It shouldn’t be any surprise that a recently released audit showed many schools hadn’t met New York mandates for SAVE Act-required mental health training.

The Comptroller’s Office audited 20 randomly selected school districts, and found 18 of them, or 90%, either did not offer mental health training or provided insufficient training, such as lacking instruction to recognize warning signs of mental or psychotic disorders in children or how to access appropriate support and services.

For starters, the audit period for the 20 school districts audited was July 1, 2020, through June 30, 2021, a time when schools were trying to figure out how they were going to meet the state’s requirements to reopen safely due to COVID-19. It’s little wonder the training wasn’t completed on time.

DiNapoli himself noted a bigger problem than schools not meeting the state’s deadlines. The SAVE Act and state Education Department requirements state only that the annual school safety training must include a component on mental health, but neither the SAVE Act nor state requirements directly address what topics should be included within the mental health training component.

That’s a problem. Teachers and school staff are on the front line dealing with students’ mental health issues, yet the state’s guidelines to train those front line staff are unclear at best. The state should make more clear the training it expects its school districts to offer.

But there is a bigger issue worth considering — how much can we really expect classroom teachers and staff to do when it comes to mental health? NYSUT President Andy Pallotta has argued teachers need better training to address mental health challenges. That’s important to note, because while many schools are currently using federal stimulus dollars to hire additional counselors and psychologists to help students, we know that money will run out and the burden will inevitably fall back onto teachers and aides.

How much can we expect of teachers?

It’s interesting that the original SAVE Act didn’t focus on mental health. It focused on discipline. Violent students were to be removed from the classroom immediately and a suspension process triggered. Schools were to adopt a code of conduct and, we would assume, enforce them. Those were the first two items in the state Assembly’s executive summary posted in February 2001.

It’s worth asking if the move from the SAVE Act’s original message toward non-punitive conflict resolution between school staff and students is playing a role in the increasing mental health issues students are dealing with. Could some mental health issues facing students be dealt with by a return to allowing teachers to enforce basic norms of classroom behavior, including disciplining students who disrupt, bully or threaten their fellow students or teachers? It’s quite likely. We know for certain there are unintended consequences of keeping disruptive children in classrooms.

In our opinion, child mental health is a bigger and bigger problem every year in our schools. But it’s on the state and school administrators to devise a way to provide mental health services, ideally linked to public child and family services that are already available, to children who need help without overburdening teachers who already have enough on their plate.