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By Nicole Asbury Washington Post April 21 2022
The Montgomery County Council is boosting funding for services offered to students in the county amid an escalating mental health crisis among children during the coronavirus pandemic.
The $8 million investment wouldinclude $2 million toward immediatelyestablishinginterim wellness centers at county high schools in existing space and relocatable classrooms, county officials said. More permanent facilities would be built at each high school over a five-year period.
The fundingpackage alsoallocates $3 million for mental health programming and $3 million for portable classrooms.
‘A cry for help’: CDC warns of a steep decline in teen mental health
Montgomery is one of many school systems across the country that has witnessed exacerbated mental health challenges among its student population. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned of the accelerating mental health crisis among youths in a report last month. A survey by the CDC found that 4 in 10 teenagers reported feeling “persistently sad or hopeless,” and 1 in 5 said they have contemplated suicide. And in October, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health, noting soaring rates of depression, anxiety, trauma, loneliness and suicidal thoughts.
Northwood, Gaithersburg, Watkins Mill, Wheaton and Seneca Valley high schools already have school-based wellness centers. A sixth is being built at Kennedy High School.
Community members testified at a council meetingTuesday that the need for additional resources in schools was urgent.
“The few centers that we have are not enough,” Carmen Centeno, who works at Northwood High’s wellness center, told the council in Spanish through an interpreter. “The challenges that young people and their families are facing today are countless. We must act now before it’s too late.”
Back to school has brought guns, fighting and acting out
Identity, a Rockville-based nonprofit organization, runs four of the five school-based wellness centers.
The centers offer medical care, mental health and social services to students and their families. Each center also focuses on positive youth development, a county initiative that aims to curb violence and gang activity and support families that may have been exposed to complex trauma.
Identity Executive Director Diego Uriburu said in an interview that there are tremendous mental health needs everywhere. The wellness centers have an advantage, he said, because they serve both students and their family members, who may also be struggling. The wellness centers should also help elementary-age students and middle-schoolers, he said.
“These efforts are not just to help young people heal; it also has other benefits,” he said. Citing the increase in fighting and bullying that has been reported in schools, Uriburu said that having the system make a more robust effort on mental health could help with those issues, he said.
Council member NancyNavarro (D-District 4) spearheaded the funding effort. It was supported by the Montgomery County Board of Education and Superintendent Monifa B. McKnight, who over the past several months have heard testimony from students pushing for additional mental health support services after the pandemic kept many of them in virtual learning and away from their peers for almost two years.
McKnight has pledged to direct additional resources toward mental health services in schools. In a letter to parents and other community membersTuesday, McKnight wrote that school leaders were working on other initiatives including hiring and placing more social workers in high schools and exploring ways to add counselors and psychologists.11 CommentsGift Article
By Petula Dvorak Washington Post Apri 1st 2022
The kids have been saying itthroughout the pandemic: They’re not okay.
“I was going through a rough phase with friends and had lost a loved one,” said Elizabeth Abatan, a high school senior in D.C. who wants to become an orthopedic surgeon.
“I fell behind in my school work and started to lose interest in school,” said Daniela Mendez Castro, a D.C. 16-year-old who wants to be a pediatrician.
“High school students are in a mental health crisis,” said Julissa Canales, another D.C. 16-year-old. She wants to be a therapist.
But these very D.C. teens on Monday weren’t posting on social media or complaining to their friends. They had gone to a virtual D.C. Council budget hearing, sitting before a government body, to ask for help.
And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that nearly all the students who spoke or submitted testimony want to do the work — taking care of others — that the adults aren’t doing well today.
“Students are taking the lead on addressing mental health,” Alynah King, a student at Wilson High School, saidat the hearing. “Not the adults.”
For teens whose home lives are already tough, staying home can be devastating
A few days later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report that confirmed to Americans what they had known all along in their classrooms, at their dinner tables and in their heads: Our children are in serious trouble. In the grips of the pandemic last year, 1 out of every 5 American teens that the CDC spoke to had considered suicide. Forty percent said they felt “persistently sad or hopeless.”
“These data echo a cry for help,” said Debra Houry, a deputy director at the CDC. “The covid-19 pandemic has created traumatic stressors that have the potential to further erode students’ mental well-being.”
It’s “a national emergency,” the American Academy of Pediatrics declared last fall.
That’s what the kids in D.C. said on Monday, too, in the middle of an annual budget process for the public school system that had nearly 250 witnesses submitting testimony on behalf of their passion, their profession or their pet projects: more baseball fields, a food-education program, fixing thefilthy bathrooms in one of the biggest high schools in the city.
And students from across the city who work with the Young Women’s Project, a nonprofit that helps kids find power in their voices, wrote impassioned arguments for more robust and effective mental health programs in all D.C. schools.
“My school doesn’t provide many mental health resources and does not share much information about what they do have,” said Noemie Durand, 17, a junior at BASIS. “It’s baffling and incredibly frustrating that the current health and school systems create so many obstacles to receiving that help.”
Durand said she, like many of her peers, suffered during the pandemic.
“The combination of stress from school, isolation from friends, and an extremely toxic relationship and eventual breakup led to destructive burnout and situational depression for most of my 10th-grade year,” she said. But she has parents with the money and means to get her help. Therapy pulled her out of her depression, she said. When she returned to school, she saw the same issues in peers all around her who didn’t know how to get help.
No surprise: She wants to study psychology.
She’ll have no trouble finding work — there’s a startling shortage of mental health workers in America right now. And that doesn’t bode well for the plan that D.C. Public Schools proposed to help students.
The proposed budget for the 2023 fiscal year is big, up to $2.2 billion from last year’s $2 billion. And mental health services have a starring role, making sure that licensed therapists or psychologists from the Department of Behavioral Health are on all 216public school campuses.
Taking a mental health day is legit. Just ask the kids.
Staffing up isn’t going to be easy.
“Everybody knows that, around the country, there are really not sufficient numbers of [licensed social workers] to serve in various capacities,” the agency’s director, Barbara J. Bazron, told The Washington Post’s Perry Stein. “We are also working closely at getting more people in our pipeline through our internship programs and so forth. We are doing some of the same things that people around the country are doing.”
Good plan, adults. For the future.
But kids need help now.
“Many students don’t realize that their stress levels are rising until they have a panic attack,” said Abatan, a student at McKinley Tech High School. “They need to know what to do in the moment before they are overwhelmed to the point of adding more mental harm to themselves.”
The students proposed a $5 million initiative to create after-school mental health programs in 125 schools.
And they explained that while many schools do have resources, kids don’t know about them, are disconnected from them or are embarrassed to use them.
“At my school, you usually have to go to a teacher first to get help from a therapist,” Canales, a student at Columbia Heights Educational Campus, said in her testimony. “This presents a problem because students have to share why they need to see a therapist and may not feel comfortable sharing that with a teacher.”
Canales’s goal of becoming a therapist one day is a good one.
Let’s hope we can get it right sooner, though.
By Moriah BalingitMarch 31, 2022 at 1:00 p.m. EDT Washington Post
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning of an accelerating mental health crisis among adolescents, with more than 4 in 10 teens reporting that they feel “persistently sad or hopeless,” and 1 in 5 saying they have contemplated suicide, according to the results of a survey published Thursday.
