As Boston schools stare down the Jan. 30 deadline to spend the last of more than $400 million in federal pandemic relief funds, some schools are already seeing the effects of cutbacks as they return to slimmer budgets.
Last spring, Boston Public Schools eliminated seven school psychologist positions, leaving 25 city schools with part-time mental health coverage for students returning to school this fall.
Jackie Rodriguez, a Spanish-speaking psychologist at the Charles Sumner Elementary School in Roslindale, said her hours helping students at the school have been cut.
“I’m a little concerned about what happens that one day I’m not there,” Rodriguez said. “I worry about the kids that will not get served because they don’t speak English, or their parents don’t speak English.”
The decline in school mental health support for students is a problem for districts across the country as pandemic funding dries up, according to Seth Lipkin at the National Association of School Psychologists.
“We have heard these concerns from NASP leaders throughout the United States and are concerned that this will worsen an already dire nationwide shortage of school psychologists,” he said.
But BPS Superintendent Mary Skipper said in a statement that the eliminated psychologists focused on “very specific traumas and mental health hardships caused by the pandemic.”
“As we move farther from the pandemic, this specific need has decreased,” she wrote. “[Psychologist] assignments may be adjusted to meet the needs of individual schools … which are fluid, and change from school to school, and year to year.”
The district did not name the affected schools.
There has been a significant increase in students feeling persistent sadness or hopelessness, according to a March report by Boston health officials. Female Black and Latino students, in particular, reported feelings of sadness at much higher rates than their peers. The report also found increases in the number of students reporting suicidal thoughts.
“The last few years have made it abundantly clear that there needs to be significant investment in the social and emotional well-being of our youth,” Skipper wrote.
Skipper said the district has more than doubled its staffing of social workers and school psychologists in the last four years, but psychologists interviewed by GBH News said the cuts exacerbated a long-term lack of mental health services for students.
School psychologists’ duties include counseling and developing special needs students’ Individualized Education Programs, or IEPs.
In the last school year, 23% of BPS students had an IEP, amounting to about 10,000 students, according to data from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary & Secondary Education.
This fall, fewer than half of Boston’s public schools have a full-time, in-school psychologist, according to the district’s own numbers. In the academic year that just ended, 68 schools didn’t have a dedicated full-time psychologist and relied on part-timers sometimes working across multiple schools. The remaining 44 schools have full-time psychologist positions.
The cuts will spread their services more thinly.
The National Association of School Psychologists recommends one full-time school psychologist for every 500 students, which is the “minimum acceptable ratio,” Lipkin said.
“Depending on community needs, such as those disproportionately impacted by poverty, trauma, or environmental stressors, this ratio may need to be even lower,” Lipkin added.
The student-to-school-psychologist ratio in Massachusetts was 1:700 in the 2022-23 school year, the most recent NASP data available. GBH calculations with data from the National Center for Education Statistics showed BPS had ratios over 1:600 until the 2022-23 school year, when it dropped below 1:500. The cuts will bring the ratio higher again.
A shortage of mental health providers can create unmanageable caseloads, forcing other school staff, including counselors and social workers, to take on responsibilities outside their training. It also means that working psychologists spend most of their time addressing students with acute needs, instead of mental health programming for the broader student population.
“If we had more school psychologists, we wouldn’t have to be always dealing with crises, and we could be doing much more proactive work,” BPS school psychologist Rosie Perez told GBH News. “In the years going forward, we would really see the benefit.”
Rodriguez, the Sumner psychologist, said she typically conducts an assessment of a student threatening violence or suicide once a week. When there is no psychologist available, schools typically call an ambulance to help a student in crisis.
Rodriguez said she is the only Spanish-speaking clinician at the school, where more than half the student population is Hispanic.
Several school psychologists testified about the reduction at recent school committee hearings to bring attention to the problem. And some youth advocates shared their concerns.
Certain groups of kids, including LGBTQ+ youth, are particularly vulnerable to mental health and suicide risks. Sixty-nine percent of LGBTQ students felt persistently sad or hopeless, and 45% seriously considered attempting suicide, according to the American Psychological Association.
The Boston Alliance of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Youth’s Tia Sky said nonprofit groups like the alliance frequently help teens who haven’t found support at school. The alliance offers peer assistance, therapy, and other programs.
But that’s not supposed to be a replacement for school-based interventions, Sky said.
