Sec. 2. Findings
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Congress finds the following: Research shows that low socioeconomic status and certain family risk factors, such as low maternal education level and being from a single parent household, are highly correlated with poor educational outcomes, with a concentration of low-performing schools in low-income and under-served communities. Research shows that teachers cite poor working conditions, student behavior, lack of student motivation, and lack of administrative support as key reasons why they choose to leave the teaching profession.
It is essential to student achievement that we address these issues inside and outside of the classroom in order to support both our students and their educators. Teachers and principals working for low-income local educational agencies are increasingly tasked with addressing not only the academic needs of a child, but also the social, emotional, and behavioral needs of a child that require the services of a school counselor, school social worker, school psychologist, and other qualified psychologists, and these needs often interfere with delivering quality instruction and raising student achievement.
Expanded school mental health services in elementary schools have been found to improve aspects of school climate. Only 16 percent of children who need mental health services receive such services. Seventy to eighty percent of these children access mental health services at school. Students are more likely to seek help when they need it if school-based mental health services are available. Rates of maltreatment and neglect of young children in military families have shown dramatic increases during the parental deployments that have accompanied the increased military involvement of the United States abroad since October 2002.
Likewise, adolescents with deployed parents report increased perceptions of uncertainty and loss, role ambiguity, negative changes in mental and behavioral health, and increased relationship conflict; children exhibit increases in behavior disorders, stress disorders, and emotional difficulties, and decreases in achievement in most academic subjects. These trends raise concerns about the impact of deployment on military personnel and their families and whether schools that serve a large number of children with deployed parents have sufficient staff and expertise to meet these challenges.
Children of military families in rural communities are often geographically isolated, and schools that were already experiencing understaffing of school counselors, school social workers, school psychologists, and other qualified psychologists face even greater challenges meeting the increased needs of students enduring the stress that comes along with having a deployed parent or parents. Schools served by low-income local educational agencies suffer disproportionately from a lack of services, with many schools sharing a single school counselor, school social worker, school psychologist, or other qualified psychologist with neighboring schools.
Too few school counselors, school social workers, school psychologists, and other qualified psychologists per student means that such personnel are often unable to effectively address the needs of students. ) The American School Counselor Association and American Counseling Association recommend having at least 1 school counselor for every 250 students. The School Social Work Association of America recommends having at least 1 school social worker for every 400 students. The National Association of School Psychologists recommends having at least 1 psychologist for every 500–700 students.
Recent research of victimization of children ages 2 to 17 suggests that more than one-half of the children experienced a physical assault in the study year. More than 1 in 4 experienced a property offense, more than 1 in 8 experienced a form of child maltreatment, 1 in 12 experienced a sexual victimization, and more than 1 in 3 had been a witness to violence or experienced another form of indirect victimization. Only 29 percent of the children had no direct or indirect victimization.
Principals and teachers see signs of trauma-related stress in many students including hostile outbursts, sliding grades, poor test performance, and the inability to pay attention. There were more than 423,000 children in foster care in 2009, and studies have revealed these children to have higher rates of placement in special education, dropping out of school, and discipline problems, and poorer academic skills than their nonfoster care peers.