student. Under the old test and place model, you couldn’t ask for a more classic looking text book case of a learning disabled student on the surface. But upon looking a little closer at the possible reasons for this student’s lack of academic success, we discovered that the student had missed an excessive number of days in kindergarten and already an excessive number of days in 1st grade. The school counselor and I made an appointment with his mother and asked her in a non-judgmental why her son was missing so many school days. We also asked her a simple open-ended question, “tell us about your son”, because she knew her son the best. She proceeded to tell us that her son had missed school because she was being battered by her husband. The days her son missed were either because he was afraid to leave his mother alone at home in fear that his dad might come home and hit her and/or that she and her son were literally on the “run” from her husband and living in her car. We assisted this mother with a referral for community support services and worked closely with these providers to ensure a continuum of connected services for both mother and son. We also provided a support group for her son at school along with a social skills group to teach him how to cope with his feelings, fears and anxieties. We also worked closely with the community providers to have a continuum of connected services that occurred after the school day. Academically we provided supports with a reading specialist and tutor. I am not totally sure about this student’s long-term success, but for the reminder of that school year he did make some progress both academically and socially, emotionally and behaviorally.
Two things are true about this situation. One, we could have just as easily misdiagnosed a learning disability and placed this student in special education; but, that placement would not have taken care of his underlying problems or concerns. And two, his first grade teacher could have continued to teach him but no matter what she did academically, she probably would not have been able to help him succeed.
Of course poverty is not the only factor contributing to learning barriers. Meeting the needs of children in military families has become a significant focus in our district. One of my school psychology colleagues along with the school counselor conducted a military kids’ support group at a local elementary school. Each week she and the school counselor held a round table discussion to give the kids of military families the opportunity to talk, and to teach them how to cope with their anger, fear and anxieties. These discussions really reinforced their resilience and life skills. One student said “I liked the group. It really helped me and I didn’t feel so alone because of talking with the other kids in the group.” This student’s mother said that it helped her child feel supported and validated and helped her cope with the anger and fear that she was previously expressing behaviorally. The student’s father said that knowing that his children had this military family support group at school helped him focus on his job, making one less thing to worry about while he was deployed.
These same types of support and skills building groups can help students facing all kinds of family dislocations, such as foster kids, kids with a parent in jail, or latch key kids who may not live in the safest of neighborhoods.
From a personal perspective, I was raised in an active duty military family with a parent who went to war. I can still feel the fear and anxiety that I had 40 years ago when my father went to Vietnam. My family left the base and my small elementary school, and we went to stay with relatives who lived in a metropolitan area where I attended a large school. I struggled academically and emotionally. My mother tried to help but was coping with her own set of fears and anxieties. My second grade teacher tried to teach me to read but I couldn’t focus and did not have any of the supports I described above. I simply fell behind and didn’t catch up until two years later when my father had returned permanently and I received additional intensive reading supports.
This legislation would create a federal grant program to help build the capacity of low-income school districts to recruit, employ, and retain school psychologists, school social workers, and school counselors. It would also help local universities build their capacity for training, supervising, and placing professionals in low-income schools. Rural and urban schools in areas served by low-income local educational agencies suffer disproportionately from a lack of student support services, with many schools either sharing with neighboring schools a single school counselor, school social worker, or school psychologist, or not having any such personnel at all. This program would require schools and universities to work collaboratively to remedy the recruitment and retention issues in these school districts.
I believe that in order to achieve the goals of NCLB that it is critical to respond to children’s social, emotional, behavioral and academic needs by making sure that professionals who are trained to support students, teachers and school administrators in removing these barriers to learning are available and accessible in every school.
Thank you for this opportunity to share and for your time and potential support of the “Increased Student Achievement through increased Student Support Act.”
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