The school social worker’s job in 1913 was to check tenements and make sure children were in their seats; today it is to disrupt the systems that keep them out. The episode traces that change decade by decade — the Depression shifting the work toward food and shelter, the postwar years turning it inward toward students’ psychology, the 1960s pushing it back outward toward racism and neglect, and COVID-19 returning it to food insufficiency and housing — alongside the legal record that forced it: Brown v. Board, Section 504, PL 94-142 and its evolution into IDEA, and No Child Left Behind, which tied federal funding to test scores and made removing socioeconomic barriers a matter of institutional survival. The second half turns to the chapter’s theory, working through the systems approach, the ecological perspective, and the strengths perspective, pausing on whether a strengths focus risks minimizing systemic trauma, and closing on positionality.