Most kids around the country are back in classrooms by now, but this school year isn’t quite the return-to-normalcy that everyone had hoped for. Covid-19 cases are surging again, and many school districts have already closed due to outbreaks. Others are offering remote learning options. This school year is already feeling uncertain and anxiety ridden for many students.

“Teacher, kids, everybody thought we were going to come back this year and everything would be back to normal,” says Dr. Nicole Christian-Brathwaite, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and a senior vice president at Array Behavioral Care. “And now that it’s not, how do we prepare kids for another potentially challenging year?”

That’s a question she’s been getting a lot from schools in recent weeks. So what do you do? Christian-Brathwaite and other mental health experts gave NPR some tips that parents, teachers and all adults can use to help kids cope better in these uncertain times.

1. Adults, take care of your own well being first.

“There are no healthy children without healthy adults,” says Christian-Brathwaite.

It’s important for adults in charge of kids to take care of their own mental health, she says, so they are able to better manage whatever comes their way.

Practice things that will support your resilience, advises child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr. Vera Feuer, the associate vice president for school mental health at Northwell Health.

Feuer suggests doing calming activities like yoga and meditation. In fact, any physical activity can help, she adds, like hiking, dancing or playing sports. It will help you manage your emotions better and stay calm during stressful times, she says. And in the process you can teach your kids or students these important skills, too.

“Kids and parents should understand that we all have anxiety and stress in our lives, and the goal is not to eliminate it, but to learn to manage it,” adds Feuer.

Christian-Brathwaite suggests incorporating calming activities like meditation into the school day — either at the start of the day, or during transitions between classes.

“Something as simple as a regular practice of meditation or mindfulness, it decreases our stress response,” she says. “It brings kids out of that fight, flight or freeze, and it brings the adults out of it as well.”

2. Talk to kids about their concerns — and validate their feelings

It’s important to start talking to kids about their emotions and their mental health early, and before things reach a crisis point.

Families should “provide kids with open spaces to discuss their concerns,” says Feuer. “This generation is changing in terms of their view of mental health. And there is a positive shift in the stigma issue in terms of kids being more willing and able to come forward and talk about things. And really, adults need to continue to support that.”

The same advice goes for schools, too, says Dena Trujillo, interim CEO of Crisis Text Line, which has created a toolkit called Mental Health School Supplies to help kids cope better during these times.

“Some of these things seem basic, but they’re really important,” she says.

And when kids express their concerns, say about being back in school, or fear of infections, parents and teachers need to accept their concerns as valid, says Feuer, and then teach them tools to manage their anxiety and stress, like yoga, meditation and mindfulness.

Even better: practice these skills as a family.

“Combining that with family time to give parents the opportunity to implement these practices, but to open the door for dialogue,” says Christian-Brathwaite.

And be on the lookout for changes in behavior like sleeping and eating patterns, she adds.

“Just being aware of those behavioral changes: Is there a decrease or increase in eating? Is there a decrease or increase in exercise? Who are they hanging out with? What are they doing?”

All of those can be indicators of a child starting to struggle emotionally.

3. Be ready to provide extra support to students and teachers

“I really recommend that you just assume that everyone has experienced some level of pain,” says Chirstian-Brathwaite. “Every child that you engage with has some level of trauma.”

But children’s pain and emotional struggles often come out in the form of behavioral problems, like being disruptive in a classroom or inability to focus and learn.

For kids being disruptive in class, she advises against disciplinary action.

“I’m really asking schools not to implement suspensions or detentions immediately and to really take a more trauma sensitive lens,” says Christian-Brathwaite. “Instead of focusing on the behavior, disciplining them, sending them out of school, leading to more disruption in education, let’s focus on what’s behind that behavior. Where is this pain coming from? What was the catalyst for this child to act out? What’s happened at home that may lead this child to misbehave?”

School administrators should take a similar approach toward teachers, she adds. If a teacher is late, or having a hard time, she suggests that the school principal or superintendent ask the teacher what additional support they need to be successful.

4. Help kids embrace structure and routine

In a world filled with so much uncertainty, structure and routine are one’s friends.

“Some of what is helpful is actually making a schedule,” says Trujillo. “As you go back into this new way of living, structure is helpful. Writing down that schedule or having it in your calendar so that you have that sense of control and stability.”

Feuer suggests working ahead of time with your child to come up with a structure and stick to it. “Be consistent,” she says.

And if a child is worried about past experiences that have stressed them out, she suggests “collaborative problem solving.”

“Just talking to kids about what they [can] do if that were to happen and how to manage it and how to talk about what skills they can use in terms of managing it,” says Feuer.

5. Know where to turn for help

If a child is struggling emotionally, or in crisis, know beforehand where to reach for help, suggests Trujillo.

The easiest option for kids or their teachers or families is the Crisis Text Line, by texting HOME to 741741 and connecting to a trained counselor.

If you know a child struggling with thoughts of suicide, you can call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1(800) 273-8255.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Reprinted from How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio by Naomi S. Baron. Copyright © Oxford University Press 2021. All rights reserved.

By Naomi S. Baron

Do you believe that young kids (say, from birth to age five or six) should be firmly rooted in the world of print? Or are you worried you’re depriving children of a valuable opportunity if you deny them access to digital reading?

Parents are torn. Studies from multiple English-speaking countries show the majority of parents continue to prefer print for their toddlers and preschoolers. Yet by nixing digital offerings, mothers and fathers worry their kids will be left behind—in enjoyment, learning, or preparation for primary school, where children might be handed a tablet their first day.

As I thought about the dilemma and read conflicting research, I began asking myself, was the debate missing the point? Just as many adults choose print for some purposes and digital for others, were there solid arguments for when digital is appropriate for young children  and when to stick with print? Sensing the answer was “yes” I began thinking about… food.

Food? Indeed. We’ve likely all seen the traditional food pyramid (now reconfigured as MyPlate). While the proportions of what goes where change over time, the pyramid (or plate) concept reminds us that a balanced diet has multiple components. Lots of fruits, vegetables, and grains? You bet. But you also need some oil and salt. Meat, poultry, and fish? Optional, but if you’re vegetarian, figure out how to compensate elsewhere in your diet.

Back to children—and books. We start with infants (birth to roughly two years of age). Experts agree that when it comes to book-reading, physical books are an obvious choice. However, particularly over the last few years, even print-loving pediatricians are identifying sound reasons for letting kids younger than two have some access to
touchscreens. As early childhood specialists Natalia Kucirkova and Barry Zuckerman argue, touchscreens potentially foster vocabulary development, contribute to fine motor control and hand/eye coordination, and facilitate communication when, say,
Skyping grandparents or sharing family photos onscreen.

What about the next phases of early childhood—and materials that count as books (print or digital)? For a meaningful answer, we need to start with the purpose of reading: What are parents looking to accomplish when they sit with their child and a book, or when children are ensconced with books on their own? We can think about reading with toddlers and preschoolers through three perspectives:

• The social side
• The linguistic and cognitive side
• The engagement side

Keep in mind, though, that while it may be convenient for research purposes to distinguish these three approaches, in actual practice they are interwoven.

Three Sides of Reading With Young Children

The Social Side

Years ago, the psychologist Jerome Bruner argued that children begin learning to talk not as a standalone enterprise but as a linguistic overlay atop social interaction with caregivers. Similarly, much of the reading we do with young children is as much about being together and sharing experiences as about the books themselves. In fact, joint reading is one of the tools recommended by pediatricians to foster bonding between parent and child.

Among academics, the term “dialogic talk” describes conversation with infants and toddlers that takes place around reading. (With infants, understandably, the adult generally needs to uphold both sides of the conversation.) Yes, you read the book, but you ask questions and connect what the book is about to experiences in
the child’s own world: “Look at that elephant! Remember the elephant we saw at the zoo yesterday?” Such conversational give and take spontaneously takes place in many households, but other times the practice benefits from being structured and modeled
for parents.

[aside postID=’mindshift_51281′ label=’What’s Going On In Your Child’s Brain When You Read Them A Story?’]

Decades ago, most of the research I did was on child language acquisition. At the time, linguists were starting to recognize that not all children learn language the same way, Among the reasons is cultural context. For instance, middle-class infants in the United States tend to start using words earlier than kids living in societies where parents aren’t constantly pointing out names for things, as in, “Peter, there’s a fish. It’s a fish. Can you say ‘fish’?” Take the Tsimané, an Amazonian tribe in Bolivia, where mothers average less than one minute a day directly talking with babies—about one-tenth the amount in the U.S. But regardless of the cultural parenting patterns, all these children learn to talk.

The same cultural issue extends to dialogic talk around books with young children. In many literate societies in which children grow up to be accomplished readers, interactive reading with infants and toddlers isn’t part of the social landscape. My husband, who’s from a highly literary family in India and learned to read by himself
around age four, reminds me of this difference.

Debate over print versus digital books for young children often revolves around the assumption that print encourages dialogic talk more than digital does. (More on that in a moment.) But is this difference inevitable? Recent initiatives, in both Norway
and the United States, suggest productive ways of building dialogue into the ways we read digital books with young children.

What’s also often missing from the discussion is that the role of books with young children extends beyond child-caregiver bonding. We need to think more broadly about goals, including which platform best supports them.

The Linguistic and Cognitive Side

Before children are able to read on their own, there is much they absorb in the presence of books. Those books could be read by an adult or, in the case of digital books, through voice activation. In either case, young children might come to pair picture, written word, and spoken word with an object (such as that elephant). They also might learn about cause and effect through following a storyline.

We know that children’s linguistic development is bolstered by the richness of language used around them. Particularly in social contexts where young children aren’t hearing a lot of vocabulary and more complex syntax, it’s useful to harness additional tools to enhance kids’ learning opportunities. Sesame Street is a resoundingly successful example of good modeling for children and adults alike. (While watching with my toddler son, I learned the word “puce” from an episode in the 1980s, where Maria went shopping for shoes.)

With the coming of digital books and apps, it’s hardly surprising that educators and parents want to know how these materials measure up against print when it comes to language-based learning. As we’ll see, many researchers are investigating this issue.

The Engagement Side

You’ve seen those parents—or been one. You’re at a restaurant, and that two-year-old at the next table wont stop crying. In desperation, Dad fetches his iPhone, pulls up a cartoon video, plants the phone in front of the miserable toddler, and voilà! Peace is restored.

There’s no question that digital technologies can be engaging. In debates between those for and against handing digital books to young children, the “con” side points to research showing children tend to focus on the device more than on the storyline or the parents trying to read with their child. All true. Does that mean such engagement is wholly negative? And how does it relate to broader senses of engagement, including cognitive or physical interaction?

As Natalia Kucirkova and ‘Teresa Cremin eloquently argue in their book “Children Reading for Pleasure in the Digital Age,” the act of reading (or being read to) is most beneficial when it includes activity on the child’s part. Importantly, this activity involves constructing meaning from what’s being read, but it might also entail patting fuzzy surfaces or opening windows in a print book, or perhaps selecting music or exploring an image in a digital work.

Researchers have begun unpacking the varied functions print or digital books might serve for young children, particularly in the eyes of parents. Roxanne Etta surveyed more than 2,000 parents of preschoolers, asking when print or digital was more appropriate. While print was typically judged best for social experience with a child, eBooks were commonly used for entertainment or, in Etta’s term, babysitting. As the quality of eBooks continues to improve, and as parents learn ways of incorporating dialogic talk with children while using digital materials, we’ll see whether these patterns shift.

Naomi S. Baron is Professor of Linguistics Emerita at American University in Washington, DC. A Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Fellow, and Fulbright Specialist, she has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Baron is author of How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World and Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World.

You can listen to this episode of the MindShift Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, NPR One, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.

‘Genius’ is a rare title often reserved for adults who have accomplished something extraordinary, like making discoveries after decades of research in their field. But we shortchange ourselves by reserving genius to a select few, according to Gholdy Muhammad, a professor, teacher-trainer and author of the best-selling book, “Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy.” 

