S-3330: Another mandate that takes more power away from parents
/By Rubashov
The New Jersey Republican Party – and its legislative caucuses – claim to support clawing away power from centralized state government and turning it back to local school boards and parents. This would create true educational diversity and a marketplace of approaches to education from which lessons could be learned and the best practices applied.
S-3330 mandates that school districts “teach students how to cope with grief and loss.” Senator Jon Bramnick (R), who together with Senator Joe Cryan (D) sponsored this legislation, explained: “Grief is one of the hardest emotions to understand and manage as an adolescent. Although grief and loss are difficult for any person to go through, we have the tools to teach kids healthy ways to cope and teachers who are eager to provide support. This legislation ensures that our high school students learn how to effectively manage the physical, emotional, and behavioral impacts of grief.”
This is not a bad aspiration – but should it be mandated by state government? And what form will it take in a state whose central government is controlled by the Woke far left? Would it not be better to allow local school boards and parents to decide whether this is a problem that needs to be addressed in their individual communities? And wouldn’t having a diversity of approaches provide us with the data to determine what really works?
Doesn’t New Jersey have larger educational problems at the moment? Like math and language scores.
This bill has not been certified by OLS for a fiscal note. Which means, yet again, that the state is embarking on a new mandate without knowing what the cost will be.
Perhaps this love of mandates is a symptom of late-stage capitalism? Take a business or profession that is having a difficult time marketing their product. Add a lobbyist or two, a politician or two, and we get a mandate that lets the government do the marketing for them – by force, mandated, or else. It’s a great way to sell something that average people aren’t convinced they need.
The press release put out by the Senate when the bill passed on Monday (36 “yes” and 4 “not voting” – every Republican voted yes, except Senator O’Scanlon) outlines the details:
Senator Bramnick worked with Imagine, a Center for Coping with Loss on this legislation (S-3330) to require public school districts to add instruction on grief for students in grades eight through twelve as part of the New Jersey Student Learning Standards in Comprehensive Health and Physical Education.
Under the bill, the State Board of Education would adopt the new learning standards and require the Commissioner of Education to provide age-appropriate resources to public school districts. This includes information on mechanisms and techniques to use while dealing with the symptoms of grief. Public school districts would also be instructed to provide in-school support, mental health crisis support, and individual and group therapy for students.
We suspect that “Imagine, a Center for Coping with Loss”, is about to see an uptick in the need for its services. The organization might even become a vendor for the state or for local school boards that are now forced to implement the new standard.
That’s good for “Imagine, a Center for Coping with Loss”, because it has suffered from the lack of a steady public revenue flow – according to the latest IRS 990 returns available from Guidestar for this non-profit organization. In the run-up to the Covid pandemic, public financial support declined from $2,057,664 to $1,279,108 (990, Part 2, Line 1).
From the 990 provided by Guidestar, we can see the numbers of individuals who currently access grief counseling services and calculate the percentage increase that will do so in the future… pretty much every child in New Jersey. It will be a growth industry in New Jersey.
Again, the work done by “Imagine, a Center for Coping with Loss”, is laudable. Now, it will be mandatory.
Late-stage capitalism. It’s the way we live now.
“Voters can’t make informed decisions unless they’re informed. If you asked any self-respecting constituent of George Santos, they’d tell you they wish they knew then what they know now.”
Micah Rasmussen
Director of the Rebovich Institute of New Jersey Politics at Rider University
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
George Orwell
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