California schools can’t afford to cut counselors, they save kids

By Ayo Banjo, especially for CalMatters

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Weeks after a a student and an employee were stabbed and four students arrested at Watsonville High, the school district that serves them is considering firing every mental health doctor and most of its school counselors.

If you want a snapshot of how we’re failing young people, especially boys, you can start here.

To balance its budget, the Pajaro Valley Unified School District is considering eliminating the equivalent of 15 full-time counselors, all 13 mental health doctors and dozens of intervention officers in its schools — at a time when youth suicides are one of the leading causes of death for people from 10 to 24 years old.

Men and boys account for nearly 80% of suicides in the United States, a rate nearly four times that of women. For LGBTQ youth, the picture is even more troubling. A national survey found almost 39% are seriously considering suicide in the past year, and 12% have tried it.

This crisis is not abstract. It’s here. It’s now. And it’s local.

Young people rely most on support at school, so if you remove counselors and clinicians, you remove the adults who are in the best position to intervene when a student’s silence becomes dangerous.

And when we talk about violence, context matters. What we call “school safety” is often a reflection of untreated pain.

When a boy explodes, we see a threat. When a boy shuts down, we assume he’s good. We seldom name what both may be—symptoms of a system which teaches boys to swallow everything and then acts surprised when the pressure finally breaks.

I see this every week in my work as a project director for a campaign to reduce stigma across the Central Coast District.

Our youth ambassadors—many of them black, brown, or LGBTQ—lead a movement called Break the Stigma Not the Vibe. They design billboards, bus ads and school announcements rooted in the language they needed when they were younger.

A plea for help with no one responding

Their message is simple: Asking for help is power. You don’t have to go through this alone. And you deserve to be seen before you collapse.

Their words will soon travel across the Central Coast on buses and hallways, reaching thousands of students who might not talk to a teacher or open up at home. Sometimes visibility is intervention.

Now imagine combining that visibility with the removal of every trained mental health professional on campus. This is the contradiction that this moment requires us to face. You can’t cut the lifelines in a suicidal crisis and call it a safety strategy.

School counselors and clinicians are not extras; they are essential safety infrastructure. They are the adults who notice when a student stops being himself, when grades slip, when friendships change, or when a child who laughs easily suddenly withdraws.

We have to stop treating mental health as a side conversation. These cuts happen in the winter – when depression, isolation and suicidal thoughts are on the rise.

They are happening in communities still recovering from the violence, and after the federal government removed the LGBTQ-specific “Press 3” option of the national 988 suicide and crisis line, a resource that has supported more than a million people. We are watching lifelines shrink at a time when young people need them most.

California has invest heavily in the behavioral health of young people in recent years. But the investment means little if school boards eliminate positions that translate those government dollars into everyday life-saving support.

If we’re serious about preventing suicide, especially among boys and historically marginalized youth, then counselors, clinicians, and trusted adults should be the last thing on the chopping block—not the first.

I say this not only as someone who works in the mental health field, but also as someone who has lost people I love to suicide. Sometimes the difference between survival and silence is just an adult who knows your name and notices when your light dims.

We have a choice before us. We can continue to cut lifelines and hope for the best. Or we can decide that in a youth suicide crisis, the most dangerous decision we can make is to remove the people who keep children alive.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.