“Genius means how are our students intellectually creative, smart, what can they do that is special, intuitive, innovative,” she said. 

She said we have more to gain by starting earlier and seeing genius as the brilliance that can be developed in each person. There are many examples of prominent people who got their start in childhood, often when a caring adult, such as a teacher, identified that spark and helped the child reach their potential. After all, those adults who we consider genius got their start somewhere in childhood. For instance, long before Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel prize for her CRISPR gene editing research, she was a high school student who didn’t even see herself as a scientist. She told the Washington Post she didn’t think about becoming a scientist until one person saw the brilliance in her: 10th grade chemistry teacher Jeannette Wong.  

But not everyone gets a Jeanette Wong at the front of their class. And it’s not that teachers can’t see potential. As a teacher-trainer, Gholdy Muhammad noticed a gap between how teachers saw the brilliance in their own children vs. what they saw in the students they taught.  

“[Teachers] would say things like, ‘they’re confrontational, defiant,’” said Muhammad, describing what teachers she trained in professional development sessions would say to her about their students. “Teachers would tell me this in high schools where you have to test to get into the high school; you had to test at a college level.”

“And then I would ask them to tell me about their own sons and daughters and magically it became a positive. But that positivity did not carry over, particularly to Black children and Latinx children.” 

Cultivating a genius isn’t just about introducing someone to a set of facts or skills and believing in them. Muhammad distilled what matters into the five tenets of the Historically Responsive Literacy framework: identity, skills, intellectualism, criticality and joy.

[aside postID=’mindshift_57137′ label=’How Historically Responsive Literacy Can Make Learning More Relevant to Students’, heroLink=’‘]

Take a listen to this episode of the MindShift Podcast to learn more about how the five tenets of historically responsive literacy work together to inspire and engage students. Or you can read more about it here.

Subscribe in your favorite podcast app so you won’t miss a single episode. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, NPR One, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.

After the release of his bestselling book “The Self-Driven Child,” clinical neuropsychologist William Stixrud got a request: make it even easier for parents to apply the research in the book.

So Stixrud and his co-author Ned Johnson wrote “What Do You Say? How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home.” Their goal was to give parents more language they can use with kids. They recently spoke about their new book at a parent education workshop hosted by Parent Venture. Johnson is the founder of PrepMatters and host of PrepTalksPod

The relationship between parent and child is central to building children’s self-motivation and stress tolerance. And how parents respond to kids when they are emotionally distressed can strengthen or strain that relationship.

Seek First to Understand

Johnson and Stixrud interviewed dozens of adolescents, asking them “Who do you feel closest to?” and “What is it about that person that helps you feel close?” The overwhelming sentiment was this: “The person I feel closest to is the one who listens to me and listens without judgment,” said Stixrud. “The purpose of communication is ultimately to connect.” 

But too often, when kids are in distress, parents want to use words to fix their feelings, said Johnson. “We use logical words and try to talk them out of their hard feelings,” he said. But logic doesn’t calm the stress response; “empathy and validation do.”

When parents offer suggestions – even really sensible ones – most children often “bounce them away,” said Johnson. “We start giving all the things to try and they will reflexively give us all the reasons it won’t work.” 

Instead, he said parents should seek first to understand, show an interest in their child’s interests, ask non-leading questions and practice listening carefully and then reflecting back what you hear with phrases such as: “Let me see if I can get this straight . . . Do I have that right?”

You can pivot toward advice eventually, Johnson said, but if you want to be heard, you need to start with empathy.  And if you do offer suggestions, avoid firm directives. Instead try phrases such as, “Can I make a suggestion?”; “I have an idea about that. Can I run it by you?”; or “For whatever it’s worth . . . ” Stay warm and tentative, framing advice as an offering rather than a command. “We are much less likely to get resistance if we do that,” said Johnson. 

Be a Manager, Not a Boss

As teens prepare to become independent adults, parents need to reframe their perception of their role, said Stixrud. “Think of yourself more as a manager than as a boss. We want to offer our help, advice and wisdom, but not force it down kids’ throats. And we want kids, as much as possible, to make their own decisions. Our goal is for kids to run their own lives before we send them off to college.” 

Stixrud recommends that parents take force off the table in their interactions with kids.  

“I start with no force,” he said, “and then I’m much more able to get cooperation and get kids to try things.” When you find yourself in a power struggle with your child, step back and use language that prioritizes the relationship, such as, “I love you too much to fight with you about your homework.” 

Power struggles activate the threat center of the brain, said Johnson, and so an overt “no-force” approach supports collaborative problem-solving. For example, if video games are a source of parent-child tension, start by showing genuine interest. “Learn the game or at least watch them play,” said Johnson. “Tell them ‘I see why you like this stuff.’”  Once you have had a chance to validate their perspective, you can say something like, “I get that you love video games. I also know that when you play too much, you get irritable and don’t have time for other things. You see that too. Let’s figure out a solution that works for you and works for me.” 

When we talk in a way that minimizes pressure, it helps our kids develop autonomy. “It’s counterproductive to motivate kids through fear or guilt,” said Stixrud. “We may get kids to do stuff, but it doesn’t do anything for self-motivation.” 

Model Calm and Confidence

When parents are constantly monitoring kids – from using apps to check their whereabouts to constant texting or checking online grades – they inadvertently convey the message that life is scary and too much for teens to handle on their own. In contrast, said Stixrud, one of most powerful messages we can give our kids is this: “I have confidence in your ability to make your own decisions.” 

When kids are faced with something that scares them, parents are tempted to offer continual assurances that they are okay. “Stop reassuring them all the time,” said Stixrud. Instead try saying something like, “I know this makes you really anxious, but I’m 100% confident you can handle it.”  

Children need practice facing the things they are worried about.  “Anxiety manifests as avoidance,” said Stixrud,  As parents, it’s a delicate balance “help just enough but not too much” so that we don’t deprive kids of experiences they need to develop confidence. 

Communicating with this kind of assured energy takes practice, said Johnson, but it’s worth it. We need to do the best we can to be a “non-anxious presence” in kids’ lives, he said. “When the people who are in charge aren’t overly reactive, systems just work better. Calm is contagious.”

Listen for “Change Talk” 

Parents often express frustration when kids seem stubbornly resistant to making the changes that we think will benefit them. But people, including adults, “are ambivalent about changing,” said Johnson. For example, “if kids are getting terrible grades, it’s not lost on them that there would be benefits to changing that behavior.” But they may be ambivalent because they know it will take tremendous effort to turn around their grades – and they may put all that work in and still not be an “A student.” 

In their practices, Stixrud and Johnson ask a lot of open-ended questions and listen for what they call “change talk.” This might sound like kids expressing some dissatisfaction about their sleep or study habits or kids mentioning an activity, topic or club they want to investigate.

The aim of these exploratory, non-pressured conversations is to “create space [for kids] to articulate the reasons for themselves why to go this way rather than that way,” said Johnson. As parents, “we are working ‘with’ them, not ‘on’ them.”

After all, said Stixrud, our goal isn’t to “change our kids,” but rather to “change the way we react to our kids.”

When teacher Brandon Graves in Louisville, Ky., talks with his elementary school students about the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he tells them where he was that day — in Washington, D.C., a freshman at Howard University, where he could smell smoke from the Pentagon.

“I liken it to, when I was that age, my parents and the adults around me would talk about where they were when Martin Luther King got killed,” Graves says.

Teaching K-12 students about the attacks of 9/11 has always been difficult. But with the 20th anniversary of the attacks this weekend, time has brought a new challenge: Students today have no memories of that day. So NPR checked in with educators and experts across the country for advice on how to approach 9/11 with kids for whom the attacks are simply history.

First and foremost, keep it age-appropriate

The Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility offers several 9/11 lesson plans on its website but says that “children ages 4 to 7 are too young for a lesson on September 11. They lack the knowledge to make sense of the attacks and their aftermath in any meaningful way.”

Similarly, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City offers interactive lesson plans for students beginning in third grade.

For children in grades three to five, Morningside recommends a brief, fact-based account of the day, including that nearly 3,000 people were killed:

“Explain that on September 11, 2001, a group of men took over two planes and flew them into the World Trade Center, a pair of skyscrapers in downtown Manhattan. After several enormous explosions, both buildings collapsed, killing almost 3,000 people. On that same day, two additional planes were hijacked by the same group. One was flown into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing 125 people, while the other crashed in a field in Pennsylvania killing all on board. Though it was never proven, that last plane was thought to be on its way to the White House or the Capitol.”

Make room for discomfort

Graves says the scale of pain and loss can understandably unsettle some young students. “They’re not used to that,” he says. “They’re used to stories geared toward kids, and so there’s a happy ending.”

Other educators note that, especially with older children, we often underestimate what they already know and what they can handle.

“We advise teachers to be bold, and be courageous in meeting the kids where they’re at,” says Tala Manassah, deputy executive director of the Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility. “Sometimes the edges of our learning happen when we are uncomfortable.”

This extends to how educators answer two very hard questions kids have always asked:

Be clear who the attackers were — and weren’t

Emily Gardner, an elementary school librarian in Texas, says it’s important to be clear and specific when talking about the group of 19 men behind the attacks.

“We’re very careful to answer that question, that it’s al-Qaida, it’s a terrorist organization,” Gardner says. “It’s not Muslims. It’s not people from a certain country.”

In some classrooms, the discrimination and Islamophobia that followed the attacks feature prominently in how teachers talk about the lessons of 9/11.

As for answering children when they ask why those 19 men did what they did, Graves says, “I think it is so important for educators, adults to be able to sit with a child and say, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

Stress how they can get still help

Graves worked with the group, Global Game Changers, to develop lessons around 9/11. Jan Helson, the group’s co-founder, says it’s important to follow that “I don’t know” with, “But what we do know is that really good people stood up to help us overcome those bad things.”

That’s why many of the school materials created by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum feature the stories of first responders who ran toward danger that day. It’s also important for kids to look not just for those helpers but to feel like they, too, can help.

“We give students an opportunity to respond and take action,” says Gardner, who remembers when her school’s art teacher “worked with our students and talked about art as empathy. And so our students made paper flowers that we mailed to the memorial.”

The Sept. 11 memorial itself suggests several activities that can help kids feel helpful, including making a first responder badge or survivor tree leaves.

Be prepared to share your feelings

Megan Jones, vice president of education at the museum, says one thing has stood out to her this year about the questions she and her staff have been hearing from kids.

In the past, children’s curiosity has largely focused on the facts of that day. This year, though, “They’re asking, ‘What was it like for you? How did you feel after 9/11? When did you feel safe again?’ ”

The reason for these questions this year, Jones says, is that today’s students are living through a new tragedy, one that has upended their lives and killed 650,000 grandparents and parents, brothers and sisters in the U.S. alone. Many children are feeling exhausted and frightened by the pandemic and may be grieving.

Jones says she hopes this COVID-19 generation of students finds solace — and reassurance — in the September 11 Memorial & Museum’s annual webinar for schools, which premieres Friday. More than 1 million people, most of them students, have already registered — nearly a threefold increase from last year.

This year, the webinar includes the voice of Brielle Saracini, who was just 10 years old on 9/11. Her father, Victor Saracini, was piloting United Airlines Flight 175 when it was hijacked and flown into the south tower of the World Trade Center.

“I just wanted to be normal,” Brielle Saracini says in a prerecorded video, remembering the days immediately after 9/11. “And I kind of internalized a lot of my grief. And grieving in public is very difficult, and so my way of dealing with it was just to kind of be quiet about it.”

Ultimately, Saracini found joy, friendship and even her future husband at Camp Better Days, a camp for children who lost loved ones in the attacks. She has also persevered through a personal battle with cancer. Jones says Saracini’s story is one of resilience that will resonate with today’s COVID-19 generation.

“Young people are looking to a generation who did live through a world-changing event,” Jones says, “and they want to know that it’s possible to come out of it and how did we do it.”

