I think your viewpoint invites wider questions on how the problems in such environments ought to be solved and what such environments ought to look like. In a

I think your viewpoint invites wider questions on how the problems in such environments ought to be solved and what such environments ought to look like. In a word, what's lacking from these communities is, in a couple of words, stability and security. Some children have parents who are either homeless or constantly on the verge of homelessness; some children have parents who have difficulty putting food on the table; some children come from households with absent or abusive parents. How, exactly, would hiring more social workers for schools solve this problem? Ought social workers be able to go into childrens' homes and intervene in some way? Put food on the table, pay the parents' past-due bills, catch abusers red-handed and put a stop to them? I'm not so sure this is the answer, because apart from the fact that doing so falls somewhere on the spectrum between absurd and enablement, in extreme cases, society already removes children from abusive homes to put them in foster care. And it doesn't seem to me like the numbers and research bear out about outcomes for fostered children being on par with children from more privileged backgrounds. Instead, funding needs to be directed towards stabilizing the parents' environment. That means more public works projects (for stable employment), more affordable apartments (for stable housing), longer school days with funding for post-schoolday extracurriculars and funding for free daycare for younger children (so that parents can stay at work while their children are looked after), exchanging prosecution for funded treatment for drug addicts. When the parents have a stable environment, then the child has a stable environment.