Governor Pritzker signing into law today a new state initiative.

The new law will require public schools to offer age-appropriate screenings to identify mental health concerns in students in the third through 12th grades.

It's our responsibility to ensure that young people have all the support that they need to get the help that they deserve.

The State Board of Education will work with the children's behavioral health experts

on what guidance should be given to school districts.

An annual check on sadness, worry, fear, and other problems

would help to identify young people who need to talk.

Opponents are skeptical of giving public schools that kind of authority.

It's a slippery slope.

School districts in the state are forcing children to go through mental health exams.

So I think it just opens a can of worms.

A can of worms indeed. Oh my God.

And this is law. This isn't even speculative. This has been signed.

Absolutely. It goes into effect in 2027, 2028 school year. There's still a little leeway there, and they're working out details of it.

First state to do this requires at least one annual mental health checkup. And what they're doing is the states are partnering with psychiatric

hospitals and schools to have like a centralized resource for helping these kids out. But as

you heard in that clip, they're, you know, again, we're medicalizing normal human emotions that

children have sadness, fear, worry. And you're putting it into a system that a psychiatric

system with a limited toolbox that has really been a pretty big failure. If you look at just

the numbers of kids with mental health, this is a disorder that's been going up for quite some

time now. And I want to put the irony of this is you have schools. The schools get this

power. The schools were the same people that supercharged the mental health disorders during COVID.

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