And the answers — that it is possible but hard and that we have to help each other — are as relevant today as ever.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

This story about The Dream SMP was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

Back in the spring of 2020, before my tween daughters became obsessed with Minecraft YouTube, I thought I had pandemic parenting figured out. Their teachers were struggling to put together half-days of online instruction, so I filled the void with “Dad School,” folding my children into a world full of all my favorite things. We made family dinners. We built a fort in the woods. I even let my girls stay up late to watch “The Last Dance,” the documentary series about Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, so I could show them one of my childhood heroes and they could dye my hair just like Dennis Rodman’s.

The high point of this period was a weeks-long Dungeons & Dragons quest. My heart nearly burst when my girls fell in love with the role-playing narrative adventure game I had once enjoyed so much. My older daughter, 10 years old at the time, with new glasses and a growing collection of high-waisted jeans, spent hours crafting an elaborate back story for her character, a moon-elf sorcerer named Glory who was intensely loyal to her friends and harbored a blind hatred of injustice. My younger daughter, 8, and still all elbows and knees, helped me concoct fantastical adventures, forcing her sister’s alter-ego to choose between risking death to save injured goblins or playing it safe to protect her fellow adventures.

This lasted until June. Then extended quarantine started to pull us in separate directions. For my daughters, stuck at home with their parents and still detached from their social lives, time started to spin faster, shredding their remaining days of childhood. But for me, middle-aged and increasingly exhausted, time slowed to a crawl, turning each day into trench warfare.

“Dad,” my 10-year-old asked one evening as I confronted the dishes, “speaking as a Boomer, is it harder to make friends as you get older?”

Actually, I said, I’m Gen X. And yes. Yes, it is.

Recognizing our kids’ growing social isolation, my wife and I tried to compensate by adopting a puppy. We also bought an Xbox, so they could join their friends for online Minecraft, the hugely popular video game that lets users explore vast digital realms and use animated 3-D blocks to build whatever they can imagine.

This is still OK, I remember thinking. Sure, my kids will be in front of screens more. But Minecraft is rich with opportunities for collaboration and creative problem-solving and all the other good stuff experts encourage.

It was a Saturday evening in late August when my illusions finally shattered. Instead of creating their own Minecraft worlds, my daughters were starting to spend hours watching other people play the game on YouTube. I tried to take advantage of their new habit, cleaning the house and chasing the puppy and catching up on overdue work. By 8:30 p.m., I was beat, so I scavenged cold leftovers in the kitchen, then crumpled into the sofa and turned the TV to an NBA playoff game.

Twenty minutes later, my 10-year-old wandered into the room, bleary-eyed and hungry. I had lost track of her, and she had lost track of time.

“It’s almost 9 o’clock,” she said. “Are we going to have dinner?”

Making ‘The Dream SMP’

The YouTube content that came to consume my daughters’ attention was called “The Dream SMP.”

The “Dream’” part refers to the username of a popular online gamer. According to his Wikitubia fan page, Dream is a 21-year-old former AppleCare worker from Orlando, Florida. He has yet to publicly reveal his face or full name, creating instead an online identity around a white blob with a smiley face. He did not respond to my requests for an interview.

“SMP,” meanwhile, is shorthand for “survival multiplayer.” This refers to the private Minecraft server that Dream launched in April 2020 so he and a few gamer friends could explore a new update to the game. Starting in July 2020, however, dozens of other prominent Minecraft YouTubers with usernames like Quackity and Technoblade and CaptainPuffy began joining in, turning The Dream SMP into a sprawling collaborative experiment. By late 2020, gameplay on the server was being guided by “Hamilton”-inspired narrative storylines and loosely sketched character arcs, with more than 30 players taking part in improvised role-plays that were streamed on multiple Twitch and YouTube channels, allowing millions of kids like mine to follow along.

It was the Minecraft equivalent of Marvel Studios’ superhero-filled cinematic universe. My whole body sagged with age when my older daughter first tried to explain it to me.

“So basically, there’s an evil egg on the server, and it like infests everything, making you evil and power-hungry, and it kind of like whispers you things inside your head. And then there’s like a whole faction, the Eggpire, and they held a Red Banquet, which was supposed to be like, ‘Oh, we come in peace,’ but then really they were actually gonna kill everybody,” she told me one evening in the kitchen while I chopped peppers.

I grimaced and nodded along, trying not to slice my fingers as I fought to keep the puppy from eating the placemats.

Related: Why all screen time isn’t created equally

On the one hand, my children’s fascination with The Dream SMP was a relief. They certainly seemed to enjoy it more than the family viewings of “Stranger Things” I had arranged in a failed attempt to reclaim their focus.

At the same time, however, The Dream SMP also gave me plenty of reason to worry. When I came downstairs, my girls would immediately pause whatever video they were watching, setting off my dad alarm. When I insisted that they let me watch along, I saw a pale-skinned, mop-haired British teenager who seemed to communicate mostly via screams, braying laughs, and random phrases he seemed to feel obliged to repeat at least four times.

“Dude, I’ve never been that close to weeing myself on stream,” was one of the few complete sentences I caught through the din.

This, I learned, was Thomas “TommyInnit” Simons, a hyperactive chaos agent who liked to burn down other players’ Minecraft houses and was in hot online water after sharing his platform with another gamer who had a history of uttering transphobic slurs. My daughters seemed captivated by his incessant trolling, filling my head with panicked visions of once-sweet children being transformed into obnoxious adolescent QAnon adherents who railed against cancel culture.

When confronted with such moments, experts urge parents to play the long game, creating a safe space for open communication by asking lots of open-ended questions and offering non-judgmental statements of our own values.

“If you’re able to make them feel like you truly care about their interests, you’re setting the stage for a future of important conversations,” said Yalda T. Uhls, who studies the ways media influences children’s development for the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In the moment, of course, I fell well short of this advice, fixating instead on my own fears.

“So, do you have a crush on this Tommy guy?” I asked my older daughter, by then 11 years old and attending a new school where she’d never met her teachers or most of her classmates in person.

“Ugh,” she responded, storming out of the room.

‘A very beautiful ecology’

The YouTube content that finally brought my family together featured two of the biggest stars on The Dream SMP: Dream and George “GeorgeNotFound” Davidson, a 24-year-old gamer from Britain.

The video started with the duo explaining how they hacked an electronic dog collar, using computer code and a pocket-sized microcontroller to reprogram the device to deliver electric shocks each time the wearer’s Minecraft character took damage during gameplay. From there, the tension slowly mounted, reaching a crescendo when GeorgeNotFound got zapped in the arm and started howling wildly.

For a few glorious minutes, I felt young again, transported back to the hours I used to spend watching ‘Jackass’ reruns and recording dumb skits on cassette tapes with my brothers.

“Look, Dad is actually laughing!” my younger daughter told her sister in amazement. “Usually, he only laughs at his own jokes.”

It was then that I decided to make more of an effort to see The Dream SMP through my girls’ eyes.

Related: Paper beats pixels on most picture books, research finds

Part of what they found so appealing, it turned out, were the storylines, full of revolution and betrayal and shifting alliances. They also loved the characters, none of whom is entirely good or always bad. And they took great pleasure in digging through the multi-layered identities of all the players in The Dream SMP, each of whom is simultaneously an actual human being and a crafted online persona and a character being role-played for dramatic effect.

In other words, I came to realize, my children’s new online world was very much like the fourth and fifth grade classrooms they were missing out on as remote learning sucked the life out of their 2020-21 school year.

“It’s not that I didn’t like ‘Stranger Things,’” my older daughter eventually confessed. “But I love the chaotic-ness of The Dream SMP. It feels more realistic. There’s always multiple stories going on, and you have to consider multiple people’s points of view.”

By that point, Dad School was a distant memory, and my girls had started describing themselves as members of the “The Dream SMP community.” They spent hours online, searching out the digital artwork and fiction created by the other young fans with whom they now shared a connection.

“It’s a very beautiful ecology,” said Crystal Abidin, an associate professor of Internet Studies at Australia’s Curtin University. “By creating their own version of these fictive worlds, young people are taking spaces like Minecraft and making them their own.”

Inspired, I decided to join my kids in exploring the Dream SMP universe. I quickly developed a fondness for fan art featuring a participant named BadBoyHalo, YouTube-famous for saying “muffins” instead of curse words during his streams.

One of my favorite images featured a grinning boy and a smiling puppy, both holding fresh-baked muffins against a backdrop of multi-colored hearts. I texted it to my older daughter, saying that I too now thought some parts of The Dream SMP were pretty awesome.

“Dang ur on a roll that ones cool,” she quickly texted back.

From Friday movie night to Friday YouTube night

Although Dream wouldn’t discuss the phenomenal popularity of his Minecraft server with me, he did join YouTube interviewer Anthony Padilla for an online conversation this June.

By that point, he had amassed nearly 22 million YouTube subscribers, but ceded significant control of his Minecraft server to his fellow participants. As a result, TommyInnit’s videos had collectively been viewed nearly a billion times, while other players were adding hundreds of thousands of new followers a month and launching fresh YouTube channels for their other creative endeavors.

“I’m honestly not that surprised,” Dream said. “When I go through and add somebody to the SMP, I don’t want them to just be successful in the SMP. I want them to take that and be successful [elsewhere].”

Ironically, experts recommend that parents try to empower their children in similar ways.

“Your job is to teach your kids how to get through their digital adolescence by managing themselves, so they can do the things they want to do online with grace,” said Amanda Lenhart, who studies technology’s impact on families for the Data & Society, a nonprofit research organization.

Related: What are the effects of social isolation from coronavirus on kids?

That perspective reflects a growing consensus that guardrails around children’s screen time should take circumstance into account, while focusing more on quality than quantity. When the pandemic era is viewed through that lens, Lenhart said, it actually seems pretty great that many kids responded to a time of severe social isolation by going online in search of communities and stories that could help them make sense of the world and themselves. That’s an important lesson that adults can carry forward, even as the pandemic eases and many children return to in-person school.

“Things like The Dream SMP should expand our ideas of what is art and what makes for good narrative and where opportunities for creative expression now show up in our children’s lives,” Lenhart said. “It’s no longer just in the books they get from the library.”

To be sure, Minecraft YouTube still gives me plenty of reason for concern. I’m not thrilled with all the penis jokes. I worry about the growing subsection of Dream fans linked to toxic and threatening online behavior. YouTube’s algorithm, which feeds users an unrelenting tsunami of related content, constantly overwhelms whatever bandwidth busy parents like me have to monitor what our children are doing online, a problem the platform’s parental controls have yet to adequately solve.

The amazing thing, though, was that once I started trusting my children, they started to bring such issues to my attention on their own. My daughters wanted to know what my wife and I thought. Even better, they wanted us to know what they thought.

As the 2020-21 school year came to a close, my children suggested that maybe we could swap out Friday movie night for Friday YouTube night. I pouted a little at the prospect of changing a cherished family ritual, but quickly caught myself. My girls promptly rewarded my progress.

They started the evening by showing a recap of the first few months of The Dream SMP, made by fans who blew me away by painstakingly recreating the entire Minecraft world on their own server. Then my girls played streams from some of the seminal events in The Dream SMP storyline, including a full-on role-played political debate between the server’s competing political parties, SWAG2020 and POG2020. Our watch party closed with a heartbreakingly beautiful animation created by digital artist SAD-ist, who according to Wikitubia is an 18-year-old fan from the Philippines who splices together dialogue from Dream SMP streams with her own drawings and music by the German composers 2WEI.

The high point was a dramatic recreation of the scene that led to The Dream SMP’s most famous one-liner, since meme-ified by millions of fans like my daughters and me.

“It was never meant to be,” we yelled along when the big moment came.

When we finally turned the Xbox off, it felt like we had reached an important new milestone.

“Girls, thank you so much for showing me all this,” I said. “I’m sorry I can be such a difficult student.”

“It’s OK,” my children agreed. “It’s fun trying to teach you about the things we like.”

