We are exhausted, frustrated, burnt out, feeling unappreciated, lost, stressed to the max, and our students at the service site are disrespectful and disruptive, so what do we do? We tell someone. Good, but how do we tell them?
We all know the experience of feeling sad and when we share that feeling with a friend, we brake down into tears. Our friends take pause and think, Wow, he is really really down. But what we don’t realize is that the telling is not necessarily bringing out what is locked inside so much as the performance of our sadness outside. The story actualizes itself in the telling. The way we are telling the sad story is making it even sadder so that it is a reality we are in the act of creating, not simply reporting.
We are talking ourselves into a deeper vulnerability than what we may have been feeling at first. Proof of that is our friend who catches the same feelings and starts to feel depressed about your feeling depressed. We have told our stories in ways that make us weaker.
When the indigenous communities in Australia were exposed to the Narrative Therapy approach of Michael White, they summed it all up in one neat phrase, that we are learning to tell our stories in ways that make us stronger. That means that their stories bear witness to more than the struggle or the pain. They are testimonies of survival, revealing a deeper courage to refuse to let suffering silence us. We must speak up. They are evidence of emancipation and energy.
That does not mean that they have to be all optimistic or full of false hope. But when we tell stories of our pain and center them around bravely confronting the challenges and limits, and not telling them to make our listeners pity us or offer cheap advice, then we are building strength.
We can tell our stories in ways that make us angrier, especially stories of injustice and oppression and neglect, but anger might only serve to make us more reactive, more easily provoked. We are thereby made even weaker.
We can tell our stories that make us feel more and more helpless and a victim, and we hear ourselves pleading “What did I do to deserve that?” or “Aren’t I a human being too?” or “There was nothing we could do.” The listeners are enrolled in the same feeling of despair that we feel, which only spreads our impotence.
We must learn to tell stories of our anger that become rage and then allow the rage to mature into courage. We must learn to tell stories of our being victimized without becoming the victim and to use our telling as the signal of resistance, of fighting back, not giving up. Pain finds a voice and seeks a hearing that is on the path to healing. If all it does is wound us all over again, we are only deepening the hurt.
We must tell our stories but we must learn to tell them in the ways that honor our deeper intentions and our highest purposes. As witnesses to our own lives, we owe it to ourselves not to conform to the transactional and therapeutic model of neediness, of always couching our problems as struggles or as symptoms made for someone else’s expert diagnosis.
We are responsible for our own lives. We need not exchange our agency for cheap consolation. Most of the advice we get is nothing more than well intentioned chatter. It is rarely what another will do for you. Our friends and colleagues are telling you what you should do for you, and they are not you, so perhaps save time, and cut out the middle man.
You do you, and even in the rough patches, perform the hero, the rebel, the heretic, the fighter, the sage, the prophet. Stories give us the chance to transform our experience into something beyond just the sadness and the loss. They are humankinds most powerful tool of liberation. But the magic lies in how you tell it.
These final few months of the 2021-22 year of service with Project CHANGE prompt us to reflect on what we have learned. As we move slowly into a post Covid world, we want to ask ourselves what these last three years have taught us about serving through a pandemic?
So many of our usual expectations have had to be put aside. The normal rules of accountability, the measures of impact have had to be suspended to adapt to the changing circumstances. Yet through it all, we needed to ensure that Project CHANGE’s core business of serving students with the greatest needs was being met. Did we manage to do that? The jury’s is out on that one. We expect a favorable verdict but not unanimous.
One major lesson we are all learning is that mental health is not something we can take for granted. If the community we serve is struggling, we cannot expect to be superman or superwoman and always fly above the fray. That would not be human. However, what remains the challenge is how we take care of ourselves in a way that does not bleed into or dilute how we respond to the needs of others. Human need we know knows no boundaries but as volunteers serving with AmeriCorps, we are here to get things done, to solve problems, to persevere and put other’s needs first and to ensure we are emotionally robust and remain psychologically secure enough to be able to do that. It is not always easy and none of us always get the balance right.
