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Schools Are Struggling to Meet Rising Mental Health Needs

It’s been a hard year. Ask any teacher or principal. Now the federal Education Department has data to prove it.

According to a Washington Post article, a survey of 830 nationally-representative K-12 schools released this week has some perhaps unsurprising news. “The pandemic has taken a clear and significant toll on students’ mental health,” according to Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) who conducted the survey. Among the findings:

  • 7 in 10 public schools are seeing a rise in the number of children seeking mental health services.
  • 76 percent said faculty and staff members have expressed concerns about depression, anxiety and trauma in students since the pandemic hit.
  • Yet only about half of all schools said they were able to effectively provide needed services.
  • The survey did not find any statistically significant differences on this question among schools based on student racial or economic demographics.
  • Just 12 percent of schools strongly agreed with the statement “My school is able to effectively provide mental health services to all students in need.”
  • School staff are hurting as well as students. About 3 in 10 schools reported an increase in employees seeking school-based mental health services.
  • 6 in 10 schools reported a rise in staffers’ concern over their own or their colleagues’ mental health.

The good news? In response to rising need, seven in 10 schools said they have a program in place to address social and emotional learning. The bad news? Conservatives in some communities are attacking those programs, painting them as some form of “indoctrination.”

These stark statistics were collected in April, before the school massacre in Uvalde, TX which rocked the nation. In schools encompassing every racial and socio-economic demographic, student mental health is a serious concern across the board. Schools are struggling to keep up, lacking the funding and personnel to meet the need.

Principal Derrick Lawson of Indio High School in southern California put it this way: the pandemic exposed many long-standing, hidden mental health struggles. A pool of water may look calm and placid, but “if you drain the water, all of a sudden, you find all kinds of stuff.”

Read the full article here.

Read the survey in its entirety here.

 

Meckler, Laura. “Schools are struggling to meet rising mental health needs.” The Washington Post, 31 May 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/05/31/schools-mental-health-covid-students/.

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