This story about The Dream SMP was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

For the first three days of summer camp, Stephanie Lucianovic’s 8-year-old son arrived home with tear-streaked cheeks. The causes varied — a skinned knee, another child kicking sand on his water bottle and other small bumps in days filled with climbing trees and making clay art. “All valid, emotional things, but he was really very quick to tears those first couple of days,” said Lucianovic, who lives in Menlo Park, California. For most of the 2020-21 school year, her son attended second grade in a hybrid format, with alternating weeks of in-person and virtual classes. She attributed his summer camp reactions to emotions worn thin by the dealing with many changes since COVID-19 arrived in the spring of his first grade year.

My 8 y.o. has cried at camp every day for one reason or another. None of it is sustained crying but it is showing how pushed-to-the-surface his emotions still are as he gets back to social situations.

I hope school will be better.
I hope they help the students process this.

— Stephanie Lucianovic Pre-order HELLO STAR (@grubreport) July 23, 2021

Lucianovic’s observations echoed what camp directors noticed among many kids this season, according to Tom Rosenberg, President and CEO of the American Camp Association. One camp director called it “the summer of more,” he said, because they saw “more joy, but also more anxiety, more amplified emotional distress, more, you know, challenges.”

For Muniya Khanna, strong emotional reactions and increased social discomfort are predictable responses as youngsters emerge from more than a year of isolation and altered routines caused by the pandemic. Khanna is a clinical psychologist in Pennsylvania who specializes in treatment of childhood anxiety. She explained that anxiety is part of the body’s fight-or-flight response to uncertainty. While in-person activities may be billed as a “return to normal,” Khanna said it also brings with it the uncertainties of social interactions with which children have been out of practice. As a result, she said, children’s bodies are “kind of primed to feel really more uncomfortable than ever before in going towards those things.”

To ease the adjustment, Khanna and other experts recommended that parents and teachers listen and observe, help children shift their focus, reestablish routines and communicate with each other. “This won’t be an ideal transition. But I do think if we kind of stick to those basics, that we’re going to get there,” said Khanna.

What Parents Can Do

For parents like Lucianovic, child psychiatrist Michael Enenbach recommends learning the signs of anxiety and simply paying attention. “Checking in every day, like, ‘How’s your anxiety? How’s your depression?’ can be a little bit much for a kid,” said Enenbach, who is clinical director and associate medical director at the Child Mind Institute. “So it’s about observing their behaviors, observing what they’re struggling with and then sort of having an open-ended conversation with them.”

While problems such as bullying or severe depression may require help from school leaders or a psychologist, Khanna said anxiety usually comes from the “what ifs.” The fastest way to get out of that spiral is to help children ask different questions and plan action. One young girl Khanna worked with this summer was worried about getting teased on the bus. Rather than identifying all the ways to solve the potential problem, Khanna helped the girl plan she wanted to do more of on the bus, including saying “hi” to all the classmates she knows. “Planning that action actually creates a lot of relief,” Khanna said. “It’s like you’ve just given your body the signal that you’re OK because you’ve just planned to do something.”

Shifting the focus doesn’t mean pretending everything is OK, and it doesn’t mean children won’t experience discomfort when they get back on the bus or in the classroom. But Dr. Khanna said it can guide children to strategies for making themselves feel better in hard moments. “Whenever we work with kids with any kind of anxiety, we’re trying to help them identify the thing that they’ve been avoiding and then try to move them slowly towards getting more and more comfortable doing those things.”

To help her son through the first week of camp, Lucianovic said they talked about his feelings and strategized how to recover and return to fun throughout the day. By the time three weeks had passed, the 8-year-old had a different reason to be sad: he didn’t want camp to end. Still, the experience made Lucianovic worried about the emotional needs of other kids as schools reopen in the wake of distance or hybrid learning.

What Teachers Can Do

“I’m very concerned that our schools are just going to act like everything is just normal and fine because we’re all back together,” Lucianovic said. Rather than waiting to respond to warning signs, she wants to see schools proactively help students process what’s happened in their lives since March 2020. “I’m talking about really open forums of, like, ‘Hey, we’ve been through this and we should sit with the fact that it sucks and validate those feelings,’ so that kids just don’t feel like they’re supposed to pretend to be normal.”

Affirming children’s emotions is one the best things adults can do as kids cope with stressful changes, according to Khanna. “Our job is to demonstrate confidence and calm and that they’re going to be OK,” she said. Another role that teachers in particular can play is creating predictability. That can include taking tours of the school and classroom, setting behavioral expectations, breaking down tasks into individual steps and providing an agenda. “Every time we do something in a consistent way … our body learns and it resets and it will get better.”

With amplified stress this year, kids might need more practice with routines, and teachers might need more patience. Rosenberg, of the ACA, said camp staff this summer found that kids needed more transition time between activities. They also found that, even as campers expressed more discomfort with interacting with new people, they really craved chances to just talk. Making time right away for students to build relationships is a lesson teachers can take from summer camps, Rosenberg said. And getting outside and being active is a great way to do that. “I think that kinetic and experiential learning is exactly what kids need after they’ve been isolated and sheltered for 18 months.”

To manage the tension between social anxiety and the need to connect, Dr. Khanna recommended starting with small steps and building up. For example, instead of jumping into round-robin reading, a teacher can have pairs read aloud to each other, then to a group of five, then to the whole class.

When tolerable anxiety morphs into a breakdown or acting out, removing the student from the classroom or stressor isn’t the best idea, Khanna said. It’s a short-term solution, because the relief from the fight-or-flight reaction “actually came in the form of leaving the problem and now you’re probably going to have it come up again.” Instead, she suggested finding a small task that allows the student to regain a sense of control — that planned action idea again. Ideally, the task will include an avenue for rejoining the group when the student is ready. For instance, a teacher might ask if the student wants to organize the classroom bookshelf for a few minutes and then pick one book that the class can read together.

How Parents and Teachers Can Work Together

Anxiety about the return to school buildings isn’t exclusive to children or teens. Parents and teachers have dealt with a lot of change during the pandemic, and surging coronavirus cases from the Delta variant have thrown additional stressors into the mix. To ensure that they can support young people, adults first need to take care of themselves, Enenbach said.

Additionally, parents and teachers need to support each other. “Parent-teacher conferences generally revolve around how the kid is doing,” Enenbach said. “But I think it’s nice for the teacher to check in with the parents and the parent to check in with the teacher just to see how they’re doing. It’s just sort of an empathic thing to do that really solidifies that relationship.”

Enenbach also said it’s more important than ever for parents and teachers to communicate about what they’re observing in the classroom and at home. He pointed out that back-to-school time always brings a mix of excitement and anxiety. While those feelings are understandably heightened now, he said, “We’ll get through this and we’ll get through it together.”

Enenbach and Khanna both warned against imposing artificial timelines, though. In particular, the readjustment period may be hardest and longest for children who struggled with anxiety before the pandemic, those who entered remote learning just before hitting a developmental milestone and children who experienced trauma during this period.

In Menlo Park, Lucianovic’s freshly minted third grader returned to school in late August. So did her older son, a middle schooler who completed all of last year online. After the first week, Lucianovic reported that her kids’ spirits were high. Still, she was bracing for tears or yelling to come eventually. As Rosenberg said, “The impact of the pandemic is not going to melt away with one summer camp.” The same goes for school building reopenings.

It’s the kind of news story that keeps parents of school-age children up at night: Kids go to school, dutifully wear masks, and still half the class ends up infected with the coronavirus.

That’s what happened this past spring at an elementary school in Marin County, Calif. The school seemed to be taking all the right precautions against COVID-19 transmission. Teachers and students were required to be masked while indoors. Student desks were spaced 6 feet apart. Doors and windows were left open.

Still, when an unvaccinated teacher who had mild allergy-like symptoms briefly removed their mask to read out loud to the class, the result was a classroom outbreak. All told, 27 cases were identified, including infections in other classrooms. None of the infections resulted in severe cases, and no kids were hospitalized.

“For me, the takeaway of this story really is that even just momentary short, brief lapses in, you know, taking off a mask can open up an opportunity for delta to escape through,” says Tracy Lam-Hine, the Marin County epidemiologist who authored the report on the outbreak.

And because delta is so contagious, more than twice as contagious as the original strain of the virus, according to studies, experts say it’s more critical than ever that schools deploy multiple layers of precautions to curb the spread of the virus.

Here are some of the strategies experts recommend for safer classrooms:

1. Create a protective cocoon around children – with vaccines: Because children younger than 12 are still not eligible to get a covid vaccine, public health experts say it’s essential that anybody who spends time indoors with kids in this age group get vaccinated. That includes adults and vaccine eligible children age 12 and up. This creates a kind of protective cocoon around unvaccinated kids. Lam-Hine says the California elementary school outbreak underscores why this is so important. The teacher at the center of the outbreak was not vaccinated. If they had been, “that potentially could have prevented some of this,” says Lam-Hine.

Dr. Jason Newland, a pediatric infectious disease physician at Washington University in St. Louis, points to data from Israel showing that the more adults got vaccinated, the fewer kids got the virus. “They actually drove down their rates [of infections] in kids, which I think just goes to show the cocooning thing works,” Newland says.

2. Enforce mask wearing – and wear good masks: When schools enforce universal masking, studies show they can successfully curb the spread of the virus. Unpublished data from summer schools in North Carolina found that good masking helped keep transmission of the delta variant down to below 3%, according to Dr. Ibukun Kalu of Duke University, one of the researchers on that project. Because the delta variant spreads much more easily, experts say it’s more important than ever that kids wear good masks – ones that are comfortable, fit properly (without big gaps around the face) and do a good job of filtration. Here’s a list of some kids masks recommended by aerosols experts at Virginia Tech.

3. Improve indoor ventilation: The coronavirus spreads primarily through the air. Viral particles can accumulate indoors and linger, sometimes for hours — think of it like cigarette smoke, says Jose-Luis Jimenez, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and aerosols scientist. When a smoker lights up, at first the smoke just hovers around them. “But after half an hour … the whole room is filled with smoke,” he says.

If you want to clear smoke from a room, you open the windows and doors. The same thing holds true when it comes to dispersing infectious particles – opening windows and doors creates cross ventilation.

Jimenez recommends that every school test how well each room is ventilated by using a portable nondispersive infrared (NDIR) carbon dioxide meter. That’s because CO2 is a useful proxy for infectious aerosols. People are constantly exhaling CO2, and, like aerosols, the gas can get trapped inside a room. So if the CO2 levels are too high, that means not enough air is flowing in and out of the room. You want to keep indoor CO2 levels under 700 parts per million, Jimenez says. If the levels are much higher, turn to other strategies to improve the room’s ventilation, like keeping windows and doors open whenever students are in the classroom.

The cost of a good NDIR CO2 meter starts at roughly $90, Jimenez says. Cheaper CO2 monitors that don’t use NDIR technology are available, but he warns that they don’t really work.

4. Use portable air filters: Portable HEPA filters are effective at removing virus particles from a room, Jimenez says. Make sure the air filter you buy is large enough for the classroom, keep it at the highest setting and, he says, place it in the center of the classroom.

You can also buy several smaller air filters and put them around the classroom, he says. (For more on buying high-quality air filters and improving classroom ventilation and filtration, check out this in-depth post from Colorado Public Radio.)

5. Take things outdoors whenever possible – especially during lunch: Jimenez and many other experts urge schools to have activities outdoors as much as they can — especially during lunch, a vulnerable time when kids are unmasked en masse. If kids must eat indoors, open windows, use portable air filters, reduce eating time and space students out as much as possible. Also, try to keep them from talking.

6. Physical distancing still matters: Experts say that schools should continue to keep three feet of distance between students. But, they note, in many public schools that have reopened at full capacity, that’s just not happening. Which is one more reason why schools should focus their energy on these other strategies, they say.

“I think our foundational protective element here is vaccination,” Kalu says, “and we’re layering other things on top of it in schools.”

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Students across Illinois will be able to take up to five excused mental health days starting in January.

Under a bill signed into law by Gov. J.B. Pritzker last month, students who decide to take a mental health day will not be required to provide their school with a doctor’s note and will be able to make up any work that was missed on their day off.