“These data echo a cry for help,” said Debra Houry, a deputy director at the CDC. “The COVID-19 pandemic has created traumatic stressors that have the potential to further erode students’ mental well-being.”
The findings draw on a survey of a nationally representative sample of 7,700 teens conducted in the first six months of 2021, when they were in the midst of their first full pandemic school year. They were questioned on a range of topics, including their mental health, alcohol and drug use, and whether they had encountered violence at home or at school. They were also asked about whether they had encountered racism.
Although young people were spared the brunt of the virus — falling ill and dying at much lower rates than older people — they might still pay a steep price for the pandemic, having come of age while weathering isolation, uncertainty, economic turmoil and, for many, grief.
In a news conference, Kathleen A. Ethier, head of the CDC’s division of adolescent and school health, said the survey results underscored the vulnerability of certain students, including LGBTQ youth and students who reported being treated unfairly because of their race. And female students are far worse off than their male peers.
“All students were impacted by the pandemic, but not all students were impacted equally,” Ethier said.
‘This is a crisis’: Tens of thousands of children affected by pandemic-related deaths of parents
It’s not the first time officials have warned of a mental health crisis among teens. In October, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health, saying that its members were “caring for young people with soaring rates of depression, anxiety, trauma, loneliness, and suicidality that will have lasting impacts on them, their families, and their communities.”
In December, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued an advisory on protecting youth mental health.
“The pandemic era’s unfathomable number of deaths, pervasive sense of fear, economic instability, and forced physical distancing from loved ones, friends, and communities have exacerbated the unprecedented stresses young people already faced,” Murthy wrote. “It would be a tragedy if we beat back one public health crisis only to allow another to grow in its place.”
The CDC survey paints a portrait of a generation reeling from the pandemic, grappling with food insecurity, academic struggles, poor health and abuse at home. Nearly 30 percent of the teens surveyed said a parent or other adult in their home lost work during the pandemic, and a quarter struggled with hunger. Two-thirds said they had difficulty with schoolwork.
But the survey also offers hope, finding that teens who feel connected at school report much lower rates of poor health. The finding calls attention to the critical role schools can play in a student’s mental health.
Ethier said the findings add to a body of research that show that feeling connected at school can be “a protective factor” for students. Schools can deliberately foster connectedness in a number of ways, including instructing teachers on how to better manage classrooms, to facilitating clubs for students and ensuring that LGBTQ students feel welcome. Such steps can help all students — and not just the most vulnerable — do better, she said.
“When you make schools less toxic for the most vulnerable students, all students benefit — and the converse is also true,” Ethier said.
Katelyn Chi, a 17-year-old junior at Rowland High School in Rowland Heights, Calif., said her school’s Peer Counseling Club was key to helping her get through last school year, which was entirely virtual. At the beginning of each online club meeting, she and other members filled out a Google form that simply asked them how they were doing. The forms were viewed by the club’s president, who checked in with her whenever she indicated she felt down.
“It really helped,” Chi said. “I received support and validation.”
Concerns about adolescent mental health were rising before the pandemic: Teens had been reporting poor mental health at higher rates. Between 2009 and 2019, the percentage of teens who reported having “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 37 percent. In 2021, the figure rose to 44 percent.
For months, he helped his son keep suicidal thoughts at bay. Then came the pandemic.
The survey results also underscore the particular vulnerability of LGBTQ students, who reported higher rates of suicide attempts and poor mental health. Nearly half of gay, lesbian and bisexual teens said they had contemplated suicide during the pandemic, compared with 14 percent of their heterosexual peers.
Girls, too, reported faring worse than boys. They were twice as likely to report poor mental health. More than 1 in 4 girls reported that they had seriously contemplated attempting suicide during the pandemic, twice the rate of boys. They also reported higher rates of drinking and tobacco use than boys.
And, for the first time, the CDC asked teens whether they believed that they had ever been treated unfairly or badly at school because of their race or ethnicity. Asian American students reported the highest levels of racist encounters, with 64 percent answering affirmatively, followed by Black students and multiracial students, about 55 percent of whom reported racism. Students who said they had encountered racism at school reported higher rates of poor mental health and were more likely to report having a physical, mental or emotional problem that made it difficult for them to concentrate.
The study also shed light on household stresses. One in 10 teens reported being physically abused at home, and more than half reported emotional abuse, including being insulted, put down or sworn at.
The survey also revealed that students who felt connected at school fared far better than those who did not. Teens who said they felt “close to people at school” were far less likely to report having attempted or thought about attempting suicide, and they were far less likely to report poor mental health than those who did not feel connected at school. The same held true for teens who felt connected virtually to friends, family members and clubs.
What happened to America’s teens when coronavirus disrupted high school?
“Comprehensive strategies that improve connections with others at home, in the community, and at school might foster improved mental health among youths during and after the pandemic,” the report concluded.
Chi said she wishes policymakers could take adolescent mental health more seriously. She sometimes feels like people her age are dismissed because of their age.
“I’d like to ask them to provide us with a lot of more resources and a lot more empathy on what we’re going through,” Chi said, adding that her school delayed the opening of a much-needed student wellness center this year. “With things so hard right now, it’s hard to see the future as something better.”
John Gies, the principal of Shelby High School in Shelby, Ohio, said he noticed a rise in the number of his students who were “struggling.” Sometimes, they would not make eye contact. Other times, students without previous disciplinary issues acted out and ended up in his office.
So he used some of the money the school received from the American Rescue Plan to connect more students with counseling, and created an arrangement to bring counselors from a local counseling center to school several times a week. The school has created a support group for grieving students and for a cohort of freshmen who educators worry could fall through the cracks.
“The mental health struggle had been there” before the pandemic, Gies said. “The pandemic really brought it to the surface and made it actually a little bit worse.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/03/31/student-mental-health-decline-cdc/
A beautiful day in New York City isn’t just a day when the sun shines and Central Park is sky blue meeting lawn green, shining out in all its glory. It is also a day when New York hotel staff are happy to see you, and do their best to accommodate your needs, like checking in early or securely storing your baggage if you can’t.
When AmeriCorps Project CHANGE arrived last Friday, we were treated to an abundance of the first blessing, a magnificent day in Central Park, flowers blooming, happy people walking, biking, running. On the second score, we got the opposite- a bravura performance from the Hotel staff who could not do enough to frustrate, delay and confuse. If one wanted to experience New York City in all its extremes, the good, the bad, the ugly, we got it in the first New York hour. It is not what we signed on for, but it is what one can expect anytime in NYC and one has to be ready.
The manager- she could not cope with 11 rooms being booked through Expedia. “Why didn’t you book directly with us?” There was $200+ per room reason to use Expedia, but we didn’t tell her that. Working from a crammed space that looked like an annex to an Amazon storage facility, with parcels stacked everywhere, she asked us to give her the 11 separate 14 number booking references, which she laboriously wrote down on her notebook, and I mean lab-or-ious-ly.
23BB6745987745
439988JHHG4557
67934087GFRER3
23BB6745987746
23BB6745987747
23BB6745987748
23BB6745987749
23BB6745987750
23BB6745987751
23BB6745987752
23BB6745987753
She breathed out a sigh for each one, a sigh that got deeper and deeper until I thought by 7753, the 11th registration, she might have sighed herself out and needed CPR.
