Brace yourselves, Secular Fam. We’re about to wade into the deep brown shitwater that has become the standard for PUSD governing board meetings.
Once again, this meeting went on for several many hours (7:07:19 to be exact), and consisted of both a study session and the regular business meeting of the district. Since the meeting was so long, I’m going to do my best to cover the most important parts, and this is either going to break records for my longest Substack or I may just channel my inner King Solomon and split this baby in two!
Deeeelicious!
The study session’s agenda included an organizational chart redo that ended up getting tabled and yet another discussion about social workers. I’m going to go ahead and cut right to the chase here about social workers and the cult members currently leading this board: they want to remove mental health care supports for the students and families they were elected to serve, and they are twisting themselves into human pretzels to make it happen.
At this point, nothing else makes sense. Last year, they turned down their own grant money from a school safety grant for social workers, and then a few weeks later, after realizing that their constituents actually like having social workers on staff, dipped into their own carry-over funding to keep the program going.
So much for fiscal responsibility, amirite?
Once the new board members were sworn in, Clerk Tobey presented a rewritten policy asserting that PUSD was breaking state statute (they’re not). This policy rewrite evolved into the study session, and even more district time, money, and resources are now being spent on a topic that has been beaten to death.
The meeting started with a couple of comments, and then Board Member Proudfit launched into the topic of social workers, and asked the question that is on everyone’s minds: what problem are we trying to solve here? Now, pay close attention to the answers at this meeting folks, because they changed a LOT. Much like the Arizona Legislature, these elected officials are focused on solving problems that don’t exist.
When Mrs. Proudfit asked this question, Board Member Bowles (aka Sister Fratelli)
Began to direct the staff to explain the problem, but Board Member Ewing piped up, saying since Mr. Tobey asked for it, he should be the one explaining it. Mr. Tobey asserted his not-a-lawyer™ legal opinion. I wanted you all to be able to read his exact words; hopefully someone reading this speaks gobbledygook:
“So the problem that we’re trying to solve here is the legal one. Nothing in the policy said anything detrimental about the support staff that we have or the services that we provided is strictly a legal argument and based upon the grant narratives that have come over that I've seen and submitted to the Department of Education. There's an issue and it's been talked about, as you alluded to Mrs Proudfit, for several years now going back to when I was a parent advocate coming to the district and speaking up publicly at the board meeting. So really the problem is getting the district to be in compliance with what state statute is.”
I have no idea what the legal problem is, and as far as I can tell, Clerk Tobey doesn’t either.
Next, President Rooks brought up an unsubstantiated claim made by a parent during a public meeting three or four years ago. Apparently this parent’s child received support from the social worker without the parent’s permission. The alleged parent was upset about this alleged incident, and the alleged child left the alleged high school. Allegedly.
Rooks went on to say that she knows countless alleged parents like this, stating:
“That is just one story I know personally myself. I've heard from many parents that reach out but they don't want to file a report or they don't want to come and speak in front of a meeting because of the judgment that will go towards them and speaking up. And the things that they went through with their own child is just devastating to them and so that's hard to talk about in a public meeting so I just wanted to make note.”
Hmmm. Why would parents be afraid of judgement for not wanting a caring adult to help the child’s with their mental health struggles? Perhaps the parents are the source of the child’s mental health struggles. I wonder…is there a population of children who are more likely to struggle with their mental health than others?
A quick Google search provides a ton of information from reliable sources about the causes of mental health issues in both K-12 and postsecondary settings. Many students struggle with anxiety and depression, but according to the CDC and a Surgeon General’s report, special education students, female students, LGBTQ+ students, immigrant students, and low income students struggle the most.
The recommendations from the Department of Education are basically exactly the opposite of what the new PUSD board seems to be advocating for.
The discussion that ensued was a big “what-if” about hypothetical situations that have never happened in PUSD. Sister Fratelli chimed in to assert that there is no waitlist for mental health providers outside of schools, despite what the experts at Phoenix Children’s Hospital (PCH) say. But, you know, she like, knows everyone, so who needs experts? Anecdotal stories are always much more reliable than surveys, data, and statistics, amirite?
As I’ve observed before, these cult members think of themselves as the experts in everything, and that whatever happens in their zip code is the experience of everyone else on the planet. The result is that their myopia and ignorance guide their politics and policies. Since her cult leader is afraid of ideals like diversity, equity, and inclusion, she is too. He ignores people’s social and emotional needs (well, except for his own), so she will too.
Clerk Tobey seems to believe that even though there have been no reported incidents of PUSD social workers providing services outside of their scope of practice, it’s going to happen at some point, so the whole program should be nixed.
Board Member Ewing pointed out the many flaws in their arguments for the changes they’re proposing, and she suggested perhaps tighter parental consent forms would provide them some peace of mind for all the imaginary and unsubstantiated concerns “so many parents” apparently have.
President Rooks wanted to prove to everyone that she knows how to read (just not silently), so she read portions of the grant narrative. She then shared a story about a second grade student (again, unverified) who lost a family member, and shared her indignation that the caring adults on campus soothed the grieving child.
Mrs. Ewing asked clarifying questions of the social workers and counselors present, and in response, President Rooks practiced reading again in front of everyone to show that she lacks basic comprehension skills. No matter how many different ways the simplest concepts were explained to the cult members, their adherence to mis/disinformation could not be swayed.
The cult members sat slack-jawed, as one of the high school counselors explained that not every parent in PUSD is educated, has reliable transportation and housing, and that many parents/guardians work several jobs to make ends meet. She explained that the social workers and other mental health support staff identify the students, get parental consent.
In some cases, parents do not give consent for those kids to receive services. The parents that DO give consent to receive help for their children rely on the social workers and others to match them with service providers. Some of those families may need outside therapy or counseling, and some may need information on housing, transportation, medical and dental care, or any number of things that families need.
But everything looks like a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works. It’s pretty clear that the majority of this board doesn’t know how anything works. Or maybe they do, but they’re not really on the board to help kids. Whether it’s ignorance or cruelty that motivates them, one thing is certain: the students, families, and staff of PUSD deserve better.
The expertise of the *checks notes* EXPERTS was routinely disregarded throughout this study session, and Mrs. Rooks said that soothing a grieving child was too “interpersonal” since parents only send their kids to school for an education. When Mrs. Proudfit asked again what illegalities Bowles, Rooks, and Tobey were referencing, Mrs. Bowles said she’d “rather not get into it because we’ll be here all night” but continued to reference a claim about a teacher behaving inappropriately, that as far as I can tell isn’t verified.
Clerk “Joe Friday” Tobey continued to share his lack of understanding of absolutely everything everyone was saying to him, and all of us were on an endless hamster wheel.
It seems that Mr. Tobey and his fellow extremist board members read the colloquial language used in the grant and gave it a clinical meaning. He and his colleagues seem to believe that the use of the word “therapy” when describing what a child may need, means that they are performing psychotherapy, but that’s not the case. I can’t imagine being one of the social workers, behavior specialists, counselors, or any other educator in the room during this study session. How they managed to keep their cool while explaining over and over and over again how all of this works is impressive.
Again, Secular Fam. PUSD is fully within the law and the current requirements of the grant and every expert in the field says that American students need more access to mental health supports, not less.
There is more to this story, but I’ll need to break it into pieces. Consider this Installment One on the continuing PUSD saga. I’ll summarize the regular meeting - all four hours of it - sometime later this week.
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