Opinion: California’s schools can’t afford to cut counselors who keep kids alive

Weeks after a student and staff member were stabbed and four students arrested at Watsonville High, the school district that serves them is considering laying off every mental health clinician and most of its school counselors.

If you want a snapshot of how we are failing young people, especially boys, you can start there.

To balance its budget, the Pajaro Valley Unified School District is considering eliminating the equivalent of 15 full-time counselors, all 13 mental health clinicians and dozens of intervention staff at its schools — at a time when youth suicide is one of the leading causes of death for people ages 10 to 24.

Men and boys make up nearly 80% of suicides in the United States. For LGBTQ youth, the picture is even more alarming. A national survey found nearly 39% seriously considered suicide in the past year, and 12% attempted it.

This crisis is not abstract. It is here. It is now. And it is local.

Young people rely most heavily on school-based support, so if you remove counselors and clinicians, you remove the adults best positioned to intervene when a student’s silence becomes dangerous.

And when we talk about violence, context matters. What we frame as “school safety” is often a reflection of untreated pain.

When a boy explodes, we see a threat. When a boy shuts down, we assume he is fine. We rarely name what both can be — symptoms of a system that teaches boys to swallow everything and then acts surprised when the pressure finally breaks.

I see this every week in my work as project director of a countywide stigma reduction campaign on the Central Coast.

Our youth ambassadors — many of them Black, brown or LGBTQ — lead a movement called Break the Stigma Not the Vibe. They design billboards, bus ads and schoolwide messaging rooted in language they needed when they were younger.

Their message is simple: Asking for help is strength. You don’t have to go through this alone. And you deserve to be seen before you collapse.

Their words will soon move appear on buses and corridors, reaching thousands of students who may not talk to a teacher or open up at home. Sometimes visibility is the intervention.

Now, imagine pairing that visibility with the removal of every trained mental health professional on campus. That is the contradiction this moment demands we confront. You cannot cut lifelines in a suicide crisis and call it a safety strategy.

School counselors and clinicians are not extras; they are core safety infrastructure. They are the adults who notice when a student stops being themselves, when grades slip, when friendships change or when a child who laughs easily is suddenly withdrawn.

We have to stop treating mental health as a side conversation. These cuts are happening in winter — when depression, isolation and suicidal ideation increase.

They are happening in communities still recovering from violence, and after the federal government removed the “Press 3”  LGBTQ-specific option on the national 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — a resource that has supported more than a million people. We are watching lifelines shrink at the moment young people need more of them.

California has invested heavily in youth behavioral health in recent years. But investment means little if school boards eliminate the positions that translate those state dollars into daily, life-saving support.

If we are serious about preventing suicide, especially among boys and historically marginalized youth, then counselors, clinicians and trusted adults must be the last thing on the chopping block — not the first.

I say this not just as someone who works in mental health, but as someone who has lost people I love to suicide. Sometimes the difference between survival and silence is a single adult who knows your name and notices when your light dims.

We have a choice in front of us. We can keep cutting lifelines and hope for the best. Or we can decide that in a youth suicide crisis, the most dangerous decision we can make is to remove the people who keep kids alive.

Ayo Banjo leads a stigma reduction campaign funded through the California Youth Behavioral Health Initiative. He wrote this commentary for CalMatters.