A School Mental Health Provider Like Me: Links Between Peer Racial Harassment, Depressive Symptoms, and Race-Matched School Counselors and Psychologists

Legal scholarship and caselaw suggest that exposure to peer racial harassment in school (PRHS) harms student mental health and can derail students’ academic trajectories. Legal precedents call on schools to intervene to reduce student exposure to PRHS when feasible. However, little quantitative social science has explored the impacts of PRHS, explored whether exposure to PRHS varies by racial group, or identified structural factors that may protect against PRHS. We review data from over 350,000 California 6th–12th-grade students in nearly 1000 schools and estimate that exposure to PRHS is related to a twenty-percentage-point-higher depressive symptom rate for students of all racial groups, that Black students are significantly more likely to experience PRHS, that being in a school with a race-matched school counselor or psychologist is related to lower rates of both PRHS and depressive symptoms, but that White students are more likely than students of other backgrounds to be in a school where the mental health workforce reflects their racial background. The results suggest a need to reduce exposure to PRHS, particularly for Black students, and that expanding the diversity of school mental health providers could be a pathway to protecting students against PRHS and its attendant harms.