“Having this now for all students across the state will be really beneficial, especially with what’s going on with COVID,” State Rep. Barbara Hernandez, who co-sponsored the bill, told the Journal-Courier. “Many students feel stressed, and have developed anxiety and depression because they’re not able to see teachers and friends, and may have lower grades due to remote learning.”

Child psychiatrists say they expect more children will need help

The pandemic has placed unique strains on children, and as a new school year begins, child psychiatrists say they expect to see a surge of kids who need help.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between March and May of last year, hospitals across the country saw a 24% increase in the number of mental health emergency visits by kids aged 5 to 11 years old, and a 31% increase for kids 12 to 17.

“The younger school-age kids are more anxious about separation from their parents and caregivers,” child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr. Ujjwal Ramtekkar at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio, told NPR. “They’re worried about getting sick,” or their parents getting sick.

For teens, the challenges can be somewhat different, according to Ramtekkar. Most teenagers are struggling with social and academic anxiety, he said, as most are worried about socializing with their peers again and adapting to full-time in-person learning.

The new law is designed to help kids get care

With the new law in Illinois, Hernandez says students will have more of an opportunity to get the care they need.

“I am really excited for this. I think it will help students, parents and teachers, and can help them understand what’s going on in their students’ lives,” Hernandez said.

Once a student requests a second mental health day, a school counselor will reach out to their family and the student may be referred to get professional help, according to the bill.

Hernandez says that after students take their second mental health day, they should understand that a conversation with an adult is needed about whatever it is they’re going through.

“Many students are going through a lot mentally and emotionally and they need support,” Hernandez said.

Several states have taken similar steps

School districts across Illinois will have until the end of the year to come up with a specific plan to execute the new law ahead of its effective date in January.

Illinois joins states such as Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Nevada, Oregon and Virginia that have passed similar bills over the last two years allowing students to be absent from school due to mental or behavioral health reasons, according to The New York Times.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

When Makiyah Hicks was young, her uncle, Jamal Hazel, was killed in her District Heights neighborhood in southwest Maryland. Her father lost a brother and her grandmother, Darlene Hazel, lost her youngest son.

Every year since, on her uncle’s birthday, Makiyah and her family visit his grave.

Despite the traumatic loss, she says her family and community members mostly avoid conversations about gun violence.

“It was always something we were around, but not something that was talked about,” says Hicks, who graduated this year from Washington’s Duke Ellington School of the Arts. “Especially with regards to my grandmother. That was her youngest son. It’s a bit of a touchy subject.”

So Hicks, along with her classmates Jonetta Harrison and Quin Wells, decided to talk about it. The students, all recent graduates of the Duke Ellington School, made a podcast about gun violence in D.C., and how families of victims are shaped by the loss. Their teacher, Thom Woodward, entered it in NPR’s Student Podcast Challenge, and their story is one of 10 high school finalists, chosen by our judges from more than 2,200 entries.

As part of the podcast, Hicks interviewed her grandmother, and they talked about the death of Jamal Hazel for the first time. “It’s all for a cause when things occur in life that you don’t anticipate or expect to happen to you,” her grandmother tells her.

The conversation, Hicks says, was a breakthrough after so much silence: “It’s hard to find a light at the end of the tunnel,” she says of her grief. But when she spoke about it with her grandmother, “for a second, it was there. It was something.”

‘D.C. has long struggled with one of the highest rates of gun violence in the country. The district saw 198 homicides in 2020, a 16-year-high, and the 2021 homicide rate is already outpacing 2020.

Harrison, Hicks and Wells wanted their podcast to show that it’s not just about the numbers. Real people are impacted by every life lost to gun violence, so the students talked to three of them: first, Darlene Hazel, Hicks’ grandmother. Then one of Harrison’s friends, Jayla Faust, who lost her stepfather to gun violence.

Through the podcast, Harrison explains she wanted to give families a chance to speak.

“It’s important for the people who are affected by it to be able to speak because I feel like a lot of times the government is speaking for them,” Harrison says. “These are the people that actually have to go through this.”

The final interview in the podcast is with RuQuan Brown. Now a football player at Harvard University, but in the podcast, he says he didn’t always know if he would make it to college.

“I would walk down Florida Ave on my way back home and I would cry some nights because I was afraid I wouldn’t make it to college because I’d be killed,” he tells Harrison.

His fear of whether he would survive in D.C. is a very real fear among his peers.

Harrison thinks about 18-year-old Richard Bangura often these days as she starts her first semester at Temple University. Bangura was shot and killed in northeast DC last summer, days before he was supposed to move into the same university.

Losing a loved one to gun violence is painful, but Harrison says the podcast is about what community members take away from that pain, too. “You have a loss, but because of this loss, you have transformed to a better person or have a better view of life.”

Brown, for example, dealt with the grief by creating art.

He owns a clothing brand, Love1, which donates to communities affected by gun violence. Brown is currently looking to fund therapy for students in D.C.’s public schools. He has also donated thousands of dollars to the One Gun Gone project, which repurposes guns into artwork to raise awareness about gun violence.

“I created this brand because I wanted to live,” he says.

Harrison, Hicks and Wells are starting college this fall and hope the lessons they learned from the people in their podcast will help them handle loss, and challenges, in their own lives.

Sneha Dey is an intern for NPR’s Education Desk.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

As schools across the country reopen, mental health professionals are anticipating a surge in the number of kids seeking help in the coming weeks.

That’s not unlike previous years.

“Historically, our busiest times of the year are a couple of weeks into the school year, perhaps the end of September, beginning of October,” says Dr. Richard Martini, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Utah and Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City. “These are times where you really begin to identify kids that are struggling — the schools begin to identify them.”

But what’s different this year is that the pandemic has already increased the number of kids struggling with mental illness. Another surge this fall might mean a further worsening of an ongoing crisis.

“It was about this time last year that hospitals started raising red flags, like ‘we are being overrun in the [emergency department],’ ” says Amy Knight, president of the Children’s Hospital Association.

According to the CDC, between March and May, 2020, hospitals across the country saw a 24% increase in the proportion of mental health emergency visits by kids aged 5 to 11 years old, and a 31% increase for kids 12 to 17.

“And it hasn’t really subsided,” says Knight.

This year, the number of kids coming to hospitals for mental health needs in 2021 is 15% higher than two years ago, says Knight, referring to data collected by the Children’s Hospital Association.

While many kids are excited to go back to school, mental health care providers around the country are already seeing signs of growing anxiety among students.

“We have already been seeing a lot of pick up in pre-existing anxiety in anticipation of school starting,” says child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr. Ujjwal Ramtekkar at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. The hospital has a school-based mental health program in 70 schools in the area. (It also provides financial support to NPR.)

The causes for anxiety differ for different age groups. “The younger school-age kids are more anxious about separation from their parents and caregivers,” he says. “They’re worried about getting sick,” or their parents getting sick.

On the other hand, most teenagers are struggling with social and academic anxiety, he adds. They are worried about socializing with their peers again and adapting to full-time in-person learning.

“As the [Covid-19 case] numbers were improving, there was a significant amount of hope that, oh, great, now I can play basketball, or I can hug my friends when I see them,” says Dr. Nicole Christian-Brathwaite, a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Boston.

With cases rising again, she says, there’s a lot of disappointment especially among older students. Many of her patients are angry, frustrated and stressed by the uncertainty of what this school year will look like.

“That uncertainty increases anxiety,” says Christian-Brathwaite.

Kids most vulnerable to feeling anxious right now, or to having other mental health problems are those with certain risk factors, say child and adolescent psychiatrists.

“This is more for kids who already are prone to anxiety or they already had pre-existing depression, anxiety, separation related issues, trauma or things like that,” says Ramtekkar.

And kids in communities of color have been disproportionately affected by trauma during the pandemic, says Dr. Warren Ng, president-elect for the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. That’s because their communities have been disproportionately affected by the health and economic impacts of the pandemic.

“What we’ve experienced over the past 18 months is that there’s been a lot of stress and anxiety experienced by our children and adolescents and families,” says Ng, who also directs outpatient behavioral health at Columbia University, which primarily serves Latino and African American families in Manhattan and the Bronx.

“Many of these children also live in households where there are more multigenerational family members, where you’re more likely to experience a loss,” he says

They are also more likely to have fallen behind with school work, he adds, because many don’t have a private space at home for attending school online.

“What we’ve seen with the youth has been much more anxiety related to preparedness,” says Ng. “They’re concerned about how far they’ve fallen in terms of their schooling and their education and their progress. They’ve worried that they’ve lost a year of schooling.”

Fortunately, schools and teachers are aware of all these issues. And many have been proactively reaching out to mental health experts for guidance and advice, says Christian-Brathwaite.

“I am getting a significant number of calls from schools requesting education and professional development for teachers around how to support kids with trauma,” she says. “They’re looking for tools to help support students.”

Children’s hospitals, too, have been preparing, some adding more resources in anticipation of a fall surge in mental health visits.

“This summer allowed us at the children’s hospital and at the psychiatric hospital to catch up a little bit with recruitment and expanding services and capacity,” says Dr. Vera Feuer, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Cohen’s Children’s Medical Center in Long Island, N.Y., and the associate vice president for school mental health at Northwell Health.

She hopes more kids and families will have access to care if and when kids struggle with mental health problems. For now, she says, her team is just watching and waiting. “It’s the quiet before the storm phase.”

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mental health has only become more important and more fraught as the pandemic has confined children to their homes and limited their social interactions. With parents losing jobs and COVID-19 claiming loved ones, adolescents are experiencing a lot more strain on their mental health.

“There’s just a lot more worry about everyday things. So there’s anxiety about things – and I’m not talking necessarily diagnostic anxiety. I’m just talking about the result of living in a really chaotic, stressful world,” says Tracy Smith, director of the Wright Institute’s School-Based Collaboration, a clinical psychology program that connects therapists in masters and doctoral programs with schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.

According to Smith, middle-school-age students experienced anxiety about general safety and whether they’re communicating with their peers enough, whereas high schoolers are stressed about family security and took on more responsibilities like childcare or jobs outside of school.

There are ways, however, that schools can try to ensure that children can get their needs met when they are struggling and be proactive about maintaining their mental health and wellbeing. Long before the pandemic, educators at Urban Promise Academy (UPA), a middle school in Oakland, California, started offering their students therapy services through a partnership with the Wright Institute to address mental health concerns. UPA’s students faced things that many adolescents experience, like anxiety, trauma and self harm. Although UPA uses social and emotional learning and counseling that’s common in many schools, they benefited from having therapy services that offer individualized and hands-on support tailored to each student. With a few big adjustments, they continued to support students’ mental health even when they were no longer in school buildings.

Cultivate a Positive School Culture

When UPA first opened in 2001, the founders, including current school counselor Mary Ellen Bayardo, wanted to create a school that responded to students’ needs and focused on student mental health. Bayardo worked to destigmatize mental health care by giving counseling and support services a strong presence at the school. Outfitted with plush chairs and blankets, her counseling office is a comforting space where students are encouraged to drop in with any concerns. “When you have that kind of environment, you really get all the information you need to be able to really match the services to the kid,” says Bayardo.

School environments are complex and one solution rarely solves all problems. Additionally, people often overlook how schools can be sites of trauma and the attention is usually focused on addressing the trauma that children “bring to school.” For UPA, school culture was as important as the services themselves. “If a school is iffy or mixed about how important mental health is to education, we have a harder time,” says Smith about how schools must normalize mental health care to make therapy services more effective.

Getting Help

Strong relationships with teachers is a priority at UPA because teachers are instrumental in noticing signs that a student might be in need of support. Research shows that it’s important for children to have at least one trusted adult in their life. “We’ve had strong leadership and because we have teachers that stay for years and years, this is what’s built up: that core of resiliency, that core of safety and stability,” says Bayardo.

