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We’re all guilty of creating a disconnect between what we say we value and where we actually commit our resources. So it’s understandable that the Legislature tends to do the same. Yet, where youth mental health is concerned, that disconnect is unacceptable.

According to , 1 in 3 Hawaii public school students in grades six to 12 felt so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that they stopped doing some of their usual activities. Less than 25% of those teens received the help they needed.

The  says it is committed to ensuring “every student has what they need to thrive and reach their full potential” and prioritizes “access to mental health supports for all students through either school-based programs or community-based partners.” It’s a laudable mission that’s clearly going unfulfilled.

The disconnect is something that keeps Alec Marentic, president of the , using his free time to advocate for more mental health support in public schools 

Marentic is one of 61 school psychologists employed by the Department of Education. Like most of his colleagues, he holds a graduate degree that required training in both psychology and education as well as supervised field experience in a school setting.

School psychologists like Marentic have unique expertise in precisely what we need – providing comprehensive mental and behavioral health services for youth at school.

Yet, last week, he could only see two students because most of his time was spent in meetings with adults discussing student evaluations and legally mandated for students with special education needs.

Now, these plans are important to the DOE as Hawaii remains under pressure to comply with the , a settlement that followed a 1993 federal lawsuit that accused the state of failing to provide adequate mental health services to students with special needs. According to the Hawaii State Teachers Association, the state could face another lawsuit if we don’t hire more school professionals soon.

Because the state has not solved its shortage of special education teachers or behavioral health specialists, school psychologists like Marentic are in a constant state of triage.

As Marentic explained, when school psychologists are responsible for so many evaluations, “a lot of the needs around mental health are things that we can’t do or are not able to do at the level that our schools need.” In other words, school psychologists, who each support an average of five schools, are primarily tasked with helping the Department of Education fulfill its legal mandates instead of providing the prevention and intervention services that they’ve also trained for.

Approximately 10% of public school students are enrolled in special education. These students have been chronically underserved by Hawaii’s school system, which worsened during the pandemic.

This year, the Legislature to provide applied behavior analysis for students with significant behavioral and social-communication deficit. That’s a start, but if specialists remain overwhelmed and underpaid, recruitment won’t be easy.

If the DOE does manage to hire enough staff to satisfy its responsibilities under the Felix consent decree and, more importantly, fulfill its moral obligation to special education students, it still won’t be enough for the students suffering from depression who are not enrolled in special education. At a minimum, those students make up 23% of Hawaii’s public school population in grades eight to 12.

The Legislature’s $5 million per year appropriation to fund mental health services for public school students isn’t likely to rectify the situation given the DOE is also contending with a $261 million operating budget shortfall over the next two fiscal years.

Money isn’t the only obstacle to hiring enough school mental health professionals. In the case of school psychologists, the state’s outdated licensing model is also preventing recruitment. Puzzlingly, the Legislature hasn’t done anything about it.

Hawaii is  without certification or licensure for school psychologists. From a recruitment standpoint, this means that anyone who works as a school psychologist in Hawaii won’t be able to count their years of experience if they move to another state. When combined with lower-than-average salaries and excessive responsibilities, Hawaii is an unattractive option. 

Leslie Baunach, the National Association of School Psychologists’ delegate to Hawaii and a former DOE employee, has been advocating for licensure at the Legislature since she first started working in Hawaii 13 years ago. But she said, “It just feels like hitting a dead end every year.”

Particularly frustrating, Baunach explained, is that legislators and professional associations like the often appear initially supportive. However, pushback from clinical psychologists, the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, and others tend to dampen that support as legislative sessions move forward.

School psychologists’ quest for licensure is reminiscent of past pushes to license marriage and family therapists, grant prescriptive authority for clinical psychologists and expand nurse practitioners’ scope of practice.

While, on one hand, it’s reasonable to be protective of your role and its responsibilities when you’ve spent over a decade training. I get why a doctorate-level degree holder wouldn’t want to cede any of their territory to someone who has a different degree. On the other hand, the state desperately needs people to fill mental health positions, particularly in our public schools.

Until the Legislature takes action on licensing school psychologists, the state will remain limited in its ability to recruit and retain a mental health workforce in our public schools. Further, we’ll continue to miss out on federal Medicaid funding for school psychologists, which can’t be accessed without a licensure program.

Every other state has taken action to broaden their scope of licensed youth mental health practitioners. In California, for Medicaid reimbursement in schools. Hawaii only allows three. We need more options if we’re going to build our workforce and reverse our negative youth mental health trends.

As Marentic puts it, “We need state leadership in the DOE, at the Legislature, and in our union to start, you know, doing things, taking the information they have, taking the data they have, and implementing things. We’ve been stuck in this runaround where we’re passed off for so many years. And nothing gets done, and nothing is going to change. We need them to be our leaders in that regard and create those changes.”

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by , Swayne Family Fund of Hawaii Community Foundation, the Cooke Foundation and .