Among the comments about my last article on this subject, a reader brought up my next topic — use of telemedicine for mental health support in schools.
I am a believer in telemedicine
to the degree the professions are; and
to the degree that such practices are circumscribed by law in Virginia.
I find, however, that creating the professionally specified environments for such telemedicine in the schools
can be very difficult if not impossible;
requires too much effort in schools stretched in their primary missions; and
imposes liability they do not need.
Even then parents will have to get past the cultural stereotyping by the psychiatric community, which I will detail.
The community school model can provide tele-clinical environments and services in the vicinity of schools, but I recommend the schools stay out of it beyond testing for referrals.
Word of warning to Virginia State Senate Democrats: paybacks are hell.
Your gleeful construction of a “brick wall of resistance” to the governor who was elected by the majority of Virginians may come back to crush you.
Maybe not this year. Or next. But eventually you’ll be back where you belong — in the minority — and the GOP will remember what you did in February 2023.
Have you heard?
Earlier this week the Dems flexed their muscles and rejected three of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s appointees. They tried to block the appointment of Bert Ellis to the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors because he arrived on “Grounds” a couple of years ago with a tool that he intended to use to remove the “F*** UVA” sign some snotty, disrespectful undergrad had plastered to her door on the Lawn.
The president of the university should have ripped it down the day it appeared, but he’s far too woke.
Democrats were unsuccessful in trying to boot Ellis. He was approved on a tie vote.
So the UVa board now has at least one member willing to stand up for the values that once were the hallmark of the commonwealth’s flagship university.
One of the Democrats’ dubious successes this week was the sinking of Colin Greene, Youngkin’s pick for Health Commissioner.
“On a party-line vote, the Senate blocked the appointment of Health Commissioner Colin Greene, Virginia’s top public health official, over comments he made downplaying the significance of racism as a driver of health disparities,” reported the Virginia Mercury. (more…)
All bills in the Virginia General Assembly to allow ranked choice voting (RCV) for town council, school board and constitutional officer elections, plus presidential primaries, were passed by indefinitely Feb. 7 by House and Senate committees, essentially being killed for this legislative session.
Even in the Democrat Senate, the RCV bill was killed unanimously.
I was disappointed: HB1751, to allow RCV in local and school board races was offered by Republican Del. Glenn Davis of Virginia Beach, as there has been widespread opposition to RCV by Virginia Republicans.However, there was some evidence RCV could have helped GOP candidates who lost recent Virginia Beach City Council elections, so maybe that’s why he patroned it. (more…)
Rebecca Aman, a member of the Newport News School Board, is frustrated. She told me in an interview that:
Without sufficient discipline and access to clinical mental health services, behavioral intervention does not work to make schools safer and healthier.
She believes that Newport News schools need to improve both discipline and the effectiveness of behavioral interventions.
She is absolutely right.
But school-based mental health services offer different, very complex and rapidly changing challenges.
The profession of psychology has recognized that the one-on-one clinical treatment model is permanently out of reach for the broad communities needing assistance because the supply of qualified professionals cannot now and will never meet the demand.
So the delivery model is in the midst of profound change.
Three key changes being pursued are
a far bigger emphasis on prevention, much of it to be delivered by school staff;
better diagnosis; and
“school based” (their term) group treatments.
Which raises at least three questions:
Are the pediatric mental health delivery models changing so much that the schools are “shooting behind the rabbit” in the hunt for more services?
What does the profession of psychology mean when it describes massively expanded “school-based” services? The schools and parents better find out.
Should schools even be in the hunt for more in-school services? I say no. They are already trying to do too much.
As reported here, the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) recently released a scathing report on the former Virginia Parole Board scandal from early 2020. As documented in 69 pages, the former board repeatedly broke both laws and the board’s own procedures to illegally release many prisoners convicted of violent crimes, and failed to notify the victims’ families.
The statute of limitations has since expired, so no members of that board will face any legal repercussions. One of those members was Roanoke City Mayor Sherman Lea Sr. (D). However, the former Chair of the Board, Adrianne Bennett, was later appointed to be a state judge in Virginia Beach before the parole board scandal became public knowledge.
Seeking some accountability, Del. Chris Head (R-Botetourt/Roanoke) as reported here has called on Judge Bennett to resign due to what the OAG described as a pattern of illegality and endangerment to the public.
Del. Head seems to be tapping into a large reservoir of voter ire. This frustration regards what to many appears to be a lack of accountability for political figures who do wrong and a two-tiered justice system that quickly punishes normal people but lets powerfully-connected individuals get off scot-free. (more…)
Awakening in the darkness of the predawn, brave Virginia mother Suparna Dutta spoke out on Fox and Friends First, challenging not only the hegemony of Democratic power over parents in Virginia but also the nation, as she fired back on not only Virginia Democrats who attacked her with the “white supremacist” smear but also Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, who tried to gaslight parents this week in the U.S. Congress.
