Union pushing Clovis schools to invest millions more in mental health staff, programs
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Clovis school psychologists are pushing the district to invest millions more in student mental health staffing and programs as Fresno County’s second-largest school district negotiates with unionized workers.
The district’s mental health professionals are asking for more staff, an “equitable and reasonable” caseload, a defined staff-student ratio and enough time for their increasing duties spurred by the growing need for services.
Those are some of the things it would take to serve all students well, they said about the collective bargaining process between them as unionized school psychologists and mental health support providers under the Association of Clovis Educators and Clovis Unified.
The group’s proposals equal an increase of about $3.3 million, which the union says will help address decades-long issues, fill vacancies and the burden of understaffing and make mental health a priority for all students.
“We want to be collaborative; we want to have a partnership in achieving those goals,” said school psychologist Bernadette Rodarte, also a member of the collective bargaining team. “But we really need the district to value it as much as we do.”
The district says they do.
“We recognize and value the work of our close to 80 school psychologists and mental health professionals,” CUSD spokesperson Kelly Avants said in an emailed statement.
Clovis’s mental health professionals say they feel otherwise.
The need started long before the pandemic
The social-emotional and mental health of students is one of the most important parts of education, school psychologists and educators told the Clovis Unified school board at a mid-August meeting that allowed public comments on the negotiation process.
“If I had my way, I’d be everything for every student, but I can’t be,” 15-year educator Judy Dumas said. “These fragile young people need more than I can provide. Success at my job depends on our school psychologists and mental health professionals. Without these professionals, our most vulnerable students cannot learn, and I cannot teach them.”
Mental health support provider positions were created about six years ago based on the increasing mental health needs of students before the pandemic, according to school psychologist and collective bargaining team member Melissa Saunders. Continued increasing mental health needs changed the role from being a twice-weekly job to a full-time workload in 2019. And the time allocated for them to do that job has remained the same from 2019 until now, she said.
In the words of school psychologist Trish Orr, “your school psychologists have the passion and desire to serve every student on our campus, but sometimes we don’t feel equipped.”
Then the coronavirus pandemic “magnified” mental health issues affecting students in Clovis and around the nation, school psychologists have said.
“How can we universally provide students with appropriate coping skills to deal with today’s new challenges?” Rodarte asked. “How can we ensure every student is connected with a network of support? How do we build systems of safety to ensure students don’t resort to hurting themselves and others?”
The union proposed multi-tiered systems of support they said would provide academic, social-emotional and behavioral intervention with not only the school psychologists but different personnel who can meet students’ varying needs.
They want 12 additional school psychologists to help ensure schools are sufficiently staffed to address our student mental health crisis.
Along with more psychologists, the proposal outlines situations when:
additional staff should handle excess workload
employees should be paid for extra time, including a staff-student ratio or an employee taking on more responsibilities when the district is understaffed.
There are around 80 psychologists and mental health professionals positions for more than 42,000 Clovis Unified students.
The mental health team asked for school psychologist ratios to be one for every 700 students at elementary schools, one per 1,200 students in intermediate grades, and two for every 3,200 students at the high school level.
Rodarte said the team’s suggestions aren’t to serve mental health professionals’ desires but to ensure they can serve all students well.
But the district “struck” the suggested language, Rodarte said, and only offered ways to keep the status quo.
Clovis Unified is suggesting staff ratios be determined by district need, student enrollment, and the number of full-time school psychologists with one mental health professional assigned to each high school.
Needs may go unmet, union says
“We want to be able to do all of the things our job entails and be able to do it well so that we’re not missing students,” Rodarte said.
The primary role of school psychologists is to serve special education students by conducting evaluations for services, followed by the responsibility to serve all students’ social and emotional well-being and mental health.
More psychologists mean more needs can be met, including school psychologists’ responsibilities for the special education department and their work with all students in prevention and intervention services, ACE spokesperson Kristin Heimerdinger said.