One UPA sixth grader I spoke with got connected with therapy services when a teacher noticed she had lower energy than usual. “[The teacher] said that it’s not good to keep my problems inside of me. It’s better to talk to someone than to keep it to myself,” said the student, recalling when her teacher invited her to use UPA’s therapy services.

Many students are new to therapy and just starting to learn how to describe their complex emotions as they navigate home life and adolescence. “There are questions that I really don’t want to answer, but I have the need to answer them because I don’t want to keep them in my chest,” says the sixth grader.

But not all needs are visible to teachers, so in order to help identify students in need of support, UPA distributes a school-wide student wellness survey every six weeks. These types of surveys are used in school districts around the country to assess every student and then connect them with services. The survey asks questions such as, “Is there food in the fridge?” to get more information about how things are at students’ homes. There are also questions about students’ experience at UPA like: “Do you have friends?” and “What is your overall rating of UPA?” Then there are general questions about their state of mind, including “How are you feeling?” and “Do you need support for those feelings?”

After receiving survey results, Bayardo and other members of UPA’s care team will follow up individually with students who need help.

Connecting with Reluctant Parents and Caregivers

Even though UPA has systems in place to provide mental health services, parents and caregivers play an important role. However, it can be challenging for schools to engage them. In particular, many families of color and caregivers who are recent immigrants have stigma around therapy, so they are often concerned when asked if their child can be in therapy, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. That’s where UPA’s family coordinator Glendy Cordero Rodriguez plays an important outreach role. She’s there to help families, often in Spanish, understand how therapy can help their children.

“I personally make the first call to the families and let them know how we have our intakes for therapy,” says Rodriguez. “I explain to them clearly what those reasons are – mainly feeling overwhelmed, stressed out, all other emotional situations that had been happening in the child’s life.”

She works with parents and caregivers who are initially resistant to having their children start therapy and patiently answers any questions they might have. She’s even invited them to see their child on the playground. Her hope is that parents see the way their child interacts with others and gain insights into bullying, isolation or fighting that they wouldn’t know about at home. She also provides resources like parenting workshops or English classes to caregivers to support families and build stronger community relationships.

Parents’ continued support is important. “Not just by signing the agreement or waivers,” says Rodriguez. “But as well to continue developing their skills at home so they can support the child.”

Communication and Flexibility

When remote learning started, UPA had to scramble to make sure students had the devices they needed to continue therapy at home. Some of the essentials include access to Wi-Fi, access to a computer, access to a phone and “enough minutes on the phone to have regular sessions,” says Smith.

“Sometimes, some of our kids don’t have phones, so they’re using their parents’ phones. And so they can only do that when their parents are home,” according to Smith.

With entire families in the house, privacy is also hard to come by. Kids who are normally comfortable sharing about their struggles on campus may shut down when siblings are within earshot. Glendy recalls checking in with a student on Zoom when the screen suddenly got darker. “And I asked, ‘Where are you right now?’ And he said, ‘I opened up my tent in the middle of the living room just to have a sense of privacy.’”

UPA staff addressed students’ access and space concerns by upping the communication and flexibility, knowing that students were going to miss appointments.

“We used to say, ‘Oh, yeah, that student is in room 21, let me go get that kid for you.’ All of a sudden it’s like, ‘I need to find that phone number, I need to track that kid down, I need to make sure we have a secure line – Zoom or phone – for you to talk to that kid,’” says Bayardo.

Bayardo and Rodriguez were constantly following up with students to work around their childcare duties, jobs and device schedules. They tried to find a time that would allow for students to have consistent weekly support.

And with many districts committed to having students in school buildings this year, therapy will continue to be important in supporting students during the transition, especially for children who have fared better with remote schooling.

“What I realized is that for some of my students, their biggest source of stress is their peers,” says Bayardo about kids’ experiences with bullying and social anxiety. She says that many aspects of remote therapy will remain as they figure out the safest way to have students in the school.

“We’ll be checking in with our students and anybody who has anxiety, anybody who’s really having trouble adjusting from pajama wardrobe to dress code, from mom’s cooking to school lunch, whoever is having whatever difficulty. That’s why we have therapy.”

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, American educators have experienced unprecedented change and challenges. But not everything unexpected is undesirable. Whether in virtual classrooms, hybrid instruction or in-person schools, teachers also gained new insights on themselves, their students and their practice. Now, as the Delta variant sparks ongoing worries about school building re-openings, five teachers share the unplanned lessons they will carry into the new school year and beyond.

Lucia Bowers
English teacher, Dolores Huerta Middle School
Burbank, California

Recognizing resilience

“We talk about kids being resilient all the time. I truly believe they are. But this is the first time where I noticed my own resiliency in the moment. I’m proud of that.”

For Lucia Bowers, a mom of three and teacher to more than 100, the idea of teaching online while keeping her own family afloat and the house stocked with toilet paper sounds like a science fiction novel. Yet for the past year, it was her reality.

Sure, there were days when the WiFi went out, but Bowers took those hurdles one at a time. And sometime last fall, she looked up from teaching to a smoothly operating scene. She saw her second-grader attending Zoom class in the living room right beside her and her sophomore daughter dancing in the backyard for P.E. Meanwhile, her freshman son studied biology in his bedroom and her husband worked from the family room.

“I thought, ‘Is this really happening?’ We talk about kids being resilient all the time. I truly believe they are. But this is the first time where I noticed my own resiliency in the moment. I’m proud of that,” Bowers said.

The pandemic also highlighted to Bowers that her students may not have the same resources that were in her home. She said that as the year progressed and students used up school-provided supplies, some families quickly replaced them while others couldn’t.

Her school worked to fill in the gaps, but seeing those disparities has changed how Bowers thinks about equity in the school building, too. She said it can create stigma and shame when teachers call out students who don’t have supplies ready, or when they put flags on classroom pencils to make sure they stay in the room. Going forward, her assumption will be that every kid needs a pencil or other materials. “And if they don’t — great, cool. But I’m going to still provide it for them and just hope that they will not feel embarrassed to take the supplies that are there.”

Rickey Townsend

7th grade math teacher, Benjamin Franklin International Exploratory Academy
Dallas, Texas

Opening up online

“I am learning that there are platforms to capture the voice of all students, no matter if extroverted or introverted.”

One day in late 2020, as students logged into Rickey Townsend’s hybrid classroom, they encountered the usual digital scene. Their math teacher, wearing a suit and tie with matching glasses, greeted students by name. His own name was displayed in the bottom corner of his picture. But that day, the transparent gray label included a few new words: “He/Him/His.”

Townsend appended those pronouns after seeing a tweet that suggested including them would acknowledge and affirm LGBTQ students. He didn’t point out the change, but his seventh graders noticed. One student sent him a private message saying they’d never seen a teacher do that and asking if it was OK to list their pronouns, too. It was the start of conversations Townsend said probably wouldn’t have happened in another year. And it contributed to a larger trend of his students opening up more in Zoom chat than when within an arms’ length of peers. “This is the first year a lot of students shared about who they are personally, how they identify,” Townsend said. They shared what’s going on at home (and about) deaths in the family. I don’t think that I would have gotten that in a traditional school setting.” 

Townsend found other small but intentional acts to connect with students, too. He used Zoom polls for mental health checks, and he spoke honestly about his own ups and downs. Several times per week, he started class with non-math questions about student interests, and after the Capitol riot in January, he set aside linear equations so students could process national events.

Those kinds of conversations, along with a supportive network, helped Townsend through the harder days. This was his fifth year teaching and the first time he contemplated quitting. He said the Zoom connections weren’t as fulfilling as those in a physical classroom, but they have caused him to reflect on how he engages with quiet students in-person. He might, for example, continue using virtual check-in polls or give student index cards as an alternate way to share. “Pre-coronavirus, I was guilty of encouraging students who were labeled as quiet scholars to speak up in class,” Townsend said. “I am learning that there are platforms to capture the voice of all students, no matter if (they are) extroverted or introverted.”

Janelle Henderson

Grade 3 teacher, Mill Creek Leadership Academy
Louisville, Kentucky

Hard conversations, healthy habits

“I was in a lighter mood, we had more fun together. And I know my students got more out of our content.”

Last September, when a Kentucky grand jury brought no charges against the police officers who shot and killed Breonna Taylor, Janelle Henderson took a deep breath. Discussing tough topics is nothing new to Henderson’s third grade classroom, but she knew this conversation would be different. For one thing, it came early in the year, with little time to build trust among students. What’s more, the events quite literally hit close to home.

“I don’t want to say our city was on fire, but the energy was palpable, like everyone was in a very heightened state of anxiety and stress,” Henderson said. That meant she needed to establish a clear structure and ground rules for discussing the news. Those rules included speaking in “I” statements, not “we” statements, that it’s not OK to hurt people or things, that no one was required to share, and that anyone could turn off their screens at any time.

Henderson raised the topic in small group sessions with students. With each group, she started by sharing that she was “not OK” and affirming any emotions her students felt. Then she stepped back to listen. After everyone got a chance to speak, they moved on to the day’s regular content. 

Henderson said that facilitating those conversations terrified her — especially knowing that families of students would be listening and watching — but they were necessary. And September was just the start. Throughout the year, her third graders circled up online to discuss the presidential election, Chadwick Boseman’s death, the Capitol insurrection and more. “We did a lot in this virtual setting that I didn’t ever expect to do, but it just worked, and that was the classroom that I had,” Henderson said.

It helped that Henderson herself felt more grounded and present this year. Her school didn’t require as many hours of synchronous virtual instruction as they would have in-person, and Henderson used the first hour of the day to prepare at her own pace. She also took more movement and meditation breaks throughout the day. “So as a human, I just felt really grounded, like I didn’t feel like there was this pressure to rush, rush, rush and go, go, go.”

That pace may be hard to maintain with a return to regular schedules, but Henderson said she’ll try to set boundaries, like guarding her planning period for self-care rather than squeezing in a dozen miscellaneous tasks. If she can, she knows it will be good for herself and for her third-graders. Just as it was this year. “I was in a lighter mood, we had more fun together. And I know my students got more out of our content,” she said.

Jennifer Dao

Algebra teacher, Nichols Middle School
Evanston, Illinois

Tapping into technology

“I used to think I was a pretty tech savvy teacher, but remote learning has taught me to tap more into my tech skills and use them to be more intentional with my students.”

Jennifer Dao’s mathematics teaching style has always been pretty open-ended. There’s a lesson plan and a learning goal, of course, but after presenting a problem, she follows her students’ lead. “Whatever the kids do, I use it throughout the lesson to summarize and to piece together their work,” she explained.

Without students in the same room as her until February, Dao decided to implement a new structure this year. Along with some colleagues, she adopted a practice called learning contracts from Larry Geni, a retired science teacher. Using this model, Dao started each class with a slide containing information and links to everything that would be covered that day. The class spent the first 40 minutes on a warm-up and the main lesson. For the second half of class, students chose a task from three options — “mild,” “medium” or “spicy” — to work on independently or with small groups.

A mild task might be watching a review video on a foundational skill or completing guided notes with teacher support. Medium typically meant practice exercises for the day’s topic. And spicy tasks were advanced challenges related to the standard. Dao said this structure helped her organize class more clearly, and it showed her that students benefit from visual and written instructions, in addition to the oral ones she gives in-person. “I used to think I was a pretty tech savvy teacher, but remote learning has taught me to tap more into my tech skills and use them to be more intentional with my students,” she said.

Choosing between tasks also improved students’ metacognitive skills by requiring them to take stock of their understanding. Students were “brutally honest” about themselves in weekly self-evaluations and optional blog posts, Dao said. Since she couldn’t see students’ independent work on paper, reading their self-reflections encouraged her. “It made me feel like the work that I put in wasn’t for nothing, because a lot of teachers felt that frustration on Zoom, seeing just squares on a page. … It gave me a better snapshot of the kids.”

Lauren Merkley

English teacher, Cottonwood High School
Murray, Utah

A “both/and” year

“I must have said, ‘I can’t do this’ 1,000 times this school year … But every time — every time! — I could do it. I could keep going.”