Omar claimed in a congressional committee hearing she was “unaware” of school boards ignoring parents. Suparna fired back and said Omar is a “completely unaware” politician if she hasn’t see the evidence in school districts around the country of parents treated “like dirt.”
This is Omar’s first serious emergence in the debate over parental rights and reveals how the Woke Army of Islamists working with leftists is going to see cracks in their ranks if they keep trying to sideline parents.
Are Omar’s Islamist supporters going to accept schools keeping secrets from them about their children’s pronouns? You can bet the answer is no.
In fact, Omar needs look no further than her own state and her own congressional district where Muslim parents with immigrant backgrounds from Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, her native Somalia and elsewhere are demanding their rights at fiery school board meetings. One parent is Shukri Abdrirahman @ShuForCongress, a religiously conservative Muslim immigrant mother from Somalia in Minnesota, who opposes the new age-inappropriate sexual books being taught in schools. Shukri ran as a Republican against Omar and she is building awareness now in Minnesota among her Somali-American community over how the alliance of Muslims with Democrats — embodied in people like Omar — ignores the values of parental rights sacred in immigrant communities. Stay tuned for more on Shukri’s efforts.
Watch Suparna’s interview with ToddPiro@ToddPiro to see that the Woke Army may have won a vote to oust Suparna from the Virginia Board of Education but they have just empowered a mother to fight even harder against their tyranny.
Parents around the world are cheering you, Suparna! Send her a note of support if you’d like to at [email protected].
In a bold move, Valley legislator Del. Chris Head (R-Botetourt/Roanoke) has called on controversial judge Adrianne Bennett to resign her position.
Bennett was formerly the Chair of the Virginia State Parole Board. During March and April 2020, when most people were distracted if not paralyzed by fear from the new Covid pandemic, Bennett led the Board to release an unprecedented number of prisoners and broke countless laws and procedures by doing so. As news of that scandal began to go public, The Roanoke Star ran an August 19, 2020 commentary.
However, before the news became public, Bennett resigned from the Parole Board and was appointed by the General Assembly to be a state judge in Virginia Beach, a position she still occupies. However, for unknown reasons, Judge Bennett has recently not been hearing cases or presiding over trials. (more…)
Fairfax journalist Asra Q. Normani continues her remarkable reporting on the Virginia Senate’s refusal to endorse Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s nomination of Suparna Dutta to the state Board of Education. Dutta is a brave immigrant mother who has advocated for the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, democracy and meritocracy.
We tried to tell everyone. Indexing the tax code for inflation is wildly popular, but it’s not in the pending package.
We have seen this before in Virginia and here we go again: the classic conflict between tax cuts for the many versus more government spending for a few.
The Republican-dominated House of Delegates has passed a series of broad tax reductions, while the Democratic-dominated Virginia Senate has killed its versions of the same bills. Last Sunday the Senate then produced a budget proposal about $1 billion richer in funds for education, mental health services and other poll-tested priorities.
Killing the tax bills creates even more revenue to spend in future years, billions more. (more…)
Last year, Republicans in the General Assembly rejected three of former Governor Northam’s appointments to the State Board of Education, giving Governor Glenn Youngkin the opportunity to appoint a majority of the members of that board. Last night, Senate Democrats partially returned the favor by rejecting one of Youngkin’s appointees
That rejected member was Suparna Dutta, a co-founder of the Coalition for TJ, and a fierce critic of the new admissions policy for the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County. In an unusual development, her rejection did not result as an amendment from the Committee on Privileges and Elections, as is usually the case. Apparently, opposition to her had been brewing since the committee reported the bill (SB 276) and her name was deleted from the bill on a floor amendment offered by Sen. Ghazala Hashmi (D-Chesterfield). It passed on a party line vote of 22-18. (more…)
We have arrived today at a situation in which huge percentages of Virginia children and adolescents exhibit mental health problems.
Both sides of the political divide acknowledge the problem.
It’s existence is not up for debate.
Both blame the soaring pediatric mental health issues, a problem before COVID, on COVID school shutdowns that caused children to lose foundational developmental experiences that depend in part on socialization in schools and in part on interpersonal relationships with friends, both of which were profoundly interrupted.
Both sides acknowledge that minorities suffered worse than white kids.
That is where the agreements end.
Conservatives blame the disparate mental health impacts largely on easily observable inappropriate responses to COVID insisted upon by progressives and executed for far too long in progressive-run school divisions — in which minority children are mostly educated in America and in Virginia.
