Last year, during my senior year in Wakefield High School, I remember taking an emotional assessment during French class. In my case, the assessment was mainly to gauge how students felt about the school community and how to improve it. There’s a vivid memory of using the worn-out school Chromebooks as my French teacher urged us to take the assessment seriously. While I had beef with said French teacher, I agreed with them in this instance. There’s a value in asking these questions to the student body.
This year, Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) is scheduled to release the Behavior Intervention Monitoring Assessment System, or BIMAS-2, to approximately 40 schools in the system. Implementing this behavioral survey is only part of WCPSS’s Social Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum, where school systems are trying to implement ways for students to handle and discuss their emotions. There’s been various cases of parents arguing against the SEL curriculum, but I believe these arguments are stigmatizing towards students’ mental health.
“Children belong to their parents and what starts with parents changes everything.” marks the final line in a blog entry by A.P. Dillon, a Holly Ridge Middle School parent. In the blog, she voices her displeasure with her experience on how BIMAS-2 opt-out letters were distributed. She argues that parents should have a larger input on health assessments, going as far as saying these assessments should be opt-in instead of opt-out, meaning parents would have to request to be on the distribution list, rather than request to be taken off of it. Likewise, similar remarks have been made by fellow parents in the WCPSS.
While I do believe parents should be able to critique health assessments sent out by the school system, I find these arguments to remove the opt-out system flawed. It’s not always noticeable to parents if their children are undergoing an emotional crisis, so making a system opt-in does not account for students whose problems fly under their parents’ radar. And while an opt-out system doesn’t perfectly fix that problem, using an opt-in system would further amplify problems that are hard to detect.
In a similar vein, many parents have advocated against WCPSS’ implementation of Circle Time, calling it a form of “group therapy” and that it takes away time from academics. Instead, school officials Oct. 28th said suspension rates dropped approximately 72% at schools using similar programs, according to The News & Observer. Aside from the substantial drop in suspension rates, it forms trust in the school community.
In an interview with The News & Observer, school board chairman Jim Martin said he thinks parents dislike the SEL curriculum because they lose their position of entitlement. I’d go a step further and speculate there is an implicit bias against emotional wellness, and anything resembling therapy is solely for individuals with mental illness. Implementing these systems allows for students to appreciate their community, be an active member of it and destigmatizes mental illness. Arguing against these systems, instead of constructively building upon them, further divides our community from empathy and understanding.
