Student Quote by Randi Weingarten

Numbers do the moral heavy lifting here: “500 to 600” isn’t just a statistic, it’s an indictment. Randi Weingarten’s line works because it frames a bureaucratic reality as an ethical failure, compressing a sprawling policy problem into an image anyone can grasp: one adult, hundreds of kids, and the quiet impossibility of meaningfully knowing them. It’s not an abstract complaint about “underfunding.” It’s a workload so absurd it turns the very idea of counseling into a procedural fiction.

Weingarten, a prominent U.S. teachers’ union leader, is speaking in the key of public persuasion. The repetition of “We don’t have enough” shifts blame away from individual counselors and onto the system that sets them up to fail. That’s the subtext: if a student falls through the cracks, it’s not because educators didn’t care; it’s because the institution rationed care until it became unrecognizable.

The phrase “help the children” is deliberately plain, almost civics-textbook simple. That simplicity is strategic. It invites listeners across political lines to agree on the endpoint (kids need help) before they start fighting about the means (budgets, staffing formulas, mental health services, accountability). In a moment when schools are asked to be learning centers, social service hubs, and mental health triage units all at once, the quote draws a hard boundary: you can’t keep adding responsibilities while starving the people assigned to carry them. The caseload figure becomes a translation device, turning policy into a gut-level sense of neglect.