Hendersonville Lightning: Speakers implore commissioners to fully fund K-12 schools

For more context as to why, here’s a transcript of the public comments Mary Ellen made before the Henderson County Commissioners on Wednesday, June 19, 2024:

Good morning! My name is Mary Ellen Kustin, and I have two school-age children enjoying their summer break right now.

I’m concerned that anxiety, depression, and feelings of hopelessness are on the rise in youth in North Carolina.

According to NC Youth Risk Behavior Survey data, this worrying trend was already heading in the wrong direction before COVID… and, as we know, the pandemic exacerbated existing problems across the board.

We must do what we can at every level to support the mental wellness — as well as basic needs — of children in our community.

These are not the kinds of problems that go away when you ignore them. Rather, they are far more likely to result in tragic situations. But the good news is that we have the opportunity NOW to keep professionals in place who are trained to safeguard kids’ wellbeing.

I’ve had insightful conversations with social workers recently. And it has become clear that the ability to do their job well hinges on fostering TRUST with the people they serve.

My understanding is that social workers in our schools build trust with families of vulnerable children in large part by not being employees of DSS. They’re able to assure moms, dads, and grandparents of the kids they work with that they work for our schools NOT for the part of our government known to remove children from their homes.

I’m therefore exceptionally concerned that Chairwoman McCall has indicated she’d like to embed DSS employees in our schools instead of working with our school system to continuing funding 4-5 of the professional social workers we already have doing the much needed work — and who have built the relationships needed in our community to effectively do their jobs.

And of course so much of these decisions come down to money. Unfortunately, our state legislators are openly refusing to fully fund our public schools— and have been failing to meet their constitutional obligation to do so since the ‘90s, according to our state supreme court. So it has fallen on local officials to pick up the slack. That’s unfair. I get it.

That unfairness trickled down through this very elected body last year. Our state legislators mandated salary increases for professionals in our school system. The county did not allocate those funds so our schools had to dip into their reserves to follow the law.

Since our kids’ schools have been underfunded for decades, it’s no surprise that when we finally got an infusion of federal cash during the pandemic, our school board voted to allocate some of that money for the backlog needs that had been piling up. Now that that infusion is coming to an end, our state and local officials would be wise to continue to meet those needs. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure… and our kids deserve better than footing the bill later.