We had sent these same registrations to the manager two weeks before, after we had stayed at the hotel in person to ensure that there were going to be no problems. Two weeks back, the head manager gave us all assurances that they had all they needed. Show up two weeks later and it was as if our earlier planning trip was a total waste of time. It was. The Hotel was there to frustrate, diss and deceive and in that, they could not do enough.
Six rooms were ready, not 11, so rather than split the team, we decided to come back later when all rooms were prepared. When we did return, a different staff person-(only one person on duty) was on the phone taking a complaint from another unhappy customer who was demanding her money back. This staff person was writing a verbatim report of all that went wrong for someone else. “You kept us waiting” I thought she was writing down!
Despite 15 people suddenly showing up at her desk, she did her best to ignore us. When finally we managed to get some attention, she told us that all our rooms were cancelled because someone had come in and booked 10 rooms earlier in the day, and that we had to go back to the end of the line as far as having rooms ready. When we told her that we booked them in November 2021, she didn’t care. She was going to make us wait till after 5pm, and that was that. Check-In time was 3pm and seemed to be fine for any other guests who arrived while we were there. But it was not called La Quinta ( after 5 in Spanish) for nothing.
The luggage storage facility was the crawl space beside the front door, and any space out from that, all in public view and not secure at all. Some of our team were not happy to leave their bags so exposed, so another member, Dawn, stepped up to say she would stay because she had work to do and she would mind the bags for us. No Central Park sun for her.
So began our weekend in NYC. Central Park was perfect. The Imagine circle off 72nd street as always, was full of singers and artists keeping alive the legacy of John Lennon. “Imagine there’s no heaven,” Imagine NYC as the kindest place in the world. Imagine Early Check-ins. I’ll say you are a dreamer.
The team dinner at Harvest Kitchen was another highlight, where the food was amazing and the welcome and efficiency of the staff such a total contrast to the Hotel. The manager, Igor, was a chef himself and a long time New Yorker who made you want to come back. The team explored the night away in Times Square and good ice cream and good banter, ready for the next day of walking across Brooklyn Bridge and seeing Lion King. What was not to like?
New York is a great and fun place to visit and while it can bring out the best, it can often bring out the worst. If someone goes with a hunger to enjoy, and a curiosity to explore, and not let New York entitlement or cynicism or incompetence get you down, then it is always going to be fun.
But if you are sighing all the way instead of singing all the way, it’s best to stay home. New York doesn’t need more disgruntled, unhappy people. They work hotel desks. It doesn’t have to be that way, but enjoyment in the Big Apple, especially with a team of 20 people is going to take some generosity of spirit and stoic patience to ensure that no one misses out, that people are not left waiting, and that everyone’s interests are fairly accommodated. “Everyone out for themselves,” the stereotypical New York frame of mind of “Me Me Me’ will not work. To enjoy New York, the message is don’t be a New Yorker.
That is not what AmeriCorps is about and that is not why we visit NYC. Next time we visit, we will be closely checking vaccination forms ( some forgot) and also asking members for their license to enjoy, to make sure it is renewed and up to date before they come.
There is a song “If you go to San Francisco, wear a flower in your hair.” Perhaps New York needs a song too. Not “New York New York” and its cringeworthy “Top of the List, King of the Hill” arrogance , but try this, “if you are going to New York City, remember- come singing, not sighing.” Sinatra could sing that as a tribute to the poor manager who we clearly overburdened with our welcome. But she need not worry. We will not be back at that place anytime soon.
Many Thanks to Mary and Carl and Mary and Deborah, and Igor and Harvest Kitchen and Simba and John Roebling and Elton John and Amtrak. No thanks to the La Quinta Inn & Estates by Wyndham Central Park and their unmanagement team.
By Matt Richtel
Photographs by Annie Flanagan
Matt Richtel spent more than a year interviewing adolescents and their families for this series on the mental health crisis.Published April 23, 2022Updated April 26, 2022Editors’ Note:This article examines the increase in anxiety, depression, self harm and suicide among U.S. adolescents. Parents and teenagers dealing with these issues can find resources here.
One evening last April, an anxious and free-spirited 13-year-old girl in suburban Minneapolis sprang furious from a chair in the living room and ran from the house — out a sliding door, across the patio, through the backyard and into the woods.
Moments earlier, the girl’s mother, Linda, had stolen a look at her daughter’s smartphone. The teenager, incensed by the intrusion, had grabbed the phone and fled. (The adolescent is being identified by an initial, M, and the parents by first name only, to protect the family’s privacy.)
Linda was alarmed by photos she had seen on the phone. Some showed blood on M’s ankles from intentional self-harm. Others were close-ups of M’s romantic obsession, the anime character Genocide Jack — a brunette girl with a long red tongue who, in a video series, kills high school classmates with scissors.
In the preceding two years, Linda had watched M spiral downward: severe depression, self-harm, a suicide attempt. Now, she followed M into the woods, frantic. “Please tell me where u r,” she texted. “I’m not mad.”
American adolescence is undergoing a drastic change. Three decades ago, the gravest public health threats to teenagers in the United States came from binge drinking, drunken driving, teenage pregnancy and smoking. These have since fallen sharply, replaced by a new public health concern: soaring rates of mental health disorders.
In 2019, 13 percent of adolescents reported having a major depressive episode, a 60 percent increase from 2007. Emergency room visits by children and adolescents in that period also rose sharply for anxiety, mood disorders and self-harm. And for people ages 10 to 24, suicide rates, stable from 2000 to 2007, leaped nearly 60 percent by 2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The decline in mental health among teenagers was intensified by the Covid pandemic but predated it, spanning racial and ethnic groups, urban and rural areas and the socioeconomic divide. In December, in a rare public advisory, the U.S. surgeon general warned of a “devastating” mental health crisis among adolescents. Numerous hospital and doctor groups have called it a national emergency, citing rising levels of mental illness, a severe shortage of therapists and treatment options, and insufficient research to explain the trend.
“Young people are more educated; less likely to get pregnant, use drugs; less likely to die of accident or injury,” said Candice Odgers, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine. “By many markers, kids are doing fantastic and thriving. But there are these really important trends in anxiety, depression and suicide that stop us in our tracks.”
“We need to figure it out,” she said. “Because it’s life or death for these kids.”
The crisis is often attributed to the rise of social media, but solid data on the issue is limited, the findings are nuanced and often contradictory and some adolescents appear to be more vulnerable than others to the effects of screen time. Federal research shows that teenagers as a group are also getting less sleep and exercise and spending less in-person time with friends — all crucial for healthy development — at a period in life when it is typical to test boundaries and explore one’s identity. The combined result for some adolescents is a kind of cognitive implosion: anxiety, depression, compulsive behaviors, self-harm and even suicide.
This surge has raised vexing questions. Are these issues inherent to adolescence that merely went unrecognized before — or are they being overdiagnosed now? Historical comparisons are difficult, as some data around certain issues, like teen anxiety and depression, began to be collected relatively recently. But the rising rates of emergency-room visits for suicide and self-harm leave little doubt that the physical nature of the threat has changed significantly.
As M descended, Linda and her husband realized they were part of an unenviable club: bewildered parents of an adolescent in profound distress. Linda talked with parents of other struggling teenagers; not long before the night M fled into the forest, Linda was jolted by the news that a local girl had died by suicide.
“You have no control over what they’re thinking,” Linda said. “I just want to tell people what can happen.”
