![]() ![]() While nationwide data on the impact of the pandemic is still sparse, one study of students in China’s Hubei province, an early Covid-19 hot spot, found that 22.6 percent reported depression symptoms and 18.9 percent had symptoms of anxiety after about a month in lockdown. Overall, the challenges of online education and the general isolation and stress of the pandemic could lead to a spike in mental health problems among kids. “It’s just not the same.” This has particularly impacted districts with a higher percentage of low-income families, Vinson said. “All these professionals that normally connect with kids in person in school, now you’re over Zoom,” Guerriero said. ![]() ![]() Kids who get mental and behavioral health services at school for disabilities or learning differences are also facing additional disruption. As a result, “they feel like they’re working harder, they feel lonelier, they feel like if they’re struggling with something, they’re the only one,” Guerriero said. Without a teacher in the room to keep them on task, students have to rely much more heavily on executive functioning skills like self-control - which aren’t fully developed in middle schoolers to begin with. “Now out of my 100 kids, I have 100 different learning environments,” Guerriero said. And while educators were once able to create a supportive place for education in their classrooms, they suddenly had to rely on kids and families to construct such places at home. The latter is key - in normal times, schooling by its very nature is a space for social interaction “and a place where we can connect and build these relationships,” Justina Schlund, director of field learning at the nonprofit CASEL: Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, told Vox.īut in the spring, with schools nationwide shifting to remote learning, kids lost that physical space to connect with each other and with teachers. “Coping strategies and skills that oftentimes would be ancillary to what we were doing in the classroom,” he said, “now it’s going to have to be the primary thing.” The pandemic has put students’ mental health at riskīefore Covid-19 hit, school was a constant in the lives of millions of American kids - a place they went to learn, play, eat lunch (and often breakfast), and socialize with their peers. To help students across American society cope with the loss of their routines, adjust to new ones, and begin to heal from the stress of living in a global public health emergency, Guerriero and others say schools need to focus on kids’ emotional needs - perhaps even before they worry about the curriculum. “The communities that already had less room for air have, of course, been hit hardest,” Vinson said. Vinson, a psychiatrist in the Atlanta area who works with kids across the income spectrum, told Vox.Įxperts fear that, for students around the country, the stresses of the pandemic could lead to anxiety, depression, or difficulties with learning, and that groups hardest hit by Covid-19, including Black and Latinx Americans, could be the most affected. “Their stress level is going up,” Sarah Y. For everyone involved, the pandemic has been “a collective trauma,” Guerriero said.Īnd while some families have the resources to help kids adjust to the new normal, others are going into their sixth month of unemployment, or dealing with the demands of online school without reliable internet or space for kids to study. And even these new routines are still in flux, with some areas - including Needham, Massachusetts, where Guerriero teaches - delaying the start of in-person school due to concerns that aging school buildings simply aren’t ready to accommodate even a hybrid model.Īdd to that uncertainty the fact that the virus remains a real threat, parents have lost jobs, food insecurity has skyrocketed, and teachers, the trusted guides students rely on to get them through a radically different school environment, are also afraid of what will happen to them and their families if they return to buildings that may be unsafe. Most students will be attending school either remotely or on a hybrid model, with some days in classrooms and some days at home. This can have an effect on their learning - but it has a major impact on their mental health, too. And with the fall term beginning and the crisis still in full swing, students’ predictable days aren’t coming back anytime soon. “I know that when I go into this classroom, I start this warmup I know that I need to bring this I know that I have lunch every day at 11:15.” Routines like these, he told Vox, are “so linked to middle-school students’ sense of safety.”īut when school buildings closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic this spring, those routines were completely disrupted. ![]() If there’s one thing Stephen Guerriero has learned in his 18 years teaching middle-school students, it’s that they thrive on structure and predictability. ![]()
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