One member came to drive to his service site one day to find his car had been towed. It had never happened before so he did not even know for sure what had happened. But he was in a panic more because the kids at school were expecting him in class to help with an assignment. He decided that finding his car was less important than showing up for the students as he rushed to find a bus. He had never been late before. He missed the early bus and decided that instead of waiting, he would walk the 3 miles to the school. When he arrived, he was covered in sweat but he was there and the students never knew a thing. When he had completed his service day, he went to find his car to retrieve it.
Here is a dedicated member who showed exceptional qualities of putting his needs second and honoring the commitment he had made to those kids. What was obvious to him was not obvious to another member.
This member was in full time study and semester exams were coming up and he knew that as he was still recovering from COVID, he had not done enough revision. With all the pressure, he decided he had to excuse himself for two days of serving, even though the students were relying on him to coach them for a special game. The member put the students second and himself first. It is understandable but that is not what AmeriCorps is about. He passed his exams with an A+ but the students the following week felt totally let down and wanted to know why his exams were more important than their game? What was he there for?
If your needs during your committed service hours take precedence over the needs of the students you signed on to serve, then they are getting a bad deal, and you have misunderstood what a year of service is about.
For 2022-23, we are asking ourselves how to recruit candidates who can get this balance right. This is not a job and it is not for the rest of your life. It is one year of service. It is one year where you embrace the sacrifice for the greater good. It means that some of your legitimate needs will have to be put on hold, while the needs of struggling students takes priority. That means we are asking recruits- “Are you ready to make that sacrifice?”
If your needs right now are so great, or you are struggling, then this may not be the right year to serve. You might need to rightfully to have your needs met. It is only when we know that you have a way to meet your needs, and these will not compete with your dedication to your students who need you more, that we can offer you a place.
If you come with a generous heart, but also with extraordinary needs, we cannot be sure that the students are going to gain the advantage of your care. Experience has shown us that you cannot care for your mother who has cancer and show up totally present to your students 40 hours a week. Eventually something has to give. Usually it is the member who burns out. You cannot study for your medical degree and mentor girls 35 hours a week. You are putting your studies at risk and your students at risk, and could end up failing both.
This means AmeriCorps members must have the heart for service. There is something that makes them step out of their own spotlight of self-concern and to focus on what can they do to make other people’s lives better. That means service is not going to be easy. It will cost you. Not just money or time, but in some degree of self-regard, for one year, you decide it can wait. Like the towed car was less of a problem than not showing up for your kids. Like risking a lower grade in your exam is worth coaching your kids in the game.
That does not mean you do damage to yourself, or ignore your mental health and your future prospects. No, but for this year, a special year in your life, you live a life that responds to a deeper calling to lead, to serve, to give. You are living your best self.
Some members miscalculate what a year of service is going to demand of them. And when they do, Project CHANGE will do its best to support them through, so long as they stay in the story of service. But when the needs of the members become more paramount and more prominent than the needs of the students they serve, then something feels wrong.
Perhaps it is then that one realizes that some of the habits that we might have adopted for COVID times need to be corrected. The AmeriCorps pledge has always been a touchstone of what that service is about, to persevere through adversity. Every time I hear it, I hear the echoes of the Prayer of Saint Francis, which says it is better to serve than to be served.
In these cynical times of self-serving, populist leadership, the service of AmeriCorps is what is needed right now for the mental health of the nation. Narcissism is not our national calling. Not everyone is out for themselves. We can reach out, we can act in unselfish ways, we can create what MLK called the Beloved Community, or at least if we fail, we fail because we tried. You can’t expect much more than that.
New Book- “Our Stories Rise Up- Remembering as Resilience”
We are thrilled to announce that on May 18th, at the AmeriCorps Training Conference in Burlington VT, Storywise will launch a new book inspired by our AmeriCorps members, and prompted by the pandemic challenge and how it changed our years of service.
The book is full of personal stories that testify to the impact of AmeriCorps service during the shutdown, and to the role that memory plays in giving us much needed resources for resilience facing the future. Now that we are slowly coming out of the crisis, the book argues that we must not forget, nor let our students forget.
When COVID19 shut down the school system in March 2020, we all presumed it was a precautionary measure, and that our leaders were wanting to be more sure than sorry. No one expected it to last for over a year or more, least of all the kids!
Our Project CHANGE program serves the students of the local school district, so if kids were not coming to school, they were also not coming to after-school programs that our members also helped to run.
