AUSTIN (KXAN) – At a Tuesday meeting, a Texas council that oversees mental health care professionals in the state got rid of certain education requirements for practitioners related to cultural diversity training.
The Texas Behavioral Health Executive Council oversees the regulation of social work practice and behavioral health care. It is comprised of members from four other state mental health care boards. Those boards all recently voted in favor of changing the language in the requirements for continuing education.
“[Diversity training] is really kind of the foundation that our profession is based on, or should be based on,” said Melody Marin, a licensed clinical psychologist. “It’s the foundation of what we do – to provide competent and ethical care to people in our communities. It’s very central to why most of us went into this profession.”
Marin was one of several mental health care professionals who spoke Tuesday in opposition to the rule change. Despite an outsized proportion of practitioners speaking against it, the council unanimously decided to change the language.
The council changed the education requirement from three hours of training in cultural diversity to three “hours designed to ensure competency when providing services to a distinct population, defined as a group of people who share a common attribute, trait, or defining characteristic of the licensee’s choice,” according to council documents.
Nearly 1,500 people signed a Change.org petition before the vote in hopes of persuading the Texas Behavioral Health Executive Council to keep the language.
“It’s our responsibility to provide ethically competent care to anyone we serve,” Marin said. “To target the [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] of it all, kind of takes away from that ethical responsibility we have to serve everyone competently,” Marin said.
Robert Romig, the deputy executive director of the council, said in a January board meeting that the original plan to include the language was due to “its recognition that as the state grows larger and larger and becomes more and more diverse, that it is important for licensed professionals to be trained [and] develop their competency,” he said to the Texas State Board of Examiners of Professional Counselors.
In explaining the reason why they felt the change necessary, he said some licensed professionals thought the board “was requiring education in a certain world viewpoint, using terms like ‘woke’.”
Romig said the goal of the language change was to make the training requirements more specific to the practitioner.
“It is about the licensee being competent when folks walk in their door,” he said. “That continues to be the goal of the board.”
This decision follows Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s February executive order that directed all Texas state agencies to eliminate any forms of DEI policies.