M is one of dozens of teenagers who spoke to The New York Times for a yearlong project exploring the changing nature of adolescence in the United States. The Times was given permission by M and the family to speak with M’s school counselor; M’s medical records were shared with The Times and, with the family’s permission, reviewed by outside experts not involved in M’s care.
“This is a typical outpatient,” said Emily Pluhar, a child and adolescent psychologist at Harvard University, describing M as “an internalizer.”
M, now 14, is tall, with red hair and blue eyes, and has a younger sister and older half brother. By turns shy and outspoken, M has thought extensively about pronouns and currently prefers “they.” At the beginning of seventh grade, M also asked to be called by the name of a popular Japanese anime character, whose first name starts with M. “I think we’re similar in that she’s, like, quiet and smart and plays electric bass, and I really like bass and guitars,” M said.
When M was 4, a psychologist the family consulted to assess M’s school readiness concluded that their “intellectual ability is in the very superior range,” according to the report. M enrolled in kindergarten as one of the younger class members.
At 10, M got a smartphone. Linda and her husband, Tony, both of whom had busy work schedules, worried that the device might lead to heavy screen time, but they felt it was necessary to stay in touch. At 11, M hit another adolescent milestone: puberty.
Over the last century, the age of puberty onset has dropped markedly for girls, to 12 years old today from 14 years old in 1990; the age of onset for boys has followed a similar path. Experts say this shift probably now plays a role in the adolescent mental health crisis, although it is just one of many factors that researchers are still working to understand.
When puberty hits, the brain becomes hypersensitive to social and hierarchical information, even as media flood it with opportunities to explore one’s identity and gauge self-worth. Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, said that ability to maturely grapple with the resulting questions — Who am I? Who are my friends? Where do I fit in? — typically lags behind.
The falling age of puberty, he said, has created a “widening gap” between incoming stimulation and what the young brain can process:
“They’re being exposed to this deluge at a much earlier age.”
M’s first hint of trouble came in sixth grade, with challenges focusing in class. The school called a meeting with M’s parents. One teacher suggested testing M for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but Linda and Tony were skeptical. The number of A.D.H.D. diagnoses in the United States rose 39 percent from 2003 to 2016, according to the C.D.C., and M’s parents, both scientists in biomedical fields, were concerned that consulting an A.D.H.D. specialist would tilt the scales toward that diagnosis.
Instead, Linda tried to help M stay organized with an app that parents and students used to track assignments, test scores and grades. M felt put under a microscope.
“She would say, ‘Can you bring me your iPad so we can check Schoology?’” M recalled about Linda. “I would literally have an anxiety attack because I was so scared.”
By the fall of 2019 — seventh grade — M was struggling socially, too. A close friend got popular, while M often came home from school and got into bed. “I felt like a plus one,” M said. “I just wanted to be unconscious.” Other times, M said, “I just sat in my room and cried.”
The behavior seemed alien to Tony, who had lived a different childhood. As an adolescent in Vermont in the 1980s, he fished and played outdoors. By 15, he had his first serious girlfriend; in 1990, the summer before their senior year, he got her pregnant. Their son was born that December, and Tony and the mother shared custody.
Times have changed. Federal research shows that 38 percent of high-school-age teenagers report having had sex at least once, compared with roughly 50 percent in 1990. The teen birthrate has plummeted.
So has cigarette and alcohol use. In 2019, 4 percent of high school seniors reported having a cigarette in the last 30 days, down from 26.5 percent in 1997. Alcohol use by high schoolers hit 30-year lows at the same time. Use of OxyContin and other illicit drugs among high schoolers is down sharply over the last 20 years. Vaping of both nicotine and marijuana has risen in recent years, although both dropped sharply during the pandemic.
Rates of smoking, drugs, alcohol and sex declined among high school students over the last decade, continuing trends that started over two decades ago.
Experts cite multiple factors: public awareness campaigns, antismoking laws, parental oversight and a changing social lifestyle that is no longer strictly in-person.
Dr. Nora Volkow, director for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, described drug and alcohol use as “very much of a group dynamic.” She added: “To the extent that kids are not in the same place, one would expect a decrease in the behavior.”
In the spring of 2020, M retreated further. Bewildered by online classes, M lied about participating, felt guilty and watched YouTube instead, devouring an anime series called “Danganronpa.” It is set in a high school where students learn from the evil headmaster, a bear, that the only way to graduate is to kill a peer.
M became enamored of one of the characters, Genocide Jack (sometimes known as Genocide Jill), who is described on one fan site as a witty “murderous fiend” who “kills handsome men” using scissors.
One night after dinner, M was upstairs and used scissors to cut both ankles. “I was mad at myself for not doing homework,” M said. “I was kind of thinking, ‘Oh, the pain feels good,’ like it was better than being stressed.” M couldn’t recall where the idea came from: “I wanted to hurt myself with anything.”
M’s parents noticed superficial scratches on M’s thighs that resembled cuts but did not raise the subject. Linda worried about the screen time but “it was pandemic,” she said.
When school ended for summer break, M’s mood improved. Over the summer, M discovered the mobile version of the “Danganronpa” video game and how to override the parental screen limits. M played all day.
“I was in front of my screen staring at Jack,” M said. “Then I was playing ‘Trigger Happy Havoc,’ and I was, like, more in love.”
“I was kind of just lonely,” M said. M fantasized about the future with Jack: “I’d want her to almost kill me but not, and then we could spend the rest of our lives together.”
An obsession with a virtual character is not uncommon, experts said. “This is a kid who is a bit lonely, a bit caught up in these narratives,” said Nick Allen, a psychologist at the University of Oregon. “There’s nothing new in coming up with stuff that freaks out their parents.”
Nonetheless, he added, “extremely powerful” online experiences like these can encourage users to think, “That is going to be my identity, my sense of the future, my sense of where I belong socially,” at a time when one’s identity is a work in progress.
Dr. Pluhar of Harvard noted that “the challenge and the progress” of modern adolescence “is there are so many types of identity” — more choices and possibilities, which in turn could be overwhelming. Among the factors shaping mental health, Dr. Pluhar said, is the mind’s churning and obsessing: “Rumination is a big piece of it.”
M had a name for the main source of their mental health challenges: “Loneliness.”
Health experts note that, for all its weight, the adolescent crisis at least is unfolding in a more accepting environment. Mental health issues have shed much of the stigma they carried three decades ago, and parents and adolescents alike are more at ease when discussing the subject among themselves and seeking help.
Indeed, Linda had begun having conversations with other parents who wondered whether the challenges their adolescents were facing represented typical moody teen behavior or something pathological. A colleague told Linda about her daughter’s eating disorder. A mother named Sarah confided that her middle-school-age daughter was in therapy for anxiety and depression. “I told her, ‘I understand where you’re at way better than you think,’” Sarah recalled.
Recognize the signs. Anxiety and depression are different issues but they do share some indicators. Look for changes in a youth’s behavior, such as disinterest in eating or altered sleep patterns. A teen in distress may express excessive worry, hopelessness or profound sadness.
Approach with sensitivity. If you are seeking to start a discussion with a teen who might be struggling, be clear and direct. Don’t shy from hard questions, but also approach the issue with compassion and not blame.
Offer healthy ways to manage emotions. Children who are emotionally struggling are at risk of turning to self-harm to redirect the pain they feel. To prevent that, encourage practices known to help our psychological well-being, such as exercise, meditation and journaling.
