Addressing Mental Health in the Return to School

With the imminent return to campus, several school systems have eliminated the remote learning option entirely for the 2021-2022 school year in order to maximize in-person learning and reduce last year’s learning loss. However, the rise of the delta variant and inconsistency in state governance has bred confusion across school districts regarding how to best navigate classroom learning. Most school-aged children remain ineligible for vaccination, and some states have gone as far as banning mask mandates in schools entirely – a policy failure in itself – putting into question the physical safety of both students and educators this fall. Despite such logistical considerations for the year ahead, another foreboding questions looms: how do schools address the emotional trauma and social setbacks resulting from the turbulent, unconventional 2020-21 school year?

Consider the social skills required for an elementary schooler to be successful in a traditional classroom.  Children do not need to stand up and find a partner in a remote world when they can just be placed in a breakout room, nor do they need to wait for an appropriate time to raise a hand to go to the bathroom when they can turn their camera off. In reality, thousands of students were unable to join online class due to insufficient technology or lacked the engagement necessary to make an online classroom function for them. If students were in fourth grade the last time they had a normal classroom experience, they will now be entering sixth grade – middle school in many cases – and tolerance for an inability to engage appropriately will be commensurately lower.

Research shows that the youth are feeling the strain of their year online as much as adults. A McKinsey & Company study found widespread rising levels of anxiety and depression due the pandemic among adults, and a number of additional studies have found the same to be true for school-aged kids. Loss of motivation and inability to stay organized led to increased rates of school failure last year, especially in high school students who have had to juggle home responsibilities, such as caring for younger siblings, on top of a full course load during remote learning. To address mental health issues, in New York City, Mayor Bill DeBlasio has proposed hiring 500 social workers for public schools this year in order to be prepared for students’ pandemic-induced trauma. This is barely a start, given that there are around 1,700 public schools in NYC.

New York is not alone; in La Crosse, Wisconsin, schools have partnered with the local health system to provide free counseling and mental health services to students and families. In fact, schools across the country are staffing up on counselors, or even getting their first mental health professionals. Meanwhile, many individual teachers have taken initiative to incorporate social-emotional learning aspects into their daily lessons, though there is little actual pending legislation intent on spreading this practice across the nation. A more consistent and larger-scale focus on social-emotional well-being integrated into classroom instruction has been shown to be effective in teaching skills such digital responsibility and navigating uncertainty to students, and any moves in this direction should be encouraged legislatively.

The issue of equity has moved front and center too, as students with social or academic struggles before the pandemic are likely to have those same challenges exacerbated, rendering the achievement gap wider than ever. Funding remains limited, however, and extra support for students can have a high price tag. This leads to an unfortunate conundrum: when districts prioritize social-emotional learning by hiring social workers, they are often then unable to hire more reading specialists or interventionists to catch students up to grade level. Policies that can combine the two aims should be investigated further.

Addressing both social as well as academic learning losses is crucial, yet due to the localization of schooling in the United States, any solutions will likely be patchwork. To deal with patchwork policy shifts, implementation must focus on student mental health and academics while also considering the lifeblood of schools: teachers. To close academic gaps and restore a sense of safety and community in schools, educators must be adequately trained. Disparate funding due to the localization of schooling led to nationwide differences in educational attainment before the pandemic, so it is up to those same local governments to determine the best course of action for their districts to fulfill the promise of public education in the United States: to provide a sufficient education to all students, so that they can become contributing members of our society and our nation’s future leaders.