It shouldn’t be any surprise that a recently released audit showed many schools hadn’t met New York mandates for SAVE Act-required mental health training.

The Comptroller’s Office audited 20 randomly selected school districts, and found 18 of them, or 90%, either did not offer mental health training or provided insufficient training, such as lacking instruction to recognize warning signs of mental or psychotic disorders in children or how to access approriate support and services.

For starters, the audit period for the 20 school districts audited was July 1, 2020, through June 30, 2021, a time when schools were trying to figure out how they were going to meet the state’s requirements to reopen safely due to COVID-19. It’s little wonder the training wasn’t completed on time.

DiNapoli himself noted a bigger problem than schools not meeting the state’s deadlines. The SAVE Act and state Education Department requirements state only that the annual school safety training must include a component on mental health, but neither the SAVE Act nor state requirements directly address what topics should be included within the mental health training component.

That’s a problem. Teachers and school staff are on the front line dealing with students’ mental health issues, yet the state’s guidelines to train those front line staff are unclear at best. The state should make more clear the training it expects its school districts to offer.

But there is a bigger issue worth considering — how much can we really expect classroom teachers and staff to do when it comes to mental health? NYSUT President Andy Pallotta has argued teachers need better training to address mental health challenges.

That’s important to note, because while many schools are currently using federal stimulus dollars to hire additional counselors and psychologists to help students, we know that money will run out and the burden will inevitably fall back onto teachers and aides.

In our opinion, child mental health is a bigger problem every year in our schools.

But it’s on the state and school administrators to devise a way to provide mental health services, ideally linked to public child and family services that are already available, to children who need help without overburdening teachers who already have enough on their plate.