Get the correct diagnosis. Find the right doctor for your child by asking for recommendations. Ask the specialist about her experience treating specific conditions in children and the measurement tools she uses to make medical assessments.
Carefully consider medications. Press doctors on their experience treating children with specific drugs and make sure you understand their side effects and interactions with other treatments, as well as how to tell if a medication is working and how hard it is to wean off of it.
Don’t forget the basics. Young people, with developing brains, need eight to 10 hours of sleep to promote mental and physical health. Lack of sleep can interfere with development, and can dramatically impact mood. Physical activity is also vital.
In a nearby suburb, the parents of Elaniv Burnett were struggling to understand their daughter’s desperation. As a young child, Elaniv had been joyful, an eager student and graceful gymnast, her father, Dr. Tatnai Burnett, a gynecological surgeon at the Mayo Clinic, recalled: “The kind of kid where you go, ‘Huh, we should have more kids.’”
But in 2014, when Elaniv was 9, her parents’ marriage began to fracture, and Elaniv injured her ankle; she developed chronic pain, which sidelined her from gymnastics, and she went through a dark period. Then, in 2016, Dr. Burnett, who is Black, was held at gunpoint at home by the police, in full view of the family, after officers responded to a call of a possible intruder.
Recent research has found that wealth, education and opportunity do not shield Black families from mental health issues to the same degree they do for white families. From 1991 to 2017, suicide attempts by Black adolescents rose 73 percent, compared with an 18 percent rise among white adolescents. (The overall suicide rate remains higher among white adolescents.) The suicide rate leaped particularly for Black girls, up 6.6 percent per year on average from 2003 to 2017, new research shows.
In the fall of 2019, Elaniv was diagnosed with major depressive disorder. In a poem in her journal, she wrote: “Thoughts like racecars zoom constant in my head/ Self-hate and worthlessness/ Perpetual, they speed ahead.”
Elaniv began therapy, took medications and enrolled in an outdoor inpatient program in Utah. “We worked on ourselves, worked on our parenting, we changed so many things to try to help meet Elaniv where she was,” Dr. Burnett said. “We controlled electronics, monitored friendships.”
Elaniv’s mother, Tania Gainza, a clinical social worker, saw a generational trend. She had counseled an adolescent for years who was terrified of not meeting expectations. She heard about a local boy who killed himself seemingly without warning.
“There’s something different about this era or generation that makes them much more susceptible or vulnerable,” Ms. Gainza said. “There’s not that community, I guess.”
A rise in loneliness is a key factor, experts said. Recent studies have shown that teenagers in the United States and worldwide increasingly report feeling lonely, even in a period when their internet use has exploded.
“They’re hanging out with friends, but no friends are there,” said Bonnie Nagel, a psychologist at the Oregon Health & Science University. “It’s not the same social connectedness we need and not the kind that prevents one from feeling lonely.”
Often, she said, online social connections amount to seeing “pictures of people hanging out, flaunting it, as if to say, ‘Hey, I’m very socially connected,’ and ‘Hey, look at you by yourself.’”
One day in the autumn of 2020, with the pandemic in full swing and eighth grade having gone fully remote, Linda found M sobbing in bed. M confessed to wanting to die.
Linda found an online therapist. After several sessions, “the therapist broke confidentiality,” Linda said. “She said, ‘You need to know about the knife.’”
In M’s night stand, Tony found a pocketknife and a box knife with a cat’s paw image on the handle that M had surreptitiously bought on Amazon and was using to self-harm. One night, M went further, tightening a red hair tie around their neck. “I was trying to see how far I could take it,” M said.
The following February, M entered full-day group therapy. A psychiatrist at the clinic notified the family that M had admitted to being unable to stop cutting, medical records show. Linda “de-knived the house,” she said, and hid all the pills. Then M engaged in a different kind of self-harm: hitting their head with an eight-pound workout barbell.
Linda recalled feeling stunned: “Oh, now I have to get rid of the blunt objects, too.”
M was discharged with a diagnosis of depression and a prescription for antidepressants. From 2015 to 2019, prescriptions for antidepressants rose 38 percent for teenagers compared with 15 percent for adults, according to Express Scripts, a major mail-order pharmacy.
Subsequently, M also received a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, not A.D.H.D., and given a prescription for methylphenidate, the generic name for medications including Ritalin and Concerta. “I’m still not sure I believe it,” Linda said.
M’s middle school has a trained mental health counselor. In March 2021, M visited him for the first time. During that visit, on a scale of 0 to 10, M ranked hopelessness and anxiety at 9, expressing terror at returning to school, a fear of falling behind and a wish to die.
But M’s mood improved; at a meeting a month later, M ranked hopelessness and sadness at 5 and anxiousness at 2. M felt therapy was crucial but wasn’t sure the medications helped; the school counselor credited M’s improvement to family support and getting back to school. He cautioned the parents, though, that the pendulum could swing back.
Around that time, Linda heard through the grapevine that a girl named Elaniv Burnett had died following an overdose. “I’m sorry, I can’t take it anymore,” Elaniv wrote in a note. Her mother rushed her, still conscious, to the hospital, where Elaniv expressed regret at the overdose and described her terror. She died four days later, at age 15.
The news was still on Linda’s mind a few weeks later when M fled into the forest.
M’s family had recently returned from visiting both sets of grandparents. One set criticized M’s pronouns, the other M’s heavy screen use. Linda said she felt judged. She stole a look at M’s phone and saw the troubling photos.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said to M and went upstairs briefly. When she returned, M had vanished, so she followed them into the woods, texting as she frantically looked for flashes of M’s white dress.
Finally M texted back: “I don’t want to talk to you.”
Linda returned home, and Tony went out. He found M along a commonly used trail. They walked, mostly in silence. “Then they were ready to come home,” he recalled.
The school year ended, and M improved, the anxiety ebbing. M took joy spending time with a friend, in person, walking home, strolling the forest.
But a few weeks later, a hurtful text from the friend plunged M into despair again, “like I was back to having no friends.”
M used an exfoliating blade to cut both ankles. “I don’t know how to stop it,” M said. “I can bet $20 that I’ll be in the hospital next year.”
When Linda saw the cuts, she confronted M, who handed over the blade. M let Linda examine the wounds.
“I think that’s good,” Linda said. “They let me look.”
In mid-April, I was speaking to the mother of a suicidal teenager whose struggles I’ve been closely following. I asked how her daughter was doing.
Not well, the mother said: “If we can’t find something drastic to help this kid, this kid will not be here long-term.” She started to cry. “It’s out of our hands, it’s out of our control,” she said. “We’re trying everything.”
She added: “It’s like waiting for the end.”
Over nearly 18 months of reporting, I got to know many adolescents and their families and interviewed dozens of doctors, therapists and experts in the science of adolescence. I heard wrenching stories of pain and uncertainty. From the outset, my editors and I discussed how best to handle the identities of people in crisis.
The Times sets a high bar for granting sources anonymity; our stylebook calls it “a last resort” for situations where important information can’t be published any other way. Often, the sources might face a threat to their career or even their safety, whether from a vindictive boss or a hostile government.
In this case, the need for anonymity had a different imperative: to protect the privacy of young, vulnerable adolescents. They have self-harmed and attempted suicide, and some have threatened to try again. In recounting their stories, we had to be mindful that our first duty was to their safety.
