Public School Students and Their Mental Well-Being

 Two great articles from The NY Times.

The first is School Counselors on How to Help Students Recover From Pandemic Stress. It has some good ideas including some for home and some for schools:

• Restart group activities

Or, start a new activity, either in school or outside of school. 

• Hire more staff

Yes, more of a mirage than reality. But what if there were more adults in buildings? Meaning, what if there were more volunteers helping with meeting kids' needs. 

• Offer places to take a break

I love this one. I can imagine that kids would love a quiet space with simple things to do. (Naturally, it would need to be monitored because you could get a couple of chatty kids in there and the whole thing doesn't work.)

• Teach social and emotional skills

Interesting thing - on Twitter, I get challenged on this. I cannot believe it. Either people don't know what SEL is or feel only parents should talk to kids about emotions. It feels like there are many parents who don't know how or have little time but I would venture kids need to talk about feelings. They need to know it's okay to have and talk about their feelings. Maybe if the guy who shot up the Texas school had had more support, we wouldn't be in this terrible time and place.

• Use therapy tools

A big one suggestion is art and I agree. Any kind of creative activity - cooking, gardening, needlework, painting, drawing, etc. 

• Limit technology use

Totally agree. I might be really painful but kids need to be doing things, not passively reaction to something on a screen.

• Support parents and teachers
• Expand community mental health care

This suggestion might be one to take to Mayor Harrell and the City Council.

Also, consider writing to the Superintendent and Board and ask what SPS is doing (schoolboard@seattleschools.org)

Counselors do preventive work and address short-term needs. For more serious issues, they refer students to mental health resources outside of school. But often parents encounter wait lists or can’t pay for treatment.

Parents need to know there are places outside of schools to find ongoing support.

The other article is 365 Counselors on the Pandemic’s Effect on Children: ‘Anxiety Is Filling Our Kids’

In a Times survey, counselors said students are behind in their abilities to learn, cope and relate.

• Nearly all the counselors, 94 percent, said their students were showing more signs of anxiety and depression than before the pandemic. 
• Eighty-eight percent said students were having more trouble regulating their emotions. 
• And almost three-quarters said they were having more difficulty solving conflicts with friends.
“They have less stamina; more frustration; less flexibility; less effort; less perseverance; more escape and avoidance behaviors,” Cassie Cerny, an elementary school counselor in Weston, Wis., said in response to open-ended questions in the survey.
• “We want every child to have access to a trained school counselor. The issue, though, is there are not enough qualified, licensed personnel to fill these positions.”
• At schools closed to in-person learning for a year and a half or more, three-quarters of the counselors said children were physically fighting more often, compared with less than half at schools that were open longer.

The counselors who participated in the unscientific survey are members of the association, which distributed it for The Times. The survey included counselors in 49 states who work with various age groups, from kindergartners through 12th graders. About a quarter were in urban schools, a third in rural areas and the rest in suburban schools. Roughly one-third worked in schools in which a majority of children qualified for free lunch.