EdAction
Maple River Education Coalition PAC
105 Peavey Rd, St 116 
Chaska, MN  55318 
952-361-4931
http://www.EdAction.org
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March 14, 2001

Schools as health care providers:   HF 788/SF 1058
Authors: McGuire/Sabo
(summary of this bill)

Testimony on HF 788 will be completed tomorrow:
Thursday, March 15
8:15 a.m.
EDUCATION POLICY
200 State Office Building
Chr. Rep. Harry Mares

HF 788 will include universal mental health screening in the schools as part of the kindergarten screening, extensive data collection, and numerous other disturbing provisions such as turning the schools into mental health clinics.

WE STRONGLY OPPOSE THIS BILL!

Although HF 788 has improved since it was amended, the general philosophy of the legislation is completely in the wrong direction. It further changes the mission of schools away from providing an academic education to one of providing medical, mental health, and social services when there are teacher shortages, per pupil spending is very high, ACT and SAT scores are declining, and independent evaluations of Minnesota’s education reform efforts are uniformly negative. The state can ill afford diverting precious resources away from the provision of an academic education. Students and their families can ill afford higher taxes, especially for more state interference in family life and for judging thoughts, emotions, and beliefs of children and families instead of dealing with academic and documented behavioral issues that interfere with the learning environment.

Minnesota is already at or near number one in the country in diagnosing children with emotional and behavioral disorders (1999 – number one) and is number two this year in diagnosing African and Native American students as EBD (Emotional-Behavioral Disorder) (Minneapolis Star Tribune, March 3, 2001).

There are still many provisions of concern as listed below:

1. Mental Health Screening before Kindergarten (line 1.28) – This has been changed from screening overtly for mental health disorders to interviewing parents about the “emotional and behavioral” lives of their children. This is still screening! It is just more covert. Witness this passage from the 1999 Surgeon General’s report on mental health:

   “In other words, what it means to be mentally healthy is subject to many different interpretations that are rooted in value judgments that may vary across cultures."

   Those value judgments vary not only across cultures, but across religious faiths as well.

2. Definition of Mental Health Disorder (Section 3, lines 3.17-3.29) – These criteria are impossibly vague and subjective, even for trained mental health professionals, much less for harried teachers or other school personnel. This is clearly acknowledged by another quote from the Surgeon General’s report:

   “The science is challenging because of the ongoing process of development. The normally developing child hardly stays the same long enough to make stable measurements. Adult criteria for illness can be difficult to apply to children and adolescents, when the signs and symptoms of mental disorders are often also the characteristics of normal development.”

   Here is an example of some of the criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association, considered the “gold standard” of psychiatric diagnosis for attention deficit disorder, which obviously could fit multitudes of energetic normal children:

   6 or more of 9 symptoms of inattention “Often has difficulty sustaining attention in tasks or play activities”

   6 or more of 9 symptoms of hyperactivity “Often fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in seat”

   There is much professional disagreement about the diagnostic criteria in the DSM. For example:

   “Its (DSM's) enormous growth in size, with the addition of many new diagnoses with each edition, reflects psychiatry’s need to broaden insurance coverage and to bring the whole spectrum of human variability under psychiatric authority.” (Peter Breggin, M.D., Talking Back to Ritalin, Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, 1992)

   Here also are the criteria for mental health disorders from the MARSS data handbook which is identical to the criteria in the NCES data handbook:

   "An inability to learn that cannot be explained by intellectual, sensory, or health factors An inability to build or maintain satisfactory relationships with peers or teachers Inappropriate types of behaviors or feelings under normal circumstances; A general pervasive mood of unhappiness or depression; or A tendency to develop physical symptoms or fears associated with personal or school problems."

   This is only a sample of the quotes that could be used to establish the controversy within the mental health and medical communities and the vagueness of these diagnostic criteria. If there is that much disagreement among the acknowledged experts, then should the state of Minnesota be diverting already scarce resources to do something that untrained personnel would have to do when it is hard enough to provide a decent academic education?

3. School Pre-assessment Teams – (Section 4) This theoretically covers only older students, but once this is expanded to mental health disorders for adolescents, the structure is in place for younger students as well. These teams will consist of “teachers, administrators, a family school coordinator” and other people not trained in the mental health profession. Again, it is difficult enough to provide an academic education as it is without diverting teacher training and time to diagnose mental health disorders. In addition, funds will be diverted from providing an education to children to paying social workers and counselors to justify their existence by labeling more children with mental health disorders that are disagreed upon by experts in that profession.
   
4. Teacher’s Duty – (Section 6) This draws non-public teachers into this ill-defined web of diagnosing mental illness with impossibly vague criteria.
   
5. Outcomes – (Section 11) These outcomes are very concerning, because they will create a new structure for the state to monitor children and families, such as in outcome 1 (helping to identify students at risk of mental illness or chemical abuse), outcome 6 (identifying the needs of parents and other family members and assisting them in receiving appropriate services), and outcome 13 (promoting parent education and involvement).
   
   Particularly alarming is outcome 8 (lines 10.10 – 10.12) which proposes to collect “student data for purposes of establishing baseline information and providing outcome data…” This data would be in student education data for life. [Chapter 13.32 - Subd. 2. Student health and census data; data on parents. (a) Health data concerning students, including but not limited to, data concerning immunizations, notations of special physical or mental problems and records of school nurses are educational data (emphasis added)]. A misdiagnosis or mistaken referral by the pre-assessment team could be devastating to a student’s future insurability or employability. The state should not be gathering subjective mental health data on anyone, much less for baseline.
   
6. Mental Health Coordinator - (section 12) This section injects yet another arm of the state (human services) into monitoring the thoughts and emotions of students and their families to “work with students with mental health disorders and their families, teachers, and other mental health professionals to identify and coordinate services for the students and their families, and to achieve other outcomes specified in subdivision 3.”
   
7. Staff Development Outcomes – (Section 19) This allows precious staff development time that should be spent on academics to be used on training non mental health professionals to try to diagnose disorders that engender significant controversy even among trained professionals.
   
8. Appropriation - (Section 20) Given the already oppressive levels of taxation and monitoring of students and their families by the state via the schools and other government agencies, any amount of hard earned tax payer funds for this legislation is too much.

Some very good legislators are still supporting this bill. They need continued contact from people around the state.  They have indicated they are hearing from you. Please continue to contact those who are still support HF 788.

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