School is difficult and not just because of studying and learning new things. John Dewey, in his Democracy and Education, described education as the means by which the processes of life are carried out socially, where the immature and helpless, lacking structured beliefs and ideas, are supported from one generation to another. Now, we may not necessarily call every student helpless, and the charge of immaturity is certainly thrown around easily, but students are still navigating social situations with little experience to draw from, amidst the internal cacophony provided by biological development. Knowing this, support is provided primarily in the form of teachers, but also administrators and, increasingly over the last couple generations, counselors and psychologists.
The Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) is a questionnaire given to students every two years in grades 9–12 collecting self-report declarations concerning categories like weight and diet, physical activity, injury and violence, among others. In 2021, the YRBS noted that 42% of high school students and 57% of teen girls said they felt persistent periods of sadness or hopelessness, the highest rating in ten years. Further, among LGBTQ+ students, 69% felt similarly, and 45% considered attempting suicide. While there are concerns about the accuracy of trends based on the survey due to rapidly declining response rates, that students are self-reporting this perspective on their lives is a deeply concerning development.
The calls to address what many call a growing mental health crisis among young people, exacerbated by the societal disruptions of the COVID pandemic, are intensifying as headlines and the youth themselves are declaring they need help. Unfortunately, school psychologists are few and far between. In the 2021–2022 school year, there was a national average of only one psychologist for every 1,127 students, far below the goal of 500:1. In some states, and particularly in rural areas, the situation is even worse. In Mississippi, the ratio is 9,292:1, and in New Mexico, it is 19,811:1. As the student body grows more diverse, there is also a greater need for psychologists who are bilingual, trained in cultural humility, and have an appreciation for the increasingly inclusive nature of the school environment.
In case you think the issue is only that psychologists are in short supply, there is also a shortage of school counselors. The American School Counselor Association recommends a student-to-counselor ratio of 250:1, but the national average is closer to 385:1, and 17% of high schools do not have a counselor at all.
As with any crisis of support, there’s a tendency to believe that attempting anything—no matter how faulty—is better than nothing. In that spirit, the Texas legislature passed Senate Bill 763 in 2023, allowing Texas schools to use safety funds to pay unlicensed chaplains to work in mental health roles. Amendments put forward to require accreditation, to bar proselytizing and attempts at conversion, to require parental consent, and to provide chaplains from any faith requested by students, were all defeated. Although the stated intent of the bill was not to replace licensed school counselors with chaplains, that bill proponents deliberately ignored concerns regarding licensure, consent, and active religious conversion should alarm everyone, no matter the nature of their faith. For atheists and all those interested in keeping the wall between church and state as high as Jericho’s were, the bill is an appalling and blatant attempt to bring that wall tumbling down.
For those concerned about youth mental health, bringing in unlicensed religious adherents to preach their brand of nonscientific rationale for mental health concerns and to potentially ask that issues like anxiety and depression simply be prayed away will only make things worse. There is already a problem of even trained and licensed therapists who use their authority to promote their individual religious ideology, an issue that the Recovering from Religion organization seeks to address with its Secular Therapy Project.
The school chaplain bill completely removed guardrails for objectivity and research-based interventions. Still, Texas legislators passed it deliberately and with full awareness of doing so in the face of objections. Thankfully, dozens of the largest school districts in Texas, responsible for two million students, have already rejected the policy. As of the 2023–2024 school year, only one district had hired a single chaplain.
However, bad ideas will often take on a life of their own, particularly when inspired by self-righteous self-interest, and this year in Ohio, legislators have sponsored House Bill 531 that will allow chaplains to serve in the public schools to “complement” the services of school counselors. While the bill requires background checks, there are no limits placed on the services being provided by the chaplains, instead leaving it up to the discretion of individual schools.
The bill sponsor’s use of the term “complement” is interesting. To be complementary is to utilize similar tools for mutually supportive outcomes. The self-empowerment of the person based on broad humanistic principles and adhering to evidence-based scientific practices that characterizes mental health therapy, is not the same as the self-dismissal or even shaming of the person to make room for adherence to an authoritarian supernatural figure that is characteristic of so many iterations of religion, particularly when it comes to Christianity, with which most chaplains will identify. Rather than being complementary, chaplains often serve a contradictory role to the school counselor, and this concern doesn’t even touch on the broader issue of violating church-state separation by allowing for proselytization in public schools.
The desire to address the mental health concerns of the population of young people in this country is an admirable and worthwhile one, but it should not be used as an excuse to perpetuate bad ideas, break down the civil commitment we have to our youth to provide evidence-based support, and provide a means for religious indoctrination to foster shame and fear about their struggles. Our nation deserves better; our youth most of all.