That work ranges from developing social and emotional skills and teaching coping mechanisms to crisis response, where psychologists are “the first line of defense,” Rodarte said.
School psychologists said they’re not only the go-to staff in crisis but also considered the experts in 13 categories of special education eligibility and leaders for multidisciplinary evaluation teams.
While most of the mental health team are the school psychologists who must prioritize special education, the five mental health support providers who focus on mental health do so for the district’s seventh, eighth, and high school grades.
But the sooner psychologists can reach students, like those in elementary school, the sooner they can teach them coping skills to hopefully prevent crisis when they’re older, parent Lindsey Beavers discussed.
“We know that students can’t learn if they’re not emotionally safe to learn,” Rodarte said. “We need to get kids to graduation – safely, without harming themselves or others.”
Resources, reserves, real results
Clovis Unified says it has supported the mental health of its students and those working in the mental health field.
“Out of respect for the negotiations process, we won’t go into the details of a lengthy list of work already accomplished over the past five years or so to support the mental health of students and those working in this field,” Avants said. “Just an example of which is our decision last year to reduce the number of duty days for this group without loss of pay and the final outcome of work on a salary schedule study underway for all employees.”
The union is also requesting “comparable” pay with school psychologists at districts such as Fresno Unified, as well as changes to the salary schedule.
“As the role of a school psychologist is so demanding, especially in CUSD, and the pay is in the lower third of comparable districts according to recently completed market studies, many psychologists are not looking to come to Clovis when seeking employment,” said Jade Edwards, a school psychologist and collective bargaining team member, citing the same salary study as Avants.
Avants said the district is working to negotiate a contract that “respects the breadth and scope” of those accomplishments and hopes for the future.
“This work must also take place within the context of finite resources Clovis Unified receives as the lowest funded school district in Fresno County,” she said.
The district has long described a funding gap between how much most California schools receive from the state and how much Clovis schools receive, even as recently as June when CUSD gave one-time 7% raises to its employees.
The district’s school psychologists and mental health support providers were the only employees who didn’t get the raise since they voted to unionize and have been in negotiations.
But the district has more resources than ever to tackle the mental health crisis, Heimerdinger said about the district’s reserves and the influx of funding.
Clovis Unified’s fund balance, which is the money left in a budget after the department’s assets have been used, is more than 21% of the district’s budget. Fund balances must be at least 2%, but CUSD has a policy to maintain at least 10%.
“That’s taxpayer money that belongs to students and the community,” Heimerdinger said. “Why does the district plan to spend less money on one of our biggest needs, especially when there is more money than ever to serve students?”
The district received more than $29 million in COVID relief funding that must be spent by September. Less than 1% – 0.25% or around $72,000 – is allocated for health, counseling, or mental health services, according to its budget.
The district’s budget for school psychologists and mental health specialists’ salaries decreased by about $113,000 this school year.
The push for more funding comes as federal and state leaders are pouring record-levels of funding into local schools to address mental health needs. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that expands the legal definition for counseling to include a multi-tiered support system, a component that was struck from the proposed contract with the CUSD mental health team. The legislation encourages school systems to provide access to those services.
What’s next?
So far, the mental health staff and school district have had seven bargaining sessions and are scheduled for several more over the next few months, including meetings scheduled for this week, Heimerdinger and Avants told the Ed Lab.
Other than the groups agreeing on the terms of the contract, there isn’t a timeline for when negotiations will end, especially because this is the first contract between the mental health team and district. District documents said that salary, benefits and working conditions are among the mandatory areas that must be addressed under a first-time union contract.
“Negotiating is about understanding priorities, discussing values and problem solving together,” Clovis school psychologist Cy Hiyane said. “The ACE bargaining team has proposed several articles that articulate a vision – a vision of supporting all kids in mind, body and spirit.
“Is the district ready to prioritize wellness for our kids?”
