As Murphy prioritizes youth mental health, lawmakers and advocates blast his plan to defund school-based services

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy is styling himself as the governor taking on the youth mental health crisis. But while he was celebrating his state’s investments in mental health services this week, parents, educators, lawmakers and advocates were excoriating his administration for attempting to defund school-based programs they say have saved students’ lives.

In remarks at the National Governors Association’s convening meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Tuesday, Murphy, who chairs the group, praised New Jersey’s youth mental health services and programs, including school-based services, he said could “serve as models for our fellow states.”

With Murphy’s rumored presidential ambitions, youth mental health could become a campaign platform issue for him.

Back in Trenton, however, Murphy and members of his administration were being blasted for their plan to seize funding from the state’s school-based youth health services programs in favor of a not-yet-up-and-running model many doubt will provide the same quality and immediacy of services.

“This is not a modernization or expansion of the current model. It's an elimination of the current model,” James Earle, superintendent of Trenton Public Schools, told lawmakers Wednesday during at a virtual meeting of the Joint Committee on the Public Schools. The administration’s proposed plan, Earle said, “pulls services away from schools and therefore it creates barriers to access that the original model was designed to eliminate.”

Under the Murphy administration’s proposal, starting with the 2023-2024 academic year, the state’s long-running school-based youth services program will be defunded. Money set aside for that system will instead be shifted to a regionalized “hub and spoke” model called the New Jersey Statewide Student Support Services network, or NJ4S. It will be operated by the state Department of Children and Families.

The current school-based system operates with around $30 million in state and federal funding.

Murphy officials have defended NJ4S as an “evidence-based” model that was created through a “comprehensive stakeholder engagement process,” and will improve access and equity in mental health services for all public school students. The new network they say, will be wider-reaching, offer more standardized care to more students and concentrate resources in the highest-need districts.

DCF Commissioner Christine Norbut Beyer has said repeatedly the state is intent on ensuring “continuity of supports for students throughout this transition.”

But education advocates and school leaders say the administration is trying to “spin” its proposal and obscure the fact that the state intends to eliminate funding for school-based programs. They also say the timeline for getting the NJ4S program up and running is dubious at best and that the plan is built on a mountain of unsubstantiated — or undisclosed — data.

“It's being done in such a way that feels incredibly disingenuous from a public standpoint,” Julie Borst, an education advocate and executive director of Save Our Schools NJ, said of the administration’s rollout of the NJ4S proposal.

Borst, several superintendents and some mental health professionals working in schools say they were never included in the policymaking process when NJ4S was being contemplated.

They told lawmakers during Wednesday's virtual committee meeting that the state has declined to provide detailed data from surveys the administration commissioned from a nonprofit the state paid to run its outreach.

DCF has not yet produced the contract between the state and the Center for Health Care Strategies that POLITICO requested on Oct. 12. The nonprofit was selected through an RFP process to manage stakeholder engagement. State public records law requires contracts to be turned over “immediately” to anyone who requests them.

One of the state’s core statistics that officials have relied on as proof their hub-and-spoke model would be more effective has also been denounced as “unscientific” by the same group that produced the data.

In a concept paper released with the state’s NJ4S announcement late last month, the state cites a survey conducted by a group called School Based United showing 66 percent of New Jersey students reported that “they prefer to receive mental health support or counseling remotely or in a non-school location rather than in their school.”

On its face, the number is stark. If most students don’t want mental health services in schools, the state has argued, a non school-based program like NJ4s would better fit students’ reported needs.

But the concept paper leaves out crucial context. The survey was not conducted in a consistent or scientific manner, it wasn’t intended to guide policy and it went out to thousands of students during the height of the pandemic when many schools were closed or children were learning in a hybrid format.

School Based United, a grassroots ad-hoc group of educators and directors of school-based youth services programs across the state, was launched two years ago when Murphy’s administration first proposed cutting funding for the programs.

Suzanne Keller, a school-based program director at Red Bank Regional High School in Monmouth County and a member of School Based United, said the group was launched “to promote the advancement of school-based [services] in New Jersey because we saw the signs on the wall that said we were going to go away and because the state wasn't interested in talking to us, we formed our own coalition.”

Keller said the group’s intention was to provide the state with information — ”a finger in the wind,” — to prove how much these programs mean to their communities and to check in on how students were faring during the lockdowns. She said she never expected the information to be used as the basis for defunding their programs.

“We presented it to the state and then they turned around and used it against us,” Keller said. If School Based United knew how the information would eventually be used, Keller said, “we never would have presented our findings to them.”

At Wednesday's virtual hearing, lawmakers heard emotional testimony from parents, students and school leaders about how much school-based programs have meant to their communities.

Advocates also testified that, nationally, school-based services are the gold standard and that more states have adopted school-based programs in the wake of New Jersey’s.

No individual, aside from Beyer, spoke in favor of the NJ4S model during the committee’s meeting. Beyer left the meeting immediately after her testimony at the start of the hearing, but said her staff would remain on to listen and collect feedback.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle said they were “outraged” by the state’s proposal and Beyer’s decision not to stay for the whole meeting.

Assemblymember Mila Jasey (D-Essex) introduced legislation on Monday, NJ A4808 (22R), that would require the state DCF to keep funding the school-based youth services program and other legislators strongly signaled they would look to continue funding it in the next budget.

“We want to send a message back to the Commissioner, back to Governor Murphy's office that this is a no-go for the state of New Jersey,” Assemblymember Verlina Reynolds-Jackson (D-Mercer) said.