For Lauren Merkley, the 2020-21 school year started with a sense of foreboding. Her school began with both in-person and asynchronous virtual options. That meant she had to build an online class while also preparing for socially distanced traditional instruction. At the same time, ambient anxiety about possible closures loomed large. The school went fully remote twice in the fall because of surging COVID-19 numbers.

“First quarter was brutal,” Merkley said. In her virtual classes, there were dozens of students she never saw or heard from. “They were ghosts,” she said. And that meant  failing more students than ever before. It was all so much. “I must have said, ‘I can’t do this’ 1,000 times this school year,” Merkley recalled. “But every morning my heart was beating, and I found that I could do it. Whatever ‘it’ was that day.”

The seeming impossibility of so many tasks forced Merkley, who in 2020 was the Utah Teacher of the Year, to accept imperfection in her teaching. She told students that she was learning alongside them and asked for their feedback. Though uncertainty persisted, things did improve after the first quarter. And like flowers pushing through cracks in concrete, some wonderful moments blossomed, too.  Like when her students read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In FlipGrid video responses and comments, the high schoolers drew connections between King’s rhetoric and contemporary questions about police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement. The discussion had the highest engagement of any activity in Merkley’s virtual classes.

While not every lesson sparked that kind of response, Merkley said that the pandemic and the politics of the past year catalyzed students to look beyond their usual rhythm of school or work or soccer practice. They made connections between their lives and larger systems. “It’s a both/and,” Merkley said. “It was (a year that we survived). But there were also moments where my kids felt so alive, where they felt so relevant, where what we were doing felt like it mattered.”

For some teachers, the pandemic has tipped the scale from a stressful job to an untenable one, prompting them to walk away. Merkley, however, said this year reaffirmed her place in the profession. The successes may have been fewer, but they were hard won. “You’re in it to help kids and to have those moments of discovery,” she said. “So when they came this year, I think they were all the sweeter because of that juxtaposition.”

Which masks are best to keep kids safe? It’s a question on many parents’ minds as students return to in-person school amid a huge wave of coronavirus infections. Masking is a key safety measure in schools for all kids, especially for children too young to be eligible for any COVID-19 vaccine.

A recent study involving 100 school districts and 14 charter schools in North Carolina found that masks were effective at preventing in-school transmission of COVID-19 — even with physical distancing of less than 3 feet.

We asked several experts what parents should consider when it comes to masks for their kids. They all agreed that the most important thing is to choose one that a child will actually wear properly all day long.

Here’s more of their advice:

1. Focus on comfort and fit

A mask is only protective if your child is actually wearing it. For younger kids especially, you want to choose a mask that is comfortable, so they won’t fiddle with it all day long, says Ibukun Kalu, an infectious disease pediatrician at Duke University.

“I would advise using the most comfortable mask, but at least ensure that it’s a double-layer cotton mask,” she says — and don’t use one with an exhaust valve. (A three-layer mask is a great option if you  can find it.) Multiple studies have shown that tightly woven cotton fabrics do a surprisingly good job of filtering out particles, and their performance can actually improve under humid conditions, such as those created when you breathe.

Most importantly, pick a mask that fits closely over the nose and mouth and down to the chin — bonus if it has adjustable ear loops and/or an adjustable nose piece. Remember: A snug fit is key to having a protective mask, so make sure your kid’s mask doesn’t gape open along the edges.

2. Pack a spare for school

Kids tend to be messy, so it’s a good idea to throw an extra mask in their backpacks in case the one they’re wearing gets soiled or sweaty, says Tina Tan, a pediatric infectious disease physician at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago. She says that’s one reason parents might want to choose cloth masks over disposable ones for their kids.

“If the mask gets a little bit wet and it’s very uncomfortable, they could go through two or three [masks] a day, so it could get more costly,” she says. “Whereas with the cloth mask, if you buy a couple of them, you could wash them in between.”

3. Skip the neck gaiters

Many kids like to wear gaiters because they’re easy to pull up and down and they don’t have any ear loops to fuss with. But while any mask is better than no mask, “I would really put [gaiters] way at the bottom of the list,” says Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatrics and infectious disease specialist at Stanford University who also serves as chair of the Committee on Infectious Diseases for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“They might look kind of cute for some people, but they really aren’t doing too much because they stretch so much and the fabric is really porous,” she says. “Everything can just come right through.”

4. Consider adding a filter or double-masking

If your child can wear it comfortably, now would be the time to add a filter to the mask, says Linsey Marr, a researcher at Virginia Tech who studies how viruses transmit in the air. She’s also the mother of two children, one of whom is still too young to be vaccinated. “Right now I’m emphasizing [to them], ‘You have to have the filter in there. We need our best mask game right now,” Marr says.

Many masks are sold with a filter layer built in. If your cloth mask has a pocket for a filter, Marr suggests inserting a good-quality surgical mask, because they’re made of material that’s very efficient at filtering out particles. Cut the surgical mask to fit inside the pocket if need be. She says HEPA filters cut out from the filters used in portable air cleaners also work well (here’s her how-to video).

Double-masking is also an option, she says. Your child would wear a surgical mask closest to their face, with a snug-fitting cloth mask on top to eliminate any gaps. The goal is to “achieve good filtration and fit, which are both key to having a protective mask,” Marr says.

However, not everyone agrees that double-masking is necessary. So if your kid finds this uncomfortable, skip it.

5. What to make of KN95s for kids?

While child-size KN95 respirators do exist now, they’re not necessary, says Tan — and like double masking, they can be uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time.

Maldonado agrees that a KN95 isn’t needed, but she also understands that some people’s risk tolerance is a lot lower than others’. “If people feel more comfortable with a KN95 and their child can wear it, I don’t have a problem with it.”

Another important consideration with KN95s is fit. For these types of respirators to work as effectively as billed (blocking out at least 95% of small airborne particles), they have to fit really well. A poor-fitting KN95 might not be all that protective for your child and could give a false sense of security.

6. Practice good masking techniques at home

Kids are proving capable of learning to wear their masks correctly, which is key to their effectiveness. “I’ve been rather impressed by how well kids are able to keep on their mask. We’ve seen good compliance,” says Kalu, who was part of the research team that found masks worked to curb transmissions in North Carolina schools.

But not every child knows proper mask etiquette, she says, so it’s important for parents to model that behavior. That means making sure kids know how to put the mask on properly — with the adjustable nose piece worn on top of their nose bridge, not under their nostrils, for example, and without gaps around their face. It also means knowing not to touch the front of the mask, she says, lest they contaminate their fingers.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Parents and caregivers may have to wait until the end of 2021 before a COVID-19 vaccine is fully approved for young children ages 5 to 11. The news comes from Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, in an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition.

Collins said both Pfizer and Moderna are still collecting trial data, trying to understand — among other things — whether young children should receive a smaller vaccine dose than what has already been approved for adults.

Pfizer could submit its data to the Food and Drug Administration for review by the end of September, Collins said. But he added, “I’ve got to be honest, I don’t see the approval for kids — 5 to 11 — coming much before the end of 2021.”

While full FDA approval is likely several months away, Pfizer’s vaccine could be cleared for emergency use earlier, possibly in October, after the submission of its trial data.

Collins’ remarks come one day after the FDA granted full approval to Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for people 16 and older. The vaccine remains available for kids between the ages of 12 and 15 through the current emergency use authorization.

The NIH director also weighed in on the heated fight in states requiring children to wear masks in schools. Collins said he’s “puzzled” by the debate, saying there is ample evidence that wearing masks will help prevent COVID-19 outbreaks.

Several states, including Texas, Florida and Arizona, have banned school districts from broadly requiring mask-wearing. Nevertheless, some large, urban districts — including Dallas and Phoenix — have defied those orders. The Biden administration and the U.S. Department of Education have thrown their support behind these embattled district leaders, even threatening states with civil rights investigations if students feel they cannot safely learn because of a lack of masking

Ultimately, Collins said, masking will help keep schools open.

“If you want to avoid having that outbreak that’s going to send all the kids home again, you should be doing everything to avoid that. And that means wearing masks,” Collins told NPR. “And by the way, if somebody tries to tell you we don’t really have scientific evidence to say that masks reduce infection in schools, that’s just not true. There are dozens of publications, both from the U.S. and other countries, to show that’s the case. So, boy, I wish we could get over that fight.”

It’s a fight, Collins said, that is getting in the way of “what is going to be a tough enough fall as it is.”

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

School districts are committed to having students back in school buildings even as the delta variant of the coronavirus threatens to derail in-person learning. However, cutting through all of the concerns about academics is the realization that students will need support that goes beyond schoolwork.

“There’s been this slow IV drip of stress,” said Joyce Dorado, UCSF clinical professor and director of Healthy Environments and Response to Trauma in Schools, during a recent Education Writers Association Conference. “There will be triggers in the environment that make people suddenly feel terrified or unsafe.”

She said that if kids are having a hard time as school gets started, they are probably expressing a need for one of three things: safety, agency or connection. Educators and caregivers can prioritize these three areas to support kids through this transition, which will be challenging for many.

Dorado recommends that teachers allow for as much room for student agency as possible and empower them by making sure they have voice and choice around the things that are affecting them. Having control goes a long way in easing students back into the physical classroom after months learning within the constraints of online school. 

Rebuild Learning Skills with Student Agency

Every year students come back from summer break or vacation at all different levels, said Torrie Vicklund, a teacher at a K-8 school in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Teaching students who are returning from remote learning will most likely be similar, though teachers will need to attend to fears about the delta variant and any traumas children might be experiencing. 

To prepare for the start of the school year, Vicklund is concentrating on building learning skills. “It’s not so much that they didn’t learn about algebra this year. It’s more so that they didn’t have a chance to grow and learn together,” she said.

There’s been a lot of attention on learning loss, but framing student learning that way is a deficit perspective and only focuses on the ways students are off track. If students see adults in their lives recognizing the ways that they have grown, it communicates to kids that they are resilient. “They will need support in the next year in certain aspects,” said Vicklund. “But they’ll still come through with a lot more pluses as well in resiliency and adaptability.”

Vicklund is expecting the ways students learn with one another to be different, too. For example, if students are coming back from remote learning, they may feel more anxiety about speaking in front of the classroom or going up to the board to work out a math problem in front of peers. “I’ve already seen it,” said Vicklund. “If you are already anxious about school and you don’t quite feel safe here, you can’t learn and you can’t take other chances on top of that.”

Vicklund hopes to help students acclimate by being mindful of when they do classroom activities that require performance and high levels of interaction with the whole class. She’s opting to save these exercises for later in the school year. 

When students start learning in school buildings full time, caregivers will also have a role to play in making sure students feel a sense of agency, according to Dorado. For example, if a child is having trouble getting started on homework after school, caregivers can give them options. She recommends saying something like, “You could do your homework now or you could take a 15 minute break, get something to eat, get some water, take a walk and do it then. Which would you prefer?” Dorado said these moments of giving over control can be very healing. 

Create Opportunities for Connection Among Peers 

Educators can also help students form better connections with their peers, which will be critical to students’ wellbeing and ability to learn. “Without the relationships, the academics definitely suffer,” said Tammy Stephens, a teacher at Bear Lake High School in Idaho. She noticed that students who experience a strong sense of connection feel less stressed and are more willing to try learning new things.  Even students who were in school buildings last year may have struggled to connect with classmates when they were behind masks and six feet apart. 

Younger students may have never been in the school building due to the pandemic, notes Tika Epstein, assistant principal at J.T. McWilliams Elementary School in Nevada. To help students acclimate to face-to-face learning, her school district provided an optional six-week summer acceleration program for elementary school-aged children with opportunities for social-emotional support, physical education, fine arts, project-based learning and academics throughout the day. They wanted to scaffold the learning experience before the school year started with extra individualized and small group support.

