COMMENTARY: Social workers help schools

By Jackie Zavala

Imagine yourself as a high school student, and you are having a hard time focusing on your schoolwork because you and your family are days away from being evicted. You can’t handle the stress of the situation anymore and make your way to the school counselor’s office. Attached to the counselor’s door you find a note that says she is only speaking to specific students for the week because college applications are due.

“When students are consumed by concern — about where their next meal will come from; where the family will sleep that night; or whether they will be teased or bullied because of their ethnicity, gender identity or sexual orientation, religious beliefs, or home language — attending to academics is definitely a challenge if not an impossibility,” C.M. Shields, C.T. Dollarhide and A.A. Young wrote in Professional School Counseling in 2017.

In Texas, House Bill 239 was introduced to allow social work services to be available in public schools. HB 239 would enable social workers to offer specialized services to students and their families to eliminate barriers to learning and connect them with community resources to provide students with academic success.

When you apply this to the problem facing our imaginary high school student, if a social worker were a part of their campus, they would now have someone else to talk to and hopefully fix their problem.

The profession of school counselor has evolved over the years. They are considered part of a school’s administration team and sometimes have other duties that take priority. School counselors’ job duties range from testing, managing attendance and truancy on top of whatever daily occurrences might happen on campus. Having additional support staff on campus can prove helpful.

If a campus or school district hired social workers, they would fill in the campus or district’s gaps. They can address a student’s psychological and social needs that might be affecting their academic progress. A school social worker can also collaborate with school staff to help provide tools, resources and information regarding a student’s home life.

There are programs such as Communities in Schools in many school districts and campuses that assist students and families of their campuses with their academic progress. CIS is an excellent program with a proven success rate, and the program has some problems.

One issue with CIS is that its funding and assistance only extend to students and families that qualify and are enrolled in CIS. For example, if a student needs help with the rent, CIS can only provide additional agency support or applications. A CIS student might receive monetary assistance dependant on funding.

Another issue is that CIS staff are not trained or licensed counselors, so if a student were to confide in a staff member about abuse or wanting to harm themselves, CIS staff would need to refer the student to the school counselor. If campuses and districts had a social worker on staff, they would help everyone in their campus or school district regardless of eligibility criteria.

Social workers can also offer quality guidance, counseling and advice to clients.

“Discussions of school social work or the role that school social workers can play in community schools are infrequent at best. Although their role as service providers is acknowledged, their skills and expertise with needs assessment, asset mapping, community engagement, and organizing are largely overlooked. Furthermore, the theoretical frameworks that support community schools have largely neglected school social work,” S.A. Gherardi and W.K. Whittlesley-Jerome wrote in “Children & Schools” in 2019.

If HB 239 became law and additional funding were made available to create a new position, it would be fantastic for Texas’s students.

Everyone is living in different times than we were a year ago; students and families are living and recovering in the world of a pandemic, and school counselors are faced with new challenges. With the daily struggle of having to keep up with the requirements of their job and with attendance and testing guidelines, the last thing on a counselor’s mind is what resources are available to help students and families with rental assistance or food. Unfortunately, community resources are not always known.

Wouldn’t it be great if they had additional support to help?

Jackie Zavala is a master of social work student at Our Lady of the Lake University