If The Times published the names of these adolescents, they could be easily identified years later. Would that harm their employment opportunities? Would a teen — a legal minor — later regret having exposed his or her identity during a period of pain and struggle? Would seeing the story published amplify ongoing crises?
As a result, some teenagers are identified by first initial only; some of their parents are identified by first name or initial. Over months, I got to know M, J and C, and in Kentucky, I came to know struggling adolescents I identified only by their ages, 12, 13 and 15. In some stories, we did not publish precisely where the families lived.
Everyone I interviewed gave their own consent, and parents were typically present for the interviews with their adolescents. On a few occasions, a parent offered to leave the room, or an adolescent asked for privacy and the parent agreed.
In these articles, I heard grief, confusion and a desperate search for answers. The voices of adolescents and their parents, while shielded by anonymity, deepen an understanding of this mental health crisis.
(From world Bank Blog)
Governments across the globe will spend about $5 trillion on K-12 education this year. But unless they get all children and young people back to school, keep them in class, and recover the central elements of learning, this generation could lose twice or three times that amount in earning losses.
The first impact was the millions of lives lost due to the disease caused by the COVID 19 virus. The second was the human suffering caused by job instability and poverty. The third is on children and youth who should have been in school but were told to stay at home.
It is two years since the pandemic started. Nearly all countries decided that one of the main ways to fight the pandemic was to keep students out of school and universities. Public health experts had decided that keeping education institutions open would lead to further spread of the virus. To “flatten the curve” and prevent overcrowding of hospitals, kids would have to stay home.
Many European and some East Asian countries reopened school relatively quickly, conscious of both the obvious costs for kids and the scant evidence of the benefits of the complete closure. But in many countries in South Asia, Latin America, Middle East, and even in East Asia, school closures were maintained for exceptionally long periods. Our own countries, India and Peru, are tragically representative.
By the end of 2021, school days lost were well above two hundred—that’s about a school year and a half. This prolonged interruption in learning could have grave long lasting effects, particularly in middle income and poor countries.
Most of the impact will be on children and youth who happened to be between 4 and 25 years old in 2020 and 2021, generating a huge intergenerational inequality. Being out of school for that long means that children not just stop learning, they also tend to forget a lot of what they have learned. In late 2020, the World Bank estimated that a 7-month absence from schools would increase the share of students in ‘learning poverty’ from 53 to 63 percent. An additional 7 million students would drop out of school. The effects on marginalized minorities and girls will be even worse. Our loss estimates have been revised upwards, and now we expect that, unless swift and bold action is taken, learning poverty can reach 70%.
Biggest losses for those with the least
In all countries—rich, middle-income and poor—kids from the poorest families are bearing the largest losses as their opportunities to maintain any educational engagement through remote learning are limited. Internet access for them is poor: only half of all students in middle income countries and just a tenth in the poorest countries have web access. The use of TV and radio and facilitating learning materials has helped, but it cannot replace interactive education. ‘Learning’ cannot just mean watching television or listening to the radio for a few hours a day.
The result is a widening of the already large inequality of opportunity. In the developing world, COVID-19 might lead to lower growth, higher poverty and more inequality for a generation, a terrible triple threat to global prosperity for decades to come.
By late last year, we had hard data about learning losses in middle-income countries like Brazil and India. In the state of São Paulo, for example, educators decided to measure the status of learning continuously—as opposed to many countries who have postponed any type of learning measurement, maybe to avoid getting bad news. They find that after a year without in-person classes, students had learned 27 percent less what they would have learned in normal times. India’s Pratham, a well-regarded education NGO, has found that minimum proficiency levels have been cut by half in the state of Karnataka.
Three new “Rs” for a novel coronavirus
Encouragingly, by the end of 2021, schools had reopened in many countries. But nearly one in four education systems were still closed and many systems had reopened only partially. 1.5 billion children were back in class, though 300 million kids still need to be brought back to school safely. But that was before the Omicron variant of the virus. These numbers have changed since the start of this year.
We think a blend of reopened schools, remote learning and remedial programs can limit the damage caused by the disruptions and serve as a model response for future shocks—and maybe even make public education better than it was a couple of years ago.
Reopen schools safely. If you’re unsettled by the image of millions of kids sitting and staring at the TV, consider this: more than half the households in 30 African countries don’t even have electricity. For just too many children in the world, conditions at home are not conducive for learning, too many do not have Internet access, a decent device, or money to pay for data or books, and a space to study at home. And education is inherently a social endeavor: it requires incessant interaction. This means brick-and-mortar schools, which must open and be made safe for students and teachers. Investments are needed. Quite often there is money available for this and there is no dearth of guidelines from international agencies on how to reopen schools safely. What is generally missing in many countries is a national sense of urgency.
Invest in remote learning. World Bank and OECD teams completed an assessment of remote learning during the two years of the pandemic. The results are not always encouraging. But the pandemic showed that hybrid learning innovations -combining in-person and remote instruction through smart use of digital technologies— are here to stay. But investments in technology have to be cleverly coupled with investments in learning skills. The pandemic has quickened a change in mindset about the use of technology, and we have a small window of opportunity to get teachers and administrators to see technology as part of the learning process. Besides, this is not the last pandemic or natural disaster that might force schools to close. By facilitating the continuation of the learning process at home, better learning technologies in the classroom can also make the system more effective both when schools are open and when they have to be closed.
Remediate to recoup missed and lost learning. In the United States, students returned last Fall with about a third less learning in reading during the 2019-20 academic year than they normally would have. In many countries with long school closures, students are attending a grade without having grasped even a small portion of what was taught in the previous grade. If kids don’t catch up, particularly those in the early grades where losses are larger, they might eventually even drop out. Across the world, schools must adapt to the needs of students—both the fundamental skills of literacy and numeracy, and their mental health and well-being. Encouragingly, though, students who learned less last year tend to rebound faster than others—if they are provided access to remedial instruction. But this cannot be done without additional support to teachers and principals.
Averting a permanent loss
To help in these efforts, the World Bank Group is working on nearly a hundred COVID-related education projects in more than 60 countries. These projects sum up to $ 11 billion. These are record numbers for the World Bank, but a fraction of the $72 billion the US federal government is making available for public schools to reopen safely. We are supporting countries as diverse as Chile, Jordan and Pakistan. More efforts are needed to finance the return to classroom-based teaching, and help public schools adopt teaching techniques that blend on-line and in-classroom learning and teach students at the level they need today after the months and years they have been denied of an education, focusing on foundation skills and in their emotional wellbeing
The future of a billion kids around the world is at risk. Unless we get them back in school again and find ways to remedy the effects of the interruption, COVID-19 will result in a huge setback for this generation. When the fallout of the coronavirus is finally tallied, it will become clear that its biggest damage is the lost learning of school-goers.
A decade from now, we may look back and find that the biggest permanent loss of this pandemic was avoidable. We can act now and avoid the regret.
Note: A version of this blog was first published on the Future Development Blog of the Brookings Institution on January 28th, 2022.
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Vice President, Equitable Growth, Finance and Institutions (EFI), World Bank GroupM
Global Director, Education Global Practice, World Bank
We talk a lot about the value of education, but the value of education is only as good as what education, as a whole, values.
