PD Editorial: Help students overcome pandemic stress

Students are back in classrooms, and they’re showing the mental health effects of the pandemic. California’s Sen. Alex Padilla wants Congress to help them, but his aid would be slow to arrive and insufficient for the need. Localities and the state instead must redouble their efforts to address the mental and behavioral health challenges in local schools now.

That K-12 students are struggling should surprise no one. They spent a year dealing with remote learning, largely cut off from the personal interactions with friends that are so important to healthy development.

During the first year of the pandemic, emergency room visits among school-aged youths jumped more than 25% year over year nationwide. In California, preliminary data also show a 20% increase in the suicide rate for young people aged 10-18. Students report social isolation, increased anxiety, difficulty focusing, increased depression and irritability, and other problems.

While it’s too soon for data on the new school year, anecdotally, students continue to struggle despite returning to the classroom. They brought lingering mental health challenges with them, and the ongoing pandemic compounds the stress. The virulent delta variant affects young people at greater rates and more seriously than previous variants. In classrooms, children sit separated, wear masks and see their friends put into quarantine. Children younger than 12 still are not approved for vaccination.

Meanwhile, students also are trying to make up educational ground. Remote learning proved less effective than in-person education. Early research has found that students lag where they should be in math, reading and other subjects. The effects were greatest among communities of color and low-income families, but no demographic was immune to the educational drop off.

All of which has California’s junior senator hoping to establish a pilot program to spend $20 million over four years to develop and evaluate comprehensive mental health services in elementary and secondary schools through the Department of Education. Padilla is the father of three school-aged children and has seen the stress and anxiety in schools this year.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is co-sponsoring his bill, which would create a grant-based pilot program that prioritizes high-poverty schools and using evidence-based practices to reach racially and culturally diverse students.

All of which is great but won’t help during the current emergency. The bill might not pass until next year, and it would take years for the pilot program to demonstrate effectiveness. Even if Democrats crammed it into a pending $3.5 trillion social services spending bill, it would be too little, too late.

Students need help now. Parents can provide some support, but educators are better positioned to watch for signs of students in crisis or just in need of some support during this difficult time. They can connect students to services in schools, which in turn might link them and their families to other resources.

That’s one more responsibility heaped on educators who face their own stress being back in classrooms. School districts and the state should give them the resources and training they need to pull it off. It is a big ask, but an important one if today’s youth are not to become a lost generation, always playing catch-up educationally and emotionally.

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