Teachers are amping up to help handle students’ pandemic-era trauma

“Ugh! I just walked through spiderwebs! Obviously, we’ve been gone for a while – there are spiderwebs!” Julie Trujillo says as she’s walking from Riverside’s Foothill Elementary School grounds, where she teaches fourth grade, to her car while we’re chatting on the phone.

Trujillo is one of the countless teachers gearing up for a new pandemic-era school year as students return after what many are calling a lost year after time away from desks, classmates and teachers.

Among the already steep set of tasks that teachers aim to tackle this year are the newer variety of challenges specific to a COVID-centric landscape. Not only will teachers be playing catch-up, but this year they’re anticipating kids will need re-socialization and may be grappling with the anxiety, trauma and grief that has been especially rampant for adults and children alike since March 2020.

“When the kids came into the classroom, they were terrified,” says Trujillo. “They were so worried that they were going to be sick. We have this big machine in our room that scrubs our air all the time. It’s humongous, probably about 7 feet tall, 3 feet deep and 3 feet wide, and it’s constantly going. I made mine look like a robot so it would be less daunting for them. It has arms and a face and antennas and things. It’s pretty hysterical.”

Social-emotional learning

Teachers and school administrators are stepping up, creatively and proactively approaching ways to hone in on social-emotional learning this year more than ever.

“Different schools are at different places on their social-emotional learning path,” says Michelle Harmonson, a 29-year teaching veteran who teaches seventh grade English at Suzanne Middle School in Walnut. “That’s kind of a buzzword right now, SEL (social-emotional learning.)”

Basically, SEL can be summed up as learning to understand and cope with your emotions, learning to have empathy for others, and learning the social and emotional skills needed to live a fulfilling life personally, professionally and within relationships with others. Because the pandemic has led to various forms of trauma for children – such as financial instability, social isolation, grieving the loss of a loved one and even homelessness – it makes sense that schools are amping up efforts to address academia-adjacent needs like social-emotional learning.

Harmonson references Maslow’s hierarchy of needs when explaining how she’s approaching the new school year: To set children up for learning, their basic needs must be met first, she explains.

“Starting with food and shelter. After that, you’ve got, ‘When I go to my school, am I safe?’ After that, their sense of belonging and are they loved? And that’s the one we’re going to spend a lot of time on this year – rebuilding that sense of love and belonging, bringing them back into that community of a school because they were all on their own last year.”

When Harmonson’s students returned to the classroom for six weeks during the past school year, the first day she was there she handed out a pixie stick with a welcome back note attached for each kid.

“In one class, nobody said thank you,” Harmonson recalls. “One boy actually said, ‘Oh, my gosh, we don’t know any social skills anymore!’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Thank you.’ This is a 12-year-old. So, they’re starting to become self-aware. But they really are going to have to be resocialized.”

As far as implementing social-emotional learning, Bethany Garcia, a special education teacher and education specialist at John Murdy Elementary School in Garden Grove, is a seasoned pro. She starts her classes with a morning meeting and has equipped her classroom with everything from a cool-down area for recharging to an affirmations mirror where students can remind themselves they are smart, capable, brave and kind.

“I really focus on incorporating a curriculum called zones of regulation, which helps students to identify their emotions, helps understand why they are feeling the way they are feeling, and how to regulate those emotions,” she says. “The students can understand the different types of zones they are in, and I really emphasize with my students that you don’t have to be in a green zone – which is you’re happy, you’re ready to learn. You don’t always have to be in that zone, it’s okay to be in all the different zones. We just have to learn appropriate ways to cope with the way that we’re feeling and how to regulate those emotions.”

‘Trying to cope’

Hillary Miller teaches fourth grade at Valle Vista Elementary School in Rancho Cucamonga.

“My stepdad died from COVID in February,” she says, sitting at her kitchen table on the eve of the new school year. “Coming from having that in my background, I feel like it makes me a little more prepared to deal with any students who might have lost someone and are trying to cope.”

Miller says she anticipates kids coming back with anxiety after being away for so long. Rather than have an eagle eye on test preparation and academics the way she has during the 18 years she’s been teaching, Miller is hoping this year will create a new baseline for kids.

“I’m going to teach the same way that I would teach any other year. But I’m going to know all along that I’m probably going to have to spend more time on each thing and that I might not get through everything that I’m supposed to get through. I’m going to worry more about how they’re treating each other. Are they following rules? Are they comfortable? Do they feel safe? All of those things will be my number one priority.”

Marcie Griffith, the principal at John Murdy Elementary School in Garden Grove, has been busy preparing the school’s new Wellness Center, equipped with a counselor, cozy furniture, stress balls and fidget gadgets where kids can go before school, after school, during recess and lunch.

“I have teachers who have already said, ‘Hey, I’ll volunteer my time to manage, so that kids can just drop in. And if they need something, even if they just need to be in proximity to a caring adult, and they don’t want to talk, that’s a safe space for them to be.”

Griffith is expecting to see more trauma with students than she’s seen in the past – whether it’s from a death in the family, fear of a death in the family, parents who have lost their jobs, parents who are having mental health crises – and are struggling to be able to take care of their children the way they used to. “I’m expecting that we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of the social-emotional needs that we’re going to see.”

Some schools are primed for the challenge. Capistrano Unified School District, for example, has a full-time counselor on staff at each of its schools (two for its high schools). That and other efforts to support students’ social-emotional needs earned the district the 2021 model program recognition by the American School Counselor Association.

Fresh challenges

One challenge to consider is both teaching and learning while wearing masks. Julie Trujillo said she broke down when she heard the kids would have to wear masks this coming school year.

“The kids couldn’t tell whether I was smiling at them or whether they were in trouble when I called them over,” she says.

Because masks have become hyper-politicized totems of pandemic-era conflict, teachers have a new cross to bear in enforcing mask policies at schools where some students might not understand their significance, and while trying to amp up social-emotional learning with literal barriers that for now are certainly necessary, but in some ways, hindering nonetheless.

Does Principal Griffith worry masks might make it increasingly difficult for kids at her school to resocialize?

“No,” she says. “And the reason I don’t think it’s going to be hard for them is because we’ve had Summer Bridge, which is a sort of summer program here. I’ve seen kids coming back so happy to see each other and so joyful. They’re wearing their masks. They’re doing everything that we’re asking them to do.”

Mike Marnien, a social studies teacher at Chino Hills High School, works with 10th and 12th graders. Working with older students is no doubt much different than working with younger ones, but Chino Hills High School also has a Wellness Center, which they’ve since revamped to suit the needs of the pandemic.

“We’ve had students who have lost family members to COVID or have experienced extreme financial hardship, because parents had lost jobs, and all of a sudden they had to move or they ended up living in a hotel,” Marnien says. “As teachers, we’re the first line of defense. We see the students first, we see them all day long. Counselors don’t typically see the students unless the students either seek them out, or teachers send them.

“A lot of times, students are quiet about what’s going on,” he adds. “They don’t just come to school and say, hey, guess what, my dad lost his job. Usually, the teacher recognizes something’s off with the student, because you get to know your students so well, and will recognize the student needs some type of extra support.”

Noticing the increasing and varied workload for teachers and the mounting pressure to help struggling students catch up, I asked Marnien if he felt overwhelmed or burdened by juggling the various hats that teachers are expected to wear today.

“Every teacher would probably answer that question differently,” he says. “I personally don’t, because I enjoy that aspect of teaching. In fact, I think it’s good for the kids to be able to have a place where they can come to school and have a safe place to talk about things that are going on, or having an adult who’s in their corner. It turns out to be a pretty good support system for the students.”