As a student of life and the broader world, I have seen how many industries and disciplines, such as software engineering and project management, have improved by looking at what they value, and realizing that what they previously valued was not sufficient to improve dramatically. From this, the Manifesto for Agile Software Development came forth, which has profoundly impacted and improved how software and other technology is made.
What I appreciated greatly about the original agile manifesto, is that it does not negate the value of the previous paradigm. But, instead elevates a new paradigm. This reduces some of the false dichotomy that happens in our thinking. So, in thinking about what I see as important to value and change in the field of education, I used the same style. So, what follows is the Education SystemONE Manifesto of Values with a similar structure, which also incorporates similar themes.
Education SystemONE is discovering more effective ways of learning. Through our research and practice we have come to value:
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
While it is recognized that there are biological, including neurological, factors that affect our ability to learn and reach specific competencies, it is also recognized that everyone can learn, and that the effort made to learn is what determines whether there is improvement in the outcomes, and it is this improvement that should be focused upon. Although, this focus on effort should not be mistake for a belief that any type of effort will lead to excellence. It is critical that one works both “smarter” and “harder” to be able to gain the competencies that is the goal of their education.
While it is recognized that we all have needs and wants, and thus we must and should take at times, it is also recognized that we are part of our family, a community, a humanity, and a world ecology. Each of these are necessary to provide us with our needs and wants, and only if they are healthy can we be healthy. Thus, we strive to take actions that support the health of each of the Circles of Context that we exist within, and work and give how we can, to support this health.
While there is value in determining how we plan to accomplish things, planning on its own leads to nothing. Thus we must value action higher than planning. Further, it is only through action that we can get further so that we can see what plans are necessary to continue our journey. And thus, when combined with the recognition of the rapid change and actual uncertainty of the world around us, we are often better to take a strategy of “Ready! Fire! Aim!”, then to end up in an endless loop of “Ready, Aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim…” And so we recognize that we can plan best, by using an iterative approach which is truly data-driven.
While there is value in the individual cultures and contexts that each human exists within; none the less, it is more important for us to value humanity and help humanity as a whole, more than any form of tribalism that our cultures dictate. Further, while every person is unique in the totality of their DNA, upbringing, skills, knowledge, and beliefs, and with different measures in different contexts, will be greater or lesser than each other; we none-the-less recognize that the inherent worth of each human is the same, and each person has the potential within them to have a fulfilling life and contribute to the world. Also, while it is appropriate and important to take actions that helps oneself, one’s family, and one’s friends; these should not have a negative impact on the world, and we must strive to take actions that lead to the ultimate benefit of all sentience.
While tradition has brought humanity to the state it is thus far, we can not grow and improve without questioning the status quo. We must be willing to question anything and potentially everything to see if it is still serving us well, or if a newer way can prove better.
While there is often benefit to being “taught”, and there is value to earning “a piece of paper” such as a diploma, degree, etc. We should not confuse the proxy of the piece of paper, nor what a teacher shares with students, nor even the assessment of a student with what is actually learned. Yet, we also know that these proxies can have value, and that we have no choice in using proxies to understand what someone has learned. But recognizing the limitation of knowledge that we have of other’s knowledge, we endeavor to be as careful as possible in our judgement of what has been learned and the value it has to students.
While teachers and other experts are recognized as critical sources of knowledge, we should not fall into the fallacy of argument from authority. Instead, all of us must have humility in our knowledge and abilities, recognizing that it is always possible for us to be wrong, and that only be having an open mind can we reduce the risk of thinking we are right, when we are not. Yet at the same time, to avoid the fallacy of argument from authority we also need sufficient skepticism of all that we hear from others, to not believe something that does not actually have merit.
While all humans should have a right to receive credit and earn compensation for the work they have done, and have a right to own property, including intellectual property, it is also clear that those who have chosen to share their property, especially intellectual property freely have had a greater probability of doing greater good for the world than by taking a strategy of focusing on profit motives first. Thus we work diligently to be able to release what is created in an open manner that allows for free access to others so that the benefit of the education system is multiplied.
We recognize that learning activities and the the time spent doing these learning activities are necessary to reach the goal of attaining sufficient proficiency in that which is being learned, but that there is more than one way to reach a sufficient proficiency and that the amount of time spent on learning activities does not inherently mean that one has gained sufficient competency in that which they are working on learning.
While at the beginning stages of learning, there is a need to practice skills and use repetition to remember knowledge, the ultimate goal of all learning activities is to have students gain skills and knowledge that they can apply to their lives in the real world. Further, there is a recognition that in traditional education, a great deal of student effort is not used to its full potential, because student work usually only serves as a contrived learning activity. Therefore, student work that is real will be valued higher than work that is contrived or simulated. And student work that benefits the world as a whole is valued even higher.
While there is a natural desire to stand on solid ground, we must recognize that to a degree all knowledge is uncertain. And that the best method humanity has discovered to solve this paradox is to have faith in the process of science and build our beliefs based upon evidence.
NEW YORK, 24 January 2022 – More than 635 million students remain affected by full or partial school closures. On the International Day of Education and as the COVID-19 pandemic nears its two-year mark, UNICEF shares the latest available data on the impact of the pandemic on children’s learning.
“In March, we will mark two years of COVID-19-related disruptions to global education. Quite simply, we are looking at a nearly insurmountable scale of loss to children’s schooling,” said Robert Jenkins, UNICEF Chief of Education. “While the disruptions to learning must end, just reopening schools is not enough. Students need intensive support to recover lost education. Schools must also go beyond places of learning to rebuild children’s mental and physical health, social development and nutrition.”
Children have lost basic numeracy and literacy skills. Globally, disruption to education has meant millions of children have significantly missed out on the academic learning they would have acquired if they had been in the classroom, with younger and more marginalized children facing the greatest loss.
Follow-on consequences of school closures are on the rise. In addition to learning loss, school closures have impacted children’s mental health, reduced their access to a regular source of nutrition, and increased their risk of abuse.
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Notes to editors:
Sources:
State of the Global Education Crisis report
In a normal year, up to half of Christine Jarboe’s first-graders start school knowing how to tie their shoelaces.
But thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, school hasn’t been normal for more than two years. So when Jarboe welcomed a fresh crop of Fairfax County Public Schools first-graders to her classroom in the fall for their first full year of in-person learning, she made a disturbing discovery.
“You’d say, ‘Okay, can you show me how to tie your shoes?’ and most of them would just kind of look at me, like, really confused,” Jarboe said. “They really weren’t sure even where to start.”
It was one of many “missing skills” that Jarboe discovered among her students over the course of the semester. She expected them to show up behind where they should be in academic categories such as reading. But what she hadn’t counted on was that her children would prove unable to do things such as cutting along a dotted line with scissors. Or squeeze a glue bottle to release an appropriately sized dot. Or simply twist a plastic cap off and on.
In interviews with The Washington Post, teachers around the country shared that they were confronting similar problems, dealing with pre-kindergartners, kindergartners and elementary-school students — as well as some middle-schoolers — who arrived unprepared for the school environment. Online learning left children, on average, four months behind in mathematics and reading before this school year, according to a McKinsey and Company study released in early April.
But children of the pandemic also are missing a more basic tool kit of behaviors, life skills and strategies, including tying their shoelaces, taking turns on the playground slide and sitting still in their chairs for hours at a time.
Students’ grades are up, but their test scores aren’t, new data show
“There’s a huge gap that goes beyond the academics, it has to do with social and emotional components and just how to behave in school,” said Dan Domenech, the executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. “That is something young kids have not learned.”
