Pa. House bill would make mental health training mandatory for high school sports coaches
State Rep. Carol Kazeem (D-Delaware) speaks about the mental health of student athletes during a news conference Monday, May 20, 2024. With Kazeem, left to right, are Temple University student Mekkai Williams, East Stroudsburg University graduate student Magdelynn Wigoda, and Red Lion High School baseball coach Kevin Lawrence.(Capital-Star photo by Peter Hall)
A bill being considered by the Pennsylvania House of Representatives would make mental health training mandatory for high school sports coaches.
The bill would require the Pennsylvania Department of Health and Department of Education to review mental health resources and create a curriculum for school officials. It would also require that Pennsylvania schools send a list of mental health resources to students, parents and staff twice annually. It does not, however, provide a mechanism for funding these initiatives.
“We expect our school professionals to be there for our children,” said State Rep. Mary Jo Daley (D-Montgomery), the prime sponsor of the bill, at a Monday press conference in Harrisburg. “So with modern concerns facing us, it’s imperative that we keep touch with resources to give our teachers and coaches the ability to do their jobs.”
The House Education Committee approved the bill on May 7 in a 15-10 vote, with all Democrats and one Republican voting in favor. House Democrats plan to bring the bill up for a full floor vote “in the very near future,” according to Elizabeth Rementer, a spokesperson for the House Democrats.
State Rep. Jesse Topper (R-Bedford), the top Republican on the committee and an opponent of the measure, said that while a mental health crisis exists among students, a mandate that coaches go through training would be redundant.
“I think something that we always have to be careful of is adding more requirements when we already have shortages of coaches, of teachers, counselors,” Topper, himself a longtime high school football coach at Bedford High School, told the Capital-Star. “These are people who are already very invested in the mental health and well-being of their students and student-athletes.”
Another Republican on the panel expressed concern that the bill would grant broad authority to the secretary of health to determine whether parents should provide additional, unspecified information about their children’s mental health to the Department of Health. Topper additionally took issue with the law potentially being used to require Pennsylvania health and education authorities to produce mental health resources.
“These are very powerful bureaucracies that already have quite an amount of resources at their disposal,” Topper said. “If they see a need, they can do it.”
The original version of Daley’s bill was drafted by one of her summer interns, Mekkai Williams, a rising junior at Temple University and former student-athlete. Williams said that he experienced mental health struggles after suffering a knee injury while playing football during his junior year of high school.
“The physical pain was immense, but the mental anguish was worse,” Williams said at the press conference. “It wasn’t just the injury, it was a loss of identity, my team and everything I had worked so hard for.”
This was a sentiment shared by other current and former student-athletes at the press conference who had been sidelined by injuries.
Williams based the original version of the bill on a 2012 law which requires coaches to complete training courses on sudden cardiac arrest. Kevin Lawrence, a government teacher at Susquehannock High School and baseball coach who spoke in support of the bill at the press conference, compared providing mental health training to providing AED training. He framed himself and other coaches as “first responders” for mental health issues faced by youth.
“It’s very often that I know things before those kids’ parents do because they don’t want to tell mom and dad, but they will tell coach,” Lawrence said after the press conference.
The bill is the latest in a string of mental health-related bills approved by the House Education Committee this year. In a party-line vote in January, the committee approved a bill that would allow students to take up to three mental health days during the school year without a doctor’s note. The panel, again with only Democratic votes, also approved a bill in March that would, “require that schools develop a robust and comprehensive school counseling plan,” according to a memo introducing the measure.
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