Students missing out on social support
What did COVID mean for members still committed to serve? It meant we had to adapt and recognize that needs did not suddenly go away because students were not showing up. In fact, it meant that the kids who relied on school for their primary social or adult support were going to be in greater danger of dropping out. So if the needs did not change but the access to meeting them did, what were we to do?
First, we told everyone to stay in the story of service. If for a time, that meant looking around your own neighborhood, then reach out to anyone isolated and alone. Include your families and your friends. Stay serving no matter what. The book relates the impact that had on Maria and her one elderly next door neighbor, someone she did not know till the crisis.
ZOOM kept the team together
Second, we met weekly on ZOOM to be sure that every member had a chance to share their experiences and to share any frustrations or problems. We did not presume that this was going to be business as usual. The situation was dramatically different, and we needed to acknowledge that and establish a different set of expectations. Hearing each other out meant that the members did not feel so alone. Also, the meetings established some benchmarks to measure what was emerging, what was changing and how we ourselves were changing in the process. Some meetings, everyone was just exhausted and others, we were silly and a but irreverent. There was a cycle to how we showed up.
We mapped that journey in terms of Beginning, Middle and Ending, and we share these maps in the book. At each phase, we asked the magic question of “What do we know from here that we did know from there that, put into action, will help us get through this?” Though path ahead was unknown, that did not have to trigger our anxieties but rather, to heighten our curiosity as to what was on offer here as far as learning something new.
Third, we gave permission for members to innovate, to get creative. We invented a Phone App to support student SEL needs but the school’s internet system could only see its problems with permissions and not its possibilities. Meanwhile, most members battled with security blocks on their having access to virtual Classrooms. These administrative obstacles to serving students was proof enough that large organizations did not know how to cope, except to become more risk averse. AmeriCorps members did not have to be trapped in that institutional inertia. We could become a rapid response team, making sure we could adapt to the changing climate of needs. And this is exactly what members did.
One member, a former teacher, decided she would produce her own educational materials and broadcast them on her own YouTube channel. The audience were kindergarten kids so the challenge was huge, but kids got used to the fun in what became “Aunty Genean’s Room.” Teachers relied on her materials.
Food Insecurity
Another member more used to a teaching support role, realized that food security was a huge issue for many of her students and a large part of her service became delivering food. Another member developed a hydroponics tower system for families to use to grow their own vegetables at home.
Another member signed on to a school district 3000 miles away on the West coast, where their teacher shortage was acute and where, using ZOOM, they could take advantage of her extra support. It was not exactly what our mission envisaged, but AmeriCorps members’ DNA is to serve. If the local system could not use their talents, then others would. Bureaucracy is built for permissions in normal times. In an emergency, one has to be ruled by need.
In reviewing the two years of service during the Plague Year, the Project CHANGE director got to thinking about how to honor the struggle and the success of the students we had served and the members who had served them. This is what prompted the idea that to make something positive out of the pain requires committing to a conscious way of remembering it all. One tangible way to do that was to write a book about it, featuring some of the stories.
back Cover of new book
Our Stories Rise Up is a testimony to how we “Made it Through” and that even if this coming Fall and Winter, the pandemic will return, we need to close this chapter at least. That is what the book suggests, to declare an ‘Ending’, stage “Comeback Parties” to witness that we got through, and write letters of gratitude to those who helped us the most to get through it. These are some of the methods that AmeriCorps used and they are user friendly, for parents and kids and teachers.
The book warns us that the future relies on how well we remember because in the face of the suffering and the loss of so much, memory is ultimately a decision we make in the face of death’s forgetting, by deciding what it is we want to keep alive.
There’s often no right or wrong answer when it comes to answering job interview questions, but it can be helpful to prepare in advance of your interview. Here’s our ultimate guide on how to answer every interview question.
Let’s face it: There’s plenty of career advice to go around. Some pieces of it are more relevant than others, but for many people it’s almost impossible to sort through the number of well-intentioned career tips they’ve heard throughout their lives to highlight just one.
You don’t want to seem painfully abnormal or bland and unoriginal—how do you let your potential employer know you’re unique (in a good way)? Here are our tips for striking that all-important balance.
