Mental health centers in limbo

Good morning!

Back in April, Lilo Stainton reported on state officials holding a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new mental health crisis center in Newark.

It was the first of five planned centers in New Jersey, places where people in mental health crisis could drop in, receive some help, and decompress without having to go to an ER.

But the Newark center never actually opened — and now the fate of all five centers is up in the air because the state did not put enough funding to operate them in the budget they finalized last month.

The centers are the third and final part of a three-prong state effort to address mental health issues. The crisis hotline is up and running and mobile crisis units are operational, but the centers remained closed or unfinished.

“How do you create a system but leave the most important part of it out?” said Amie Del Sordo with Care Plus NJ, the organization behind the planned Paramus location.

Read more from Lilo Stainton.

Suicide: Something alarming is happening with the nation’s preteens. The number of preteens — ages 8 to 12 — who died by suicide in the U.S. last year was 194, the most since at least 2001, according to preliminary data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since 2008, the rate of preteen suicide has increased by an average of 8.2% annually, according to researchers at the National Institutes of Health.

Health benefits: A New Jersey commission tasked with setting health rates for school workers for 2027 punted Monday and said it would make its final decision next month. Premiums are expected to rise by as much as 34%, which has teachers union officials understandably nervous.  “We are facing a real crisis here,” Steve Beatty, president of statewide teachers union the New Jersey Education Association, told the commission.

Trump: The Trump administration went to the U.S. Supreme Court Monday after a federal appeals court blocked President Donald Trump’s broad March 31 executive order restricting vote-by-mail. The executive order “directs unprecedented levels of involvement by federal officials in how states administer elections,” two Biden-appointed appeals judges wrote in their Saturday order.

Feds: A very funny story I missed last week from Fariha Rahman at City & State, who reports that a group of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers workers are protesting the Trump administration’s plan to move their offices from New York City to — gasp! — New Jersey. They say they’ll quit if they have to add a PATH ride to their daily commute, which, fair.