Our 4th graders have used 1200 water bottles so far to build our greenhouse! They still have to cover the roof. How many more bottles will they use? #estimation #ElemMathChat #STEM #summeracceleration pic.twitter.com/sDPS5QzgDF

— JT McWilliams ES (@JTMcWilliamsES) June 30, 2021

For older students, the isolation of remote learning has been especially hard because they need to socialize with people their age to receive affirmation about the hard things that they’re going through as they grow up. 

“I am lucky to not only teach grade seven, but have a grade seven student at home too,” said Vicklund. “She is an only child and going through all of this on her own. And so I am constantly having to reassure her that she is not the only one going through social anxiety, body changes and other issues in her life.” 

She plans on spending a lot more time doing cooperative activities and giving students more informal time to interact with each other to make up for the lack of connection many of her students had been feeling.

Families and emotional safety

Caregivers and educators may feel an urge to gloss over the pandemic and try to move on from the experience. According to Dorado, talking about the good and bad parts of the pandemic with children can help with healing. “If we simply pretend like it never happened,” she said, “then we lose the ability to learn from it.”

The phrase “Learning Loss” positions school as the source of all knowledge dissemination, implying families provide no source of wisdom or intellectual capital. This is why some of us rural folk have always been wary of learning institutions that devalue working class histories.

— Adam W. Jordan, Ph.D. (@aj_wade) September 6, 2020

To help students feel a sense of emotional safety, Dorado encourages teachers to invite students to discuss the ways their families coped with the pandemic and integrate these practices into the classroom. Dorado invites educators to validate the time students spent at home because families will be essential in helping students adjust to the next school year. 

Focusing on learning loss has devalued time spent with caregivers, according to Adam Jordan, professor of special education at the College of Charleston. Even for students who experienced challenges during remote learning, such as low engagement and participation in online classes, learning never stopped.

“I learned a lot from my dad, who was a welder on the weekend. I would learn how to stick metal together,” he said. “And it sparked curiosity in me. And now my son sits with me and we work on motorcycles. And it’s something that I didn’t learn at school.”

As we reflect on the experience of learning during COVID, a big question looms: What will schools look like after the pandemic?

Currently, two prevalent narratives are rising over the horizon. In the first, schools seek to return to “normal” and resume the familiar rhythms of teaching and learning much as they were before the COVID disruption. In the second scenario, schools intensify their programs to remediate learning loss with summer school, longer hours, tutoring and learning pods.

Unfortunately, both scenarios are problematic. Pre-pandemic schools, especially for underserved communities, left much to be desired, and families generally do not support increased instructional time, an approach that is found to have little positive effect on learning.

However, a third path is proposed in a new report from MIT, entitled Healing, Community, and Humanity:  How Students and Teachers Want to Reinvent Schools Post-COVID. Instead of maintaining the status quo, the paper advocates for locally sourced reinvention while emphasizing community health and welfare over the stresses of remediation. 

Its findings were drawn from interviews with teachers and students across elementary, middle and high schools about their pandemic learning experience. The report’s co-authors, educational researchers Justin Reich of MIT and Jal Mehta of Harvard, also facilitated ten design charrettes with teachers, school leaders, students and parents to generate ideas about the future of schools. Charrettes are collaborative design sprints – originally used by architects and urban planners – that integrate the views of multiple stakeholders.

“It’s important to listen to the voices of students and teachers – especially when you’re in unprecedented times – not because they’re always right, but because they’re always there,” said Reich who described policies aimed to address learning during a pandemic often didn’t include voices  from these two critical groups.

Notably, not one of the 200 teachers interviewed for the report discussed remediation as a priority. Rather, respondents advocated an approach that favored reflection, healing, community and humane reinvention.

“The narrative around learning loss was becoming the only narrative in which to think about schools and what students might need for next year, but there’s a much broader set of questions about what’s been lost this year, what strengths kids have gained this year and how we might build on that in a constructive way for next year,” said Mehta.

Connections and Autonomy: What Students Said They Lost and Found

The experiences shared by the 4,000 interviewed students ranged from being more focused and less distracted at home, to feeling completely disengaged and hating remote learning. Many expressed concern about the loss of irrecoverable chapters of their childhood and adolescence, while also lamenting the loss of social connections to their peers, and missed field trips, sports and extracurricular activities. A few even worried about the erosion of their interpersonal skills. Teachers attuned to their students’ needs stressed the importance of relationship and community building in the years ahead.

For example, one teacher said that, “I need to make so much more space for connecting with students, and for students to learn about each other. I have to stop thinking of community building as one ‘unit’ at the beginning that I rush through, and how community can play a much larger, systemic, role in my classroom.”

Students also valued the independence and autonomy they enjoyed while learning from home. They relished the freedom to wear comfortable clothes, nap, snack, access the bathroom at will and move around when restless. Living through an alternative way of doing school raised many questions about uncomfortable learning spaces, crowded curriculum at the expense of human connections and interest-based learning, undue policing of bodies and behavior and early start times that contribute to adolescent sleep deprivation. The report recommends that educators build on the positive aspects of their pandemic learning experience in the years ahead and support increased student independence to cultivate a safe and healthy environment that is more conducive to learning.

“I might say to teachers who are struggling to give up control, that you’re working too hard. You’re working against students’ natural inclinations to contribute, act and make. You’re expending a huge amount of energy policing what they’re wearing, where they’re going, etc. You could focus much more on the content if you change the relationship a little bit,” said Mehta.

Neema Avashia, a Boston middle school teacher who works closely with Reich and Mehta also advocates for a shift to greater student autonomy.

“One issue that surfaced during the pandemic was how much time and energy we spend policing children’s bodies, and how much of our day is spent on redirecting kids for what they’re wearing, how they’re sitting, etc. In urban public schools in America, there’s a lot of focus on controlling kids,” said Avashia. “Kids realized during this pandemic, ‘What the hell? Why does it matter what I wear if I’m learning? Does it really matter if I’m in pajamas?’ Kids’ tolerance for policing is gone because they know that this is not about learning at all. We have to do a lot of reflecting on how much of that policing is actually about learning and how much of policing is actually just about an ugly mix of classism, racism and adultism.”

Why Resist a Return to Normalcy? 

Teachers and students, especially those who come from economically challenged and racialized communities, are apprehensive about the impulse to resume business as usual.

“The narrative of back to normal, which I feel has been so pervasive from so many policymakers, has felt really troubling to me because normal didn’t work for too many of our kids,” said Avashia. “And so why would we go back to that? Why is that what people want to go back to? Are there things that we could learn during the pandemic? The notion of a return to normalcy I really think is a wrong headed approach to this moment. And I hope people resist it.”

We prioritized student mental health. We made sure families’ basic needs were met. We emphasized deep learning instead of shallow coverage. Why isn’t this ALWAYS how we do school? https://t.co/VpWQGomtuK

— Neema Avashia (@AvashiaNeema) July 22, 2021

Avashia’s concerns speak to the widely reported phenomenon that the fracture lines of inequity that have long plagued US schools became alarmingly pronounced during COVID, as vulnerable groups were disproportionately harmed by the pandemic. Economic disparities widened while in-person school support systems in poorer schools – ranging from counseling to community support and food programs – disappeared when classes moved online, with direct consequences to mental health, racial achievement gaps and inaccessiblity due to technological limitations.

In many cases, already underfunded schools were left to try and support struggling students and families whose situations – due to evictions, job loss, overcrowding, mental health issues or illness – deteriorated during the pandemic. But family support from schools is significantly constrained by a scarcity of resources.

“The pandemic really highlighted how easy it is to fall for vulnerable families and how fragile our safety nets are, and so schools were left to do a lot of sewing up of the safety nets, which is a tremendous amount of human capital,” said Avashia. “In our school, we would fundraise to get that cash to them from our pockets because there wasn’t a structural way to do that. Our mechanisms for supporting families have to be a lot more robust and they have to be able to respond to the needs of families.”

Stability at home is a vital precondition for successful learning, and the pandemic underscored the urgency to better equip schools to support economically challenged families. A return to normal and/or intensified learning schemes would only further disenfranchise the most vulnerable sectors of society. But how can meaningful changes be enacted? According to Reich, the pandemic revealed how much things actually can change. 

“There are lots of things in our school system that previously looked totally fixed and completely immovable that now everybody realizes are contingent and changeable,” he said.

“A Pragmatic Strategy for Gradual Reinvention”

The authors view the learning loss and “back to normal” narratives as symptomatic of governance where policymakers issue broad directives without consulting those who are most directly affected by their decisions.

“The disconnect between the local level and the policy level has never felt more intense to me than it has been,” said Avashia. “It’s like erasing your lived experience. It’s not responding to it. It’s not allowing schools to meet kids where they’re at or support them. We’re all being subjected to such intense institutional violence because the people making the decision have no willingness and no clue as to what it’s like to be young in school today.” 

Also, the authors argue that blanket policies are ineffective at addressing a mosaic of highly localized needs and circumstances, a reality made apparent by the sheer variety of divergent experiences shared by the report’s respondents. The myriad of views, opinions and experiences is not lost on school leaders, as many of those interviewed openly wondered how they might bring their fragmented communities on the same page. 

In lieu of top-down centralized policy, such as one-size-fits-all learning loss remediation programs, the authors recommend leveraging their user-centred design charrettes. This approach enlists relevant stakeholders, including students, educators, families and school leaders to help articulate, identify and solve issues that directly address their unique needs and circumstances. Charrettes require a very small investment of time, energy and resources, but can yield powerful dividends. 

The charrettes run by the researchers for the report included an “amplify, hospice and create” activity, where participating stakeholders were asked to consider what pandemic learning experiences they would keep and grow (amplify), what experiences should be retired (hospice) and the “create” activity asked participants to chart a tangible courses for implementation. 

“It’s important to delve a little bit into different people’s perspectives,” said Mehta. “To that end, the amplify, hospice and create activity is quite doable. It only takes 75 – 90 minutes, and all you really need is a meeting where you put people into manageable sized groups. If you’re doing it with the whole faculty or a wide group of faculty and students, you probably want to do it in groups of eight to ten.”

The design charrettes yielded a number of actionable initiatives that might help improve future schools. Some of these include implementing Zoom-style chat features in regular classes because they encouraged shy students to participate, continuing to hold parent-teacher conferences online, emphasizing depth over breadth by scheduling fewer but longer classes, increasing engagement through personalized learning programs, shifting from punitive to restorative disciplinary action, and building-in more time and space to reflect and connect.

“If you’re remote, you can run a charrette with Google Document or Google Slides,” said Mehta. Each group gets a slide with amplify, hospice and create. After an hour, have people look across the slides to see what things popped up again and again to decide what to move forward. Schools are just resuming, so while it’s still fresh, while everybody still remembers what happened last year, I think that this exercise would be really powerful.” 

A helpful toolkit in the appendix provides support material to effectively interview teachers and students, and guidelines to run a charrette with an amplify, hospice and create focus. These initiatives are contextualized by an acknowledgement that everybody is tired, and that change will not happen overnight. The upcoming year should be seen as an opportunity for reflection and recovery, and the charrettes can be used to support what the report terms a “pragmatic strategy for gradual reinvention.”

The Possibility of Making the Impossible, Possible 

Also, the charrettes asked participants to think about metaphors that capture the future of schools, such as “school as temple” or “school as family reunions.” These conceptual frames can act as big picture “tentpoles” to help guide and synchronize the efforts of the learning community.   

“A lot of the early planning documents for this last pandemic year were organized as checklists. That was kind of like the dominant rhetorical structure of policy advice to schools. And we thought: you cannot communicate one hundred and seventy three point checklists to families,” said Reich. “It is better to communicate one, two, or maybe three big ideas about what the response to the pandemic might look like and let people organize themselves around those big ideas, so that a high school biology teacher and a first grade teacher can both find themselves in those ideas. We went to metaphors this time.”

Unlike a contained checklist of bullet points, metaphors are generative and open a structured mental space to think creatively about practicable possibilities for building better schools. 

The common thread that runs through all these voices, proposals, aspirations and visions for the pandemic-informed future of school is a resounding call for more humane schools. And, it is important to