Some NC schools still falling short of physical activity, mental health requirements :: WRAL.com

Some North Carolina school boards, at least 38, are still not planning for students to get the required number of minutes of physical activity, according to a report the state Department of Public Instruction presented to the State Board of Education on Wednesday.

The report collected data via survey from all of the state’s traditional public school districts and many public charter schools regarding issues related to student mental health and well-being.

This school year is the first that school leaders were asked to submit a plan to incorporate the required number of minutes of activity into the schoolday, and it’s been common knowledge via other surveys for years that some schools aren’t providing the required number of minutes.

It’s the fifth year that school systems have been asked to have a mental health plan and some training.

Board members said they were concerned about the mental health challenges among young people and that some schools weren’t following state board policy for recess and physical activity.

Several supported a recommendation to require school social workers to have Master’s degrees and said they want more social workers and school psychologists in schools to support the work schools and teachers are trying to do.

“Every year you come to use with this worsening data,” Board Member Jill Camnitz told Ellien Essick, DPI’s section chief of Healthy Schools and Specialized Instructional Support. “And every year we say we want to do something… We know what we need we just need to figure out how to better advocate for it.”

In the past, the board has voted to ask state lawmakers for more school social workers, psychologists and nurses and to hire a dedicated recruiter for school psychologists, but lawmakers haven’t approved the requests.

Session Law 2020-7, or Senate Bill 476 of 2020, requires the state board and local school boards to have mental health plans, to conduct certain training and to have a suicide risk referral protocol.

Employees are supposed to receive at least six hours of mental health training when they are first hired and two hours annually after that.

According to the survey presented Wednesday, the vast majority — but not all — of school systems provided training on the six required topics: youth mental health, suicide prevention, substance abuse, teenage dating violence, child sexual abuse prevention and sex trafficking prevention.

Worsening mental health among young people over the past 15 years has raised concerns among policymakers, educators and health professionals.

Former Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt was particularly focused on the correlation among the rise in children feeling sad and the drop in children who said they were physically active.

Department of Public Instruction officials during her tenure said they were aware that some schools weren’t providing enough time for physical activity for young people and were working with them to improve that.

North Carolina schools must provide kindergarten through eighth grade students with at least 30 minute of moderate to vigorous physical activity per day, if students don’t attend a physical education class daily. Other than PE, recess, dances, classroom energizers and other approved exercise curricula can count toward that total.

The report also showed that 4% of school boards are still revoking a student’s access to recess as a punishment, something that’s prohibited in State Board of Education policy.

“Why would anyone pull recess as punishment to a child?” Board Member Wendell Hall said. Hall said that type of punishment is a step too far for a child.

“When that child can’t release that energy outside, they are going to release it inside,” he said.

Most schools don’t offer daily physical education, something Essick blamed on  a lack of enough teachers do that. That leaves recess as an equally common method for schools to use to offer than required 30 minutes of activity each day.

In the survey, 38 school boards — 12% of responding districts — don’t include the required minutes in their school mental health plan. Another 227 boards did.