Progressives, by dogma never acknowledging agency in any problem, have actively tried to blame those same disparate impacts on institutional racism.
The facts are on the conservative side.
This article will show what progressives did and the results. Progressive dogma was the cause of extended school closures. Both the closures and disparate impacts happened disproportionately in progressive school divisions and progressive states.
So progressives closed the schools, closed them disproportionately on minority kids and now bemoan the outcomes of those closures as artifacts of systemic racism.
It reminds one of the story of the young man who killed his parents and asked the judge for leniency because he was an orphan.
It takes some combination of denial, an assumption that people who hear those claims are idiots, and Olympic-level audacity.
Racism, unless it was progressive racism, had nothing to do with it.
It may be time to rethink the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which was signed into law in 1990 by then-President George H. W. Bush.
If the late president had known that some school officials would use a wrinkle in this law to keep psychopaths in the classroom I wonder if he would have signed it.
IDEA entitled students to a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment possible. It meant kids with physical, mental and emotional disabilities could get individualized learning plans and ideally have an education tailored to their needs.
It’s a well-intended piece of legislation built on several earlier laws that also attempted to give those with disabilities the same opportunities as other children for a free public education. It appears that IDEA may have been expanded to mean that a child with an IEP has a license to be disruptive and even violent while teachers are powerless to get them out of class. If that’s the case, well, it’s time to narrow the law.
The Virginia Senate has voted 24 to 15 to approve SB 842, the so-called “second look” bill. If it becomes law, inmates who have been in prison for 15 years or more could ask to be released, or ask for a reduction in their sentences. Originally, the bill applied to inmates of all types, but it was amended in the Senate Finance Committee to exclude first-degree murderers. Inmates released under second look legislation tend to be murderers (such as second-degree and first-degree murderers), although Oregon’s second look law excludes a few “aggravated” murders.
In 2022, the Democratic-controlled Virginia Senate passed an earlier version of the second look bill by a 25 to 15 vote, but it then died in a subcommittee of the Republican-controlled House of Delegates. That earlier bill was broader than this year’s bill in one way (it did not exclude even first-degree murderers such as serial killers) but narrower in another respect (it required inmates to meet specified “behavioral standards” in prison be released, which is not true of SB 842).
This bill faces an uncertain future in the House of Delegates. On the one hand, the bill is supported by many well-funded progressive interest groups with multi-million-dollar budgets, such as the ACLU, and supporters of the bill have massively out-lobbied opponents of the bill. On the other hand, it is opposed by the Virginia Association of Commonwealth’s Attorneys, which most House Republicans pay attention to. And most Republicans already oppose the bill. (more…)
When my wife and I were looking for a home in Fairfax County 50 years ago, we asked the real estate agent how the schools were. “Excellent!” she replied.
But today? The Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) Oct. 5, 2022, press release on 2022 SAT scores shows that between 2018 and 2022 the average FCPS SAT score fell 27 points, from 1212 to 1185. The last time FCPS SAT scores decreased over a five-year period was 1989-1993, and the decrease was one point.
The Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance (FCTA) emailed FCPS School Board Chair Rachna Sizemore Heizer to ask why SAT scores decreased. She forwarded our question to the Assistant Superintendent for Instructional Services, who replied that, “… five-year trends for mean SAT scores are down globally since 2018, a pattern consistent in Virginia and FCPS.”
However, the FCPS press release itself says that Virginia SAT scores increased 14 points while FCPS scores fell 27 points. So, the FCTA replied to Chair Sizemore Heizer with this correction and again asked why FCPS SAT scores decreased.
In the discussion over the shortage of “affordable” housing, one could point to one company that could be considered the cause of the disappearance of a lot of the affordable housing stock in the Richmond area: Gumenick Properties.
The company has redeveloped an 80-acre tract it owned near Broad St. on the Henrico/Richmond boundary to include apartment buildings; commercial space, including restaurants and fitness centers; and a large, state-of-the-art public library (Henrico County). As reported in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch, the company is ready to construct its third large apartment complex on the property. It will consist of 398 units, ranging from studios to three bedroom apartments. The rents for its current complexes, which have a maximum of two bedrooms, range from $1,400 to $2,700. It is reasonable to expect the three-bedroom units to exceed this maximum. (more…)
The year: 2075. The American colonies on the Moon are getting restless under Washington’s tyrannical rule….
This second edition of “Dust Mites” has a snazzy new cover, includes helpful lunar maps, and is 5,000 words tighter than the original. The sequel, “Trogs,” is scheduled for publication this summer.
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