NYC Students and Mental Health
Failing mental health and trauma is affecting students in NYC public schools
“If you look at New York City today, we’re living during the other pandemic and the other pandemic I call our mental health crisis,” says New York City Department of Education official, Kinsley Jabouin. Jabouin became principal of P.S. 9 Ryer Avenue Elementary School, located in The Bronx, in 2020. He recently assumed the position of teacher at M.S. 127 — The Castle Hill Middle School.
An August 2022 audit from New York State Comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, was instrumental in highlighting how New York City’s Department of Education had been handling the mental health crisis among its youth. The report stated the DOE “can do more to ensure that public school students receive the supports and services that they need and that are supposed to be available.” To learn more, I decided to cold-email several DOE officials to find out if their school was affected by the crisis. If so, I was eager to learn what they were doing to fix it. Lack of support often leads to things falling through the cracks.
The report also pinpointed a false statement by the DOE. Their website showcased six programs focused on mental health and alleged that “one of these mental health programs is offered at your child’s school.” According to DiNapoli, this claim turned out to be incorrect as auditors uncovered nearly 40% of the city’s 1,524 schools did not offer “even one of these structured mental health programs.” Given the effect the pandemic had on everyone — especially young people, this should have been a top priority.
In addition to Principal Jabouin, I also spoke with a social worker at P.S. 9 Ryer Avenue Elementary School, Ms. Vaval, to gain an understanding on how she deals with mental health crises at the school.
Something that stood out to me after speaking with Jabouin and Vaval was the word ‘stigma.’ According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, stigma is defined as “a set of negative and unfair beliefs that a society or group of people have about something.” Ms. Vaval explained that the reason parents aren’t on board with accepting mental health resources isn’t because of lack of awareness, but instead a result of cultural apprehension.
According to Jabouin, the stigma behind mental health often “prevents people from accessing or getting the level of support that they may require because they’re scared...scared of being committed or having a family member committed or is scared of taking psychotropic drugs.” He also explained that stigma evolves over time. “I hope that the same stigma that we used to have around cancer and how that’s transcended itself today can also happen when it comes to mental health.”
Stigma and mental health
After speaking with the DOE officials at P.S. 9 Ryer Avenue Elementary School, I decided to do an electronic call out to parents/guardians of NYC DOE students. My main goal was to get a sense of how they viewed mental health.
94.4% of the 17 respondents voted “5” when asked on a scale of 1–5 how important mental health was to them. I noticed there was a 50% awareness rate when it came to knowledge of the resources offered by the DOE.
From there, I decided to speak with another DOE official, Tanya Culver — a school counselor at P.S. 138 Samuel Randall Elementary School. She, too, mentioned the stigma surrounding mental health. According to Culver, the DOE put a program in place for staff to receive mental health support, but she posed a thoughtful question: “Why don’t they have that for the kids?” Ironically after our Oct. 27, 2023 interview, Mayor Adams and NYC officials announced a new program aimed towards helping teenagers with their mental health on Nov. 15, 2023. The program known as ‘TeenSpace’ offers “tele-mental health service available to all New York City teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 years old at no cost.”
In addition to speaking with Culver, I decided to pose the question to my Instagram followers using behind-the-scenes content from our interview. In the post, I inserted a poll into the reel that read: “Should kids be mentally evaluated before enrolling in NYC schools?”
83% voted Yes, whereas, 17% voted No. An Instagram user by the name of “@lachelle4her” commented and shared their caution behind the word, “evaluation,” due to how Black and Brown children are misdiagnosed or “the diagnosis will be unfairly used against them in the same manner of referrals and evaluations.”
HIT THE STREETS
Utilizing my television news background as a former multi-media journalist, I came up with the idea to do ‘MOS’ (man on street) interviews. I asked everyone I spoke with to share a question they’d like answered by a child therapist. I then shared the questions with Kimberly Yates, LCSW-R, a therapist specializing in trauma and anxiety.
Here’s how the idea flowed:
We decided on Bryant Park. At first, it was a bit intimidating because no one was paying us much mind. They’d look and then look away when we decided to approach. I then decided not to walk toward strangers with a camera in hand. Sidenote: If you think about it…walking up to a stranger in NYC without a blatant reason isn’t common. Most people just mind their business. We spent nearly 15 minutes roaming around the ice rink before I was finally able to persuade a woman named Garden to talk to me. After her interview, it seemed like more people were willing to talk. Judith was a major help in finding people to talk to. Watch the outcome below.
Now that I’ve produced the content, the next step is to share the material with the NYC DOE officials I’ve interviewed, as well as the community members. In terms of community members seeing the video, I already shared a snippet on my Instagram page and received two comments (both parents) who seem eager to watch the full video.
I also plan on creating a QR code of this article and posting flyers (example below) in the area. My hope is for change, of course, because I strongly believe all sides should be considered and you cannot do better, if you don’t know better.