It seems like such a simple question, but “tell me about yourself” is notorious for wrecking many interviewees’ chances to make positive first impressions. Turns out there’s a simple formula, and we’ve got you covered.
When you go to an interview, you expect questions about your work history, skills, and drive to succeed. The last thing you expect is for the hiring manager to ask you a personal question like, “What are you passionate about?”
You’ve spent so much energy constructing a succinct, yet informative resume, but now you have to cast it aside and hope an improvised answer makes you shine. Tricky? Yes. Impossible? Not if you’re prepared.”
Most interview questions ask you to discuss the positive aspects of your working life. But every now and then, a question takes a turn for the negative, potentially wrecking your whole enthusiastic vibe. “Tell me about a time you handled a conflict” is one such question.
When an interviewer asks you to tell her about your leadership experience, it’s important to have an answer ready. If you stutter at this question, you’re automatically putting yourself at a disadvantage when it comes to convincing the interviewer you’re a strong, confident leader.
When recruiters ask, “Why do you want this job?”, what they really want to know is, “What is it about this company and position that interests you, and what assets can you bring to us?” Here’s how you can answer that.
Most people’s biggest interview fears include having to respond to classic hard-to-answer questions, including “Why are you looking to leave your current job?” It’s a completely understandable query—after all, most people don’t leave positions they love, so the reason for your job search isn’t always going to be a pleasant one. Whether you can’t stand your boss or are uninterested in your day-to-day responsibilities, there are ways to answer without throwing anyone under the bus or burning any bridges—something you should avoid no matter how tempted you are.
At one point, “where do you see yourself in five years?” was a great question. It let interviewers gauge your ambition, or lack thereof, as well as your thought process. Slowly, it became a cliché. Yet, it’s still asked. Your challenge: to take it seriously and turn the predictable into an opportunity. Here are five formulas that can guide you toward a great answer to “where do you see yourself in five years?”
What is the best way to answer, “What’s your Dream Job?” While you don’t want to set the bar too high, setting the bar too low can make it sound like you don’t have goals and aspirations. So how do you find that middle ground between “I want it all” and “anything will do?”
Published: May 09, 2022 By Andrea Moran Washington Post Ads
When it comes to resumes, there are some classic mistakes you always want to avoid. But there is also room for interpretation about what makes a “good” resume. Tips and tricks you learned from your parents, or your teachers may be outdated at this point. So how do you freshen things up? Read on for ideas that can help you set your resume up for the modern age.
1. Clean it up
If you have been “updating” your resume by slapping on additional job titles as your career advances, it’s time to clean house. If you have spent ten or more years in the workforce, chances are you can go back and remove those first few entry level jobs you had when you were fresh out of college. Better yet, select which ones to keep based on how well the skills for those jobs match the skills required for the new position.
2. Replace your objective with a summary statement
Include a “summary statement” (aka: a brief blurb describing what skills and experience you can bring to the company) instead of the previously popular “objective” (aka: a brief blurb describing what you want). This is a terrific way for recruiters to get a better idea of exactly how you could fit into their office culture.
3. Remove dated language
Once upon a time, “references available upon request” was a mainstay at the conclusion of any resume. Nowadays? Employers recognize it as the space waster it is. It’s an obvious phrase (of course you will give references if requested!) that uses up valuable space that could instead be dedicated to fleshing out your work experience.
4. Refresh the format
Forbes mentions that one new consideration for resume writers is the fact that oftentimes, applicant tracking systems (ATS) are used to screen them before a human ever takes a look. Since you want both the ATS and humans to be able to read your resume with ease, it’s important to keep the formatting clean, simple, and consistent. This means putting job titles and section breaks in bold, using an easily readable font, and skipping any overly busy graphics or charts.
5. Make it pop
Your resume, when it does meet a human eye, will be skimmed extremely quickly. What is easier to read than long paragraphs and chunks of text? Lots of bullet points. These can be used when mapping out your various accomplishments, job responsibilities, and any other relevant facts that can be conveyed in short, digestible pieces. Making each bullet point succinct and action-oriented will further help move things along for the reader. Just remember to list your job experiences in reverse chronological order (aka: start with your current/latest job)—that is one piece of advice that has not gone out of style!
