New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant announced on Tuesday that the province is expanding its integrated service delivery model for providing mental health care in schools province wide.
However, he didn’t say how he was going to deal with the ongoing shortage of educational psychologist working within the school systems.
Gallant says 100 new mental health support staff will be hired to work as part of child and youth teams within every school in the province “to help children and youth who have emotional, behavioral mental health or addiction needs.”
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He says the goal is to reduce wait times province-wide for students in need of mental health support.
“This will actually help not only the child and the family, it will actually help the professionals as well be able to have a better collaboration when they are providing the services,” Gallant said.
But what the program doesn’t address is the ongoing battle to recruit trained psychologists to be part of those teams.
“I had six positions so I put the six positions one on each team but they are just not all filled,” said Gregg Ingersoll, Superintendent of the Anglophone East School District.
That district alone has had four of its six psychologist positions sit vacant for months. Meanwhile, even more positions are sitting empty across the province.
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Ingersoll says people are simply not being motivated to apply.
“Pay equity is one, working conditions is another, length of the school year is another,” he said.
He says school psychologists work 10 months a year in Nova Scotia and PEI like the teachers, but in New Brunswick, they work year-round. He adds that psychologists working for the Department of Health make more money.
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Ingersoll says he’s been meeting with the province to try to address those issues.
“We have had discussion as late as last week at the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development about this issue looking at all those things,” he said.
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