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Good judgment

Last week, the Marathon County Board of Supervisors voted 26-12 to accept a $72,974 grant that will pay for the county health department to coordinate a program that places mental health counselors in public schools, including schools on the county’s west side. We are happy a needed two-thirds majority of supervisors approved the measure as a budget amendment.

We are miffed, however, and disappointed that a group of county board conservatives, including three west county supervisors, voted against the proposal, perhaps as an attempted show of force in county politics. Chris Dickinson, Stratford, Al Habeck, town of Frankfort, and Ron Covelli, town of Stettin, cast no votes.

The mental-health-counselor-in-the-schools program started in Edgar Public Schools, the brainchild of former guidance counselor Brooke Davis. The program was started as the school district sought help in its battle against teen suicide. Since then, the program has grown into a county-wide consortium where a mental health specialist shows up for at least a few hours a week in all of the county’s 51 schools. The approved Medical College of Wisconsin grant will fortify this consortium. It will pay for county health department staff to schedule these private counselors. The counselors, by and large, are paid for by private health insurance with help from the Marathon County United Way.

Every county board member, especially those representing western Marathon County, should have voted for this program. It has zero tax impact. Money for the program comes from a private foundation. The program serves the entire county. For years, we have argued that too many county social service programs benefit the Wausau metro area and fail to filter out to the county’s rural areas. This program, however, understands that concern and, as part of its mission, deliberately attempts to provide needed mental health services to both rural and urban students. This is the kind of program that rural supervisors should stand up for and applaud, not vote against.

Supervisors who opposed the program raised questions and objections in debate, but, in the end, none of the mud that was hurled stuck. Kronenwetter supervisor David Baker, for example, questioned whether such a program undermined the role of parents. No, he was told, Wisconsin law demands parental consent for any professional therapy for children.

The most far-reaching critique of the program was offered by supervisor Dickinson. His view, if we understand him correctly, is that providing counselors in schools add to an “anything you want” cornucopia of government services (breakfast, lunch, doctors, dentists, etc.) paid for to help students. He suggested this government overreach will never ever erase the anxieties and sadness of adolescence. County mental health programming, he continued to suggest, amounted to virtue signaling, and, given county rules for schools put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic, hypocrisy.

We agree that the government should be humble and that programs, whether funded privately or with tax money, need to accomplish more than virtue signaling. But we think about the child. If parents want to see their child get help so he or she can succeed in school, we want that child to get help. We want that help to be practical and effective. We think having counselors in the schools is all that: parents don’t have to miss half days of work transporting students, children don’t have to miss classes in school. Maybe some people are worried about turning central Wisconsin schools into socialist kibbutzim. Our concern, however, is children. We can’t do everything for youngsters. But, if there are smart and cost-effective things we can do, especially in the area of mental health, then we should.

The majority of the county board approved the school mental health initiative. We applaud the good judgment of the supervisors.

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