A new report reveals how public schools are spending tens of millions of dollars to provide psychiatric care to children at school. But turning our schools into mental health institutions will almost certainly make everything worse. I ll explain why. Also, DeSantis and Vaynerchuk both had great moments at the GOP debate last night. While Chris Christie and Nikki Haley humiliate themselves, we ll break it down. And Ayanna Pressley wants to expand voting rights to 16-year-olds and convicted criminals in prison.
00:00:00.000Today on the Matt Wall Show, a new report reveals how public schools are spending tens of millions of dollars to provide psychiatric care to children at school, but turning our schools into mental health institutions will almost certainly make everything worse. I'll explain why.
00:00:12.400Also, DeSantis and Vivek both have great moments at the GOP debate last night. While Chris Christie and Nikki Haley humiliate themselves, we'll break it down.
00:00:19.400And Ayanna Pressley of the squad wants to expand voting rights to 16-year-olds and convicted criminals in prison. I'll explain why that's a horrible idea. We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
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00:01:48.100Also, I have a major announcement to start the show today, or to continue the show.
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00:02:13.840Around a century ago, the Spanish flu killed 700,000 people in this country.
00:02:18.820In terms of casualty count, that pandemic was deadlier than both world wars, plus the wars in Vietnam and Korea combined.
00:02:25.380The average life expectancy in this country dropped by 12 years virtually overnight, and many of the dead were young people.
00:02:32.420And yet, as the pandemic subsided, according to historians who have extensively documented this whole episode, life returned to normal in just a couple of years.
00:02:40.120Society did not reorder itself. There were no permanent changes to, say, election law.
00:02:45.700Mail-in balloting didn't become the norm. Clusters of a FET leftist in San Francisco and Portland didn't insist on wearing masks for years afterwards.
00:02:54.480Things progressed, and people just kind of moved on with their lives.
00:02:58.780Now, fast forward a century to the post-COVID era, and as you've probably noticed, the exact opposite happened.
00:03:04.760Instead of moving on, elected officials have opted to indefinitely extend COVID policies wherever possible.
00:03:11.260And some of these efforts are obvious. I just alluded to a few of them.
00:03:14.380But some of these efforts are not so obvious.
00:03:16.860In fact, they've gotten basically no major media coverage whatsoever, with few exceptions, even though they could affect your children in profound ways.
00:03:25.720In particular, with COVID as the pretext initially, there's now a large-scale effort underway to transform schools into mini hospitals, all for the benefit of a handful of startups that are funded out of Silicon Valley.
00:03:39.660Now, you thought the point of school was to provide an education for your child, but that's not the case anymore.
00:03:45.260It hasn't been the case for a long time, really.
00:03:46.800Now, the point is to turn students into patients in order to enrich investors in California.
00:03:54.000School is now supposedly a one-stop shop for all your children's educational and medical and psychiatric needs.
00:04:02.520According to research from the Kaiser Family Foundation, prior to COVID, there were, quote,
00:04:06.300essentially zero telehealth appointments for mental health and substance-related issues.
00:04:10.980You could look throughout the entire country, and you'd find that it's just not something that was done.
00:04:16.800But beginning around March of 2021, everything changed.
00:04:20.360And that year, telehealth technology exploded in popularity.
00:04:24.220It was used for more than one-third of all outpatient visits for these symptoms.
00:04:29.660And telehealth then went from something that basically no one used to something that more than 33% of patients nationwide were participating in.
00:04:37.440And nothing like that kind of shift has ever happened before.
00:04:40.820Many of these new patients were students in grades K through 12.
00:04:44.280And as the Associated Press reports this week, quote,
00:04:46.800Now at least 16 of the 20 largest U.S. public school districts are offering online therapy sessions to reach millions of students.
00:04:54.940In those districts alone, schools have signed provider contracts worth more than $70 million.
00:05:05.580And you were never asked to vote on that.
00:05:07.540You were never asked to vote on whether schools will become also places where therapy is conducted for tens of millions of dollars.
00:05:15.420It just happened, whether you like it or not.
00:05:18.380One of the largest telehealth providers in schools today is called Hazel Health.
00:05:22.760They're active in more than 150 school districts across 15 states.
00:05:26.160And just this year, the AP reports, Hazel signed a $24 million contract with Los Angeles County to provide teletherapy to more than a million students.
00:05:35.440Hazel has also signed lucrative deals in Hawaii, Nevada, Florida, Texas, Washington, Georgia.
00:05:40.760A lot of taxpayer money is being spent all of a sudden on in-school therapy for kids.
00:05:47.720So that's tens of millions more dollars spent by the school system to go along with the billions that it already wastes.
00:05:55.340But the bigger issue, beyond the cost of all this, is that schools should not be handling any of this in the first place.
00:06:04.940This is maybe the most egregious example of mission creep in modern history.
00:06:09.380Like, it should go without saying that schools are not hospitals, and they're certainly not mental health facilities.
00:06:16.800Outside of dealing with minor injuries, which school nurses can handle and have always been able to handle,
00:06:22.320schools should not be offering full-service medical care, least of all psychiatric care.
00:06:27.180They certainly shouldn't be promoting mental health treatments via the Internet.
00:06:30.900Now, this is the biggest problem, and the thing we should all be stopping to think about.
00:06:36.420Why are schools spending tens of millions of dollars to offer therapy to kids?
00:06:41.900Now, it used to be, like back in my day, back in the dark ages,
00:06:45.920that the school guidance counselor was really just like the school's version of an HR rep for students.
00:06:52.400So you'd talk to the guidance counselor if you had some kind of issue with another student or a teacher or whatever.
00:06:58.000And most of the time, she would give you a sticker or a coloring book and send you on your way.
00:07:04.920So the guidance counselor's role was relatively narrow in that way.
00:07:08.880But now, increasingly, schools are taking it upon themselves to play shrink.
00:07:13.320They're referring children to Zoom calls with anonymous doctors for talk therapy.
00:07:19.500And parents have no idea what exactly is being said in these sessions.
00:07:22.520It's true that parents have to consent to these telehealth providers seeing their children to begin with.
00:07:28.000But beyond that, the whole point of the practice is that parents don't have to come and get their kids.