As these issues persist well into the 2021-2022 school year, frazzled teachers — who know they must address basic behavioral challenges before they can begin to make up academic losses — are becoming creative.
A New York City elementary school imported “non-traditional” seats, including squishy red beanbags, that allow children to wriggle and squirm during lessons. Staffers at an elementary school in Oakland, Calif., weary of conflicts during recess, are training fourth- and fifth-graders as “safety leaders” to mediate between peers. And in Philadelphia, two teachers created a “literacy buddy room” in which fifth-graders and kindergartners pair off to read together, building literacy and relational skills at the same time.
In Fairfax County, Jarboe has kicked off a weekly shoelace tying contest. She provides laces to students who wear Velcro or slip-on footwear, and hands out small hourglass sand timers so children can time themselves. Since Jarboe began the competition two months ago, improvement has been rapid: As of early April, 17 of her 20 students have learned to fashion and dismember double knots with aplomb.
On a recent Thursday morning, 6-year-old Lucy Massey, wearing a pink headband, pulled a foot up to the seat of her plastic chair. She bent over a pink Converse and gripped the two ends of a hot pink lace.
“Count me off,” she told two friends, and the girls began reciting, “One … two … three … ”
Lucy’s fingers flew: First the left shoe, then the right. She blew a strand of hair from her forehead. Her friends chanted, “20 … 21 … 22 …”
“Twenty-four!” cried Lucy, triumphant, pointing to two perfect double knots and raising both hands for a star athlete’s fist pump. “Pretty good, huh?”
Jenna Spear first noticed problems during story time.
Spear works as a teacher-naturalist for the Harris Center for Conservation Education in New Hampshire, visiting K-5 public schools in the state’s Monadnock region to educate students about nature. After a pandemic-imposed hiatus, she began visiting classrooms again this school year, offering lessons on topics as varied as birding and cartography.
Early on, she was watching a second-grade read-aloud when children began crushing forward, competing to be closest to the book. Spear sat back, feeling sad.
“Normally, when you read a story in second-grade, kids know to sit down so everyone can see the pictures,” Spear said. “But you’d have kids standing in front, like right in front, of everybody.”
As the year continued, she observed other patterns. Children easily grew frustrated with one another in group settings. They struggled with the concept of taking turns, pushing each other out of the way to see a caterpillar she was holding in her palm. And, when Spears walked the children into the woods for her traditional “quiet minute challenge,” they were unable to stay still and silent for even 30 seconds.
Public education is facing a crisis of epic proportions
Frank Keil, a Yale professor of psychology who studies how children interpret the world, said these kinds of issues are to be expected after the nation’s youngest students were deprived of more than a year of in-person instruction. “A huge part of early schooling in the U.S. is being socialized, learning to sit still and listen quietly,” he said.
Being away from other children affected students from all socioeconomic backgrounds, Keil added: “Even affluent children coming from families in which dynamic back-and-forth conversations with peers and adults are the norm may need time to learn how to sit still and be more passive learners.”
In California’s Oakland Unified School District, principal Roma Groves-Waters said her first weeks and months overseeing Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School this school year were pockmarked with small troubles.
She said “little bickerings and fights” broke out on the playground far more often than happened before the pandemic. Spats happened in the classroom, too, as children sat alongside peers for six hours in a row. Hybrid learning, Groves-Waters noted, required 2 ½ hours of continuous attention at most.
Things were especially difficult for incoming first-graders, she said. For these students, who had never before set foot in a school, the concept of walking in a line between classes — while refraining from touching other children nearby — was wholly foreign.
“Also, the idea of not talking out of turn, it’s like, ‘Wait for your turn! You’ll get a turn!’” Groves-Waters said. “Those poor teachers, they really felt the effects of the pandemic.”
Things are improving, she said, in part because the school started holding meditation and yoga sessions before and after lunch and recess to help children unwind. And Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary teachers trained fourth- and fifth-graders as safety leaders, instructing them in the principles of mediation.
“They help resolve the student conflicts,” Groves-Waters said, “because kids talk to each other better.”
Behavioral issues, albeit of a different kind, also are arising among older students.
Sean O’Mara, who teaches eighth-grade social studies at Keene Middle School in New Hampshire, said his students this year have no idea how to carry on a class discussion. Many — more than before the pandemic — prefer to work independently and are reluctant to share their ideas with others, much less venture into a discussion.
O’Mara thinks this is a legacy of online learning.
“During Zoom meetings, a lot of kids would not want to turn their cameras on, so they sort of retreated into anonymity,” he said. “There is still a segment of our students who would prefer to be quiet and [be] observers.”
In response, he devoted class time to explaining how conversations work: What body language signals, what to be thinking about while someone else is talking, how to offer civil disagreement. At the start of the year, he spent up to 20 minutes per class per day on these instructions. Now, as his students get “into a groove,” he can get by with a brief reminder.
“But we’re heading toward the end of the year,” he said. “My eighth-graders have to transition into high school … before they ever really got to know what it means to be a middle-schooler.”
Teachers across the country are adapting — as they have done throughout the pandemic.
Amy Barker, a kindergarten teacher at Robert Morris School in Philadelphia, had an idea in the fall for tackling reading and behavioral problems in one swoop. Under the “Reading Buddy Program,” begun in September, Barker’s 13 kindergartners spend a half-hour every Friday afternoon reading books with teacher Jessica Scherff’s 13 fifth-graders. The students pair off and, taking turns, pick their way through whatever text they choose.
“It’s sharing the love of reading, getting kids to really enjoy sitting down with a book instead of their phone,” Scherff said.
“And it’s building the fifth-graders’ skills,” Barker added. “Without knowing it, they’re working on their literacy, and their comprehension, because the kindergartners are constantly asking them to explain.”
Both teachers said their students’ reading fluency has improved, the fifth-graders’ especially. And Tameron Dancy, the school principal, said the program has helped the older students gain social skills as well as self-esteem.
“When our older students are able to meet with, kind of take responsibility for, the younger ones, it just more rapidly develops that sense of leadership and responsibility in them,” she said.
The children also have become good friends, with the fifth-graders rushing to help the kindergartners open their milk cartons at breakfast. The program is going so well, Dancy said, that she wants to expand it to include first- and sixth-graders next fall.
And in Virginia’s Fairfax County, Jill Norris, a reading specialist at Stratford Landing Elementary, came up with her own way of teaching children that school should be enjoyable — adding a sprinkling of life skills along the way.
Norris, who enjoyed trading letters with her grandmother when she was a girl, turned her classroom into a post office. She placed a mailbox outside and promised students that if they left a letter in the box, she’d have a reply for them by next morning.
Norris has kept her promise, even though it has sometimes required up to two hours of letter writing in a night. She said the children’s handwriting and the substance of their letters have improved markedly over the course of the year.
“Dear ms. norris,” wrote a fifth-grade girl in a recent letter. “I know you neeD a Design for the reaDing room i got a iDea you ShouD Paint it [with pictures of] Book’s.”
“Dear Mrs. Norris,” wrote another student, a third-grade girl. “My Favorite Kind of books are grapic novels and I sometimes like Chapter books.”
“Dear Mrs. Norris,” wrote a second-grade boy, above a drawing of a cat. “I Love You.”
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