Are School Mental Health & Suicide Prevention Programs Part of the Vast Liberal Conspiracy?
Over the edge and into the abyss. The war on education by the right has another front, according to an investigative report from NBC News.
Groups opposing what they believe is the teaching of Critical Race Theory have expanded their repertoire to include school mental health programs.
Take, for instance, the Southlake Texas Board of Education overseeing the Carroll Independent School District. They’re outraged about school counselors’ efforts at suicide prevention.
Southlake Families PAC — a group that has fought to stop a diversity plan at Carroll — sent an email to supporters calling on the school district to “Leave mental health and parenting to parents.”
It’s not just Texas, even though the state is a known center for absurd political antics.
As school districts struggle to address accusations that administrators are indoctrinating students in progressive ideas about race, gender and sexuality, the same parents and activists making the claims have begun targeting school initiatives centered on students’ mental health and emotional well-being.
In Carmel, Indiana, activists swarmed school board meetings this fall to demand that a district fire its mental health coordinator from what they said was a “dangerous, worthless” job. And in Fairfax County, Virginia, a national activist group condemned school officials for sending a survey to students that included questions like “During the past week, how often did you feel sad?”
You can’t have a scare campaign without some evil sounding initials, and this latest effort is no exception. SEL, which stands for Social and Emotional Learning is the boogeyman.
On one level, SEL is a financialized (by education consultants & textbook companies) collection of programs designed to make classrooms more manageable and improve test scores.The same vultures charging a jillion dollars for textbooks and jamming testing down our craws have a vested interest in selling data to educators.
On another level, SEL is a well-researched approach to education with beneficial outcomes related to: social and emotional skills; attitudes about self, school, and social topics; social behaviors; conduct problems; and emotional distress. Research shows that creating SEL programs taking into account specific contexts or cultures, i.e., not using a one-size-fits-all approach, results in social and behavioral improvements in education systems regardless of their challenges.
In order for any program incorporating flexibility to work, a baseline of information needs to be established. Questions need to be asked. And asking a student if they’ve experienced depression or thoughts of suicide is a big no-no for parents that are insecure about their caring skills (or their sexuality).
Activists have accused school districts of using the programs to ask children invasive questions — about their feelings, sexuality and the way race shapes their lives — as part of a ploy to “brainwash” them with liberal values and to trample parents’ rights.
Groups across the country recently started circulating forms to get parents to opt their children out of surveys designed to measure whether students are struggling with their emotions or being bullied, describing the efforts as “data mining” and an invasion of privacy.
School districts around the country say they launched new social emotional learning programs in response to rising youth suicide rates in recent years and to help children cope with bullying and other emotional issues that can inhibit students’ abilities to focus at school.
(The NBC News story says the number of children ages 6-12 who visited children’s hospitals for suicidal thoughts or self-harm has more than doubled since 2016.)
No Left Turn in Education, perhaps the hardest of the hard core right wing groups operating in this area, says social emotional learning is connected to the potential sexual grooming of children, calling it a “dangerous” philosophy that teaches students to put their trust in educators over the instructions of their parents.
This viewpoint feeds into the conspiracist notions advocated by groups like QAnon about a liberal underground of pedophiles engaged in the organized harvesting of children.
Although not all teachers are saints, the reality is that 93% of children who are victims of sexual abuse know their abuser; family members are much more likely than strangers to hurt kids. So maybe it’s not so bad that a non-family member offers some protective advice.
Weaving critical race theory and issues relating to sexuality into the propaganda campaigns against SEL is commonplace, since all these efforts are based on the premise that somewhere there is a liberal cabal enabled by teachers’ unions seeking to corrupt young minds.
This sense of a conspiratorial ‘other’ triggers strong emotional responses and can influence many other elements of an individual’s life. Some people say it even makes people vote Republican.
Ultimately, this focus on talking about racism, sexuality, and/or mental health is about whether empathy is considered a necessary value. Some people obviously don’t think so and they’ve gone to great lengths to discredit the idea.
Empathy is the basis for social justice movements, and now evangelical congregations are telling followers that social justice is the same as socialism.
As Rev. Nathaniel Manderson says in a recent Salon article:
In a brief statement widely circulated in the evangelical world, prominent Christian leaders and pastors have claimed that the social justice movement is a danger to Christians, "an onslaught of dangerous and false teachings that threaten the gospel, misrepresent Scripture, and lead people away from the grace of God in Jesus Christ."
The problem for evangelicals is that the Bible is quite clear around the issues connected to social justice. Ignoring these issues requires completely ignoring the teachings of Jesus. It is fascinating to me, in a grim way, that the very people who claim to be holding onto the true form of Christian faith are in fact committed to destroying it.
If you zoom out to take a broader look at the issues facing our world, it’s obvious that thinking about the well-being of people in general, as opposed to self-interest, lies at the heart of everything from vaccines to critical race theory.
There is no moral difference between those who say “I did my own research” and “I’m the least racist person I know.”
If you or someone you know is at risk of suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255, text TALK to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.
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