Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona continued to place emphasis on increasing funding of mental health services in public schools at a hearing on May 11 before the Appropriations Committee on his historically high $90 billion proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2024.
The budget represents a $10.8 billion increase and a review of it shows that nearly every existing and new program contains substantial funding to increase mental health services in schools—including the doubling of what Cardona referred to as school social workers.
“The student in her family would get wraparound support,” said Cardona, who always refers to a fictional student as “she.”
He added: “And if she faced some challenges with her mental health, as we know many students do, she can go directly to a mental health professional right at her school because the school benefited from our budget investment of another half-billion dollars to advance the goal of doubling the number of school counselors, school social workers, and mental health providers that are available to our kids at this time when we’re living in a youth mental health crisis.”…