Students across New York are facing rising mental health needs, yet school social workers remain dangerously understaffed and unevenly distributed across districts. To help fix this, NASW-NY is urging the Legislature to advance S376 (Brouk) / A8390 (Gonzalez-Rojas) to strengthen school-based mental health services through statewide transparency, staffing targets, and a durable plan to grow and retain the school mental-health workforce.
Please take action today: complete our Act Now and send it to your State Senator and Assembly Member.
When you complete the Act Now, you’ll be urging your legislators to:
Pass S376/A8390 this session and move the bills through the Education Committees to floor votes in both houses.
Require annual, public reporting on the number of school counselors, school social workers, and school psychologists statewide—so we can see staffing levels by district and building.
Calculate student-to-provider ratios and identify gaps between current staffing and nationally recommended standards.
Build a concrete staffing plan tied to national standards, including progress toward the widely recommended 1 school social worker for every 250 students (with lower ratios for higher-need settings).
Pair this plan with dedicated, non-supplanting funding so districts can actually hire and retain the workforce needed to close staffing gaps.
Too many schools have one social worker responsible for hundreds, or even thousands, of students, creating long waitlists, limited service availability, and burnout for school-based providers. S376/A8390 creates the baseline New York needs to measure the problem statewide and build a plan to meet staffing needs, so students’ access to care isn’t determined by their ZIP code.
Thank you for taking a few minutes to act. A strong response from the public makes a real difference, especially when legislators hear from constituents directly.