6. Play the numbers game
Numbers tend to make a much stronger impact than words when it comes to resumes, so keep that in mind when inputting your information. Think beyond the usual roles that numbers play and consider other ways to incorporate them into your resume: How many clients did you serve? How large was your team? How many products did you sell? How often did you represent your company?
7. Add something extra
With the space you save by streamlining your resume (and deleting “References available upon request”), think about adding another experience that (while not work related) could help identify you as a good fit for the company culture. Whether it’s volunteer work or an extra college course you took, these additions can help potential employers get a better picture of you as a whole person.
No matter which style you choose for your resume, just remember: Proofreading will never go out of style.
Asian students are victims of Montgomery County’s achievement gap
Carol Park is a strategic research analyst at the Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit legal organization that defends Americans’ liberties when threatened by government overreach and abuse.
Is it legal to penalize top-performing Asian American students to help students of other ethnicities? Legal or not, it is happening all around the country. In February, a federal judge sided with the Pacific Legal Foundation and ruled that Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County adopted a test-free admission process to discriminate against Asian American students.
Just a short distance away in Maryland, Asian American students have also been suffering discrimination in Montgomery County Public Schools since 2018.
To make more room for Black and Hispanic students, the Montgomery County Board of Education manipulated the admissions process of its four highly coveted magnet middle schools to guarantee that fewer Asian American students would be offered admission.
The new admissions process includes peer grouping and local norming, meaning applicants are at a disadvantage if they live in a low-poverty area with many high-performing students.
Because Asian American students are clustered in 25 of MCPS’s low-poverty schools, the new process forces those students to compete against each other instead of competing against every MCPS student — with the purpose of altering the racial composition of magnet schools to include fewer Asian Americans and more students of other ethnic groups.
The school board’s admissions changes achieved their intended result. The number of Asian American students enrolled at all four magnet schools dropped from 2017 to 2021: from 58.9 percent to 24.3 percent at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School; from 64 percent to 44.4 percent at Roberto W. Clemente Middle School; from 39.3 percent to 35.4 percent at Takoma Park Middle School; and from 26.4 percent to 23.9 percent at Eastern Middle School.
More than a dozen Asian American students who scored between the 95th and 99th percentiles on the entrance exams (CogAT) and received top scores on state assessment tests were rejected.
To combat this overt racial discrimination, the Association for Education Fairness, represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, filed a lawsuit against MCPS on behalf of the Asian American students.
The board adopted a racial balancing scheme that systemically excludes high-performing Asian American students. It was designed to cover up the government’s systematic failure at improving public education for low-income Black and Hispanic students.
From a legal perspective, a policy with discriminatory intent is unconstitutional even if it uses nonracial or seemingly race-neutral factors to achieve a racial result: It violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Also, from a social science perspective, a policy that pits one racial minority against other minorities is unacceptable.
Here is the cold and sad truth: Asian American students are being used as scapegoats for the serious and growing achievement gap problem that MCPS has avoided dealing with: The county is failing at educating many of its Black and Hispanic students.
For example, only 34.4 percent and 30.1 percent, respectively, of Black and Hispanic students between third and fifth grades passed state math exams in 2019. Meanwhile, the rates were 79.8 percent and 71.8 percent for Asian American and White students, respectively, despite that many Asian American students also come from families with modest means.
Though MCPS claims that lack of diversity at schools is the problem, there is little to no academic evidence that increasing racial diversity, especially in middle schools, helps students perform better in reading or math. Nor is it a good idea to enroll Black and Hispanic students into magnet schools where they might not succeed.
The focus should be instead on strengthening the educational quality of all local MCPS schools so that students of all colors can succeed.
Or even better, how about increasing the magnet school options so that more children can be admitted? Maryland is known for ranking near the bottom in the nation for its school choice, but Montgomery County can be a leader in driving change for the better.
In any case, the solution is not to water down the admissions standards for the district’s highest-performing schools and hard-working students, threatening these schools’ quality and reputation.
We all know that the ambitious children of Montgomery County deserve better. The Montgomery County school board must address its achievement gap problem without victimizing high-performing Asian American students.
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.
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.”
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
American kids are struggling — and they’re asking adults for help
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.”
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.
“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.
‘A cry for help’: CDC warns of a steep decline in teen mental health
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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