Even though she is the only counselor for 650 children at Avondale-Logandale Elementary School, which serves preschool through eighth grade, Vaccarezza-Isla might also have to fill in as a substitute teacher — which has happened a half-dozen times this school year, before she went on strike last week with the Chicago Teachers Union.
“Kids are looking for me because they are having some sort of social emotional breakdown,” said Vaccarezza-Isla, 53, a 30-year veteran of Chicago Public Schools. “It hurts me that I can’t be there for them when they need me.”
The school walkouts that have spread across the country since early last year have rallied the public behind teachers. But high on the list of priorities in more recent protests, especially in large urban districts like Chicago, are demands for support staff focused on students’ well-being — counselors like Vaccarezza-Isla, nurses and psychologists.
These demands have risen as activists promote a broader mission for educators: a vision of schools as community centers that offer an array of health and social services to children, especially those from low-income families.
In Chicago, it has become clear that teacher pay is not the primary sticking point in the negotiations; after all, the city has already agreed to a raise. The Chicago Teachers Union is asking that the district enshrine in its contract a promise to hire more counselors, health workers and librarians, and to free them from tasks outside of their core duties. Those professionals are also members of the union.
Jackie Gilson, the sole school psychologist for 4,500 students at Lane Tech College Prep High School, a selective-admissions school in Chicago, said she did not expect her school to be fully staffed with mental health professionals anytime soon.
“But I am pleased that this time around, what’s front and center is the importance” of those supports for students, she said.
As Democratic presidential candidates like Sen. Elizabeth Warren join the picket line or publicly support the union’s demands, it is clear that powerful figures are paying attention too.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has promised to double the number of counselors, social workers, psychologists and nurses working inside schools. Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders have also proposed big staffing increases.
Those promises represent a political sea change. Ten or 15 years ago, it was not uncommon to hear in education reform circles — among both Republicans and Democrats — that educators were “making excuses” if they said children could not learn effectively when they were experiencing trouble at home, whether eviction, neighborhood violence or family mental illness.
Those sorts of attitudes are less common today. The get-tough education policies of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama eras, which held schools and teachers accountable for student test scores, did not always produce the soaring student achievement that reformers promised. And new research on “adverse childhood experiences” — which can range from parental divorce to sexual abuse to lack of food — has demonstrated the long-lasting impact of childhood trauma, in school and into adult life.
In this climate, teachers’ unions have renewed a century-old call for schools to provide health and social services on-site that can free classroom teachers to focus on academics.
That vision is sometimes called “common good bargaining,” in that it prioritizes benefits for students and their families alongside the bread-and-butter benefits that teachers’ unions still demand, like higher pay and bigger pensions.
The approach has shown some results. A teacher strike in Oakland, California, ended in March with a raise in addition to smaller caseloads for counselors and school psychologists. When Los Angeles teachers went on strike for a week in January, they walked away with a promise from the district to hire more nurses, counselors and librarians.
So far, the LA Unified School District has hired 45 of the 150 nurses required by the deal, according to a district spokeswoman. Pay remains a challenge. The starting salary for nurses in LA public schools is around $55,000, while hospitals can offer up to $100,000, with the opportunity to earn overtime.
Stephanie Yellin-Mednick, a nurse at the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies in LA, argued that it could still make financial sense for a nurse to work in a public school, given the benefits of summer recesses, pensions and health insurance without paycheck contributions.
She said that over the course of her 37-year career, she had seen growing numbers of students dealing with asthma, diabetes, obesity, allergies, depression and anxiety.
Only 39% of U.S. schools employ full-time nurses, according to a 2018 study. A benefit of the LA strike, Yellin-Mednick said, was that it got the word out that while there may be a nurse’s office at a school, it is not always staffed by a nurse. Some nurses in the district are responsible for multiple schools, traveling throughout the week. At any given time, a secretary may be sitting in a nurse’s office, unsure of how to handle health issues.
“They send more kids home; we get them back to class faster,” Yellin-Mednick said. “We’re able to do an assessment and figure out symptoms and what is going on, or get them to a doctor quicker. Also, they can’t fake with us.”
Walkouts may have won modest staffing increases, but they have done little to move the needle on the deep-seated budgetary constraints that make it difficult for school districts to attract health and counseling professionals. At the ballot box, voters often reject efforts to increase taxes to fund public education.
Daniel DiSalvo, a political scientist at the City College of New York and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, said school districts and city officials had avoided making difficult financial choices.
“Helping poor kids with the social services they need is an important goal,” he said, but pension and retiree health care costs are “crowding out what we could do.”
“Lamentably, I don’t see why my point of view isn’t more bipartisan,” he added.
Fiscal priorities aside, the workloads for school professionals far exceed what health and social service groups recommend. Counselors, for example, had an average caseload of 464 students during the 2015-16 school year. The American School Counselor Association recommends 250.
Vaccarezza-Isla, the counselor in Chicago responsible for 650 students, said that with a smaller caseload she could focus more on issues such as bullying and disrespectful play — “learning to be a good citizen.”
“We’re responsible for so much more every single year,” she said. “They’re burning us out.”
This article originally appeared in
.