Mental health counseling has no place in schools, she says. It’s up to parents to prevent teen suicides. The school district should instead use that funding to hire “tutors” to help kids (hers?) pass college entrance exams.
“At a September school board meeting in Southlake, Texas, … Tara Eddins strode to the lectern during the public comment period and demanded to know why the Carroll Independent School District was paying counselors ‘at $90K a pop’ to give students lessons on suicide prevention,” NBC News reported (here).
Um, to prevent suicides?
Schools are now under siege by rightwing ideologues, especially in places like Southlake, the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb where Tara Eddins (photo, right) lives and pontificates silly nonsense at school board meetings.
Let’s subject her remarks to a simple two-part common sense test. Part 1: Why are the parents better able to deal with suicidal youngsters than trained professionals? Part 2: If parents have this problem under control, then why are schools seeing suicidal kids? But facts, logic, and common sense have nothing to do with anything where these people are concerned.
By the way, if her student — God forbid — committed suicide, she’d sue the school district for not doing enough to prevent it. You can count on that.
Generally speaking, there’s a very large overlap between the people opposing mental health counseling in schools and those worked up over “critical race theory,” a graduate school subject not taught in K-12 public schools. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re also the parents of the school bullies who drive vulnerable kids to suicide.
We live in a democracy. One of our democratic ideals is giving everyone their say. In that respect, the school board did right by giving Ms. Eddins her two minutes of speaking time; that’s how we do things in this country, and should do them.
(Please note that Ms. Eddins isn’t a concerned parent; she’s a political activist; by wearing that t-shirt, she’s campaigning for a school board candidate).
Now, they should take the next step and tell her “no,” she’s wrong, and they’re not going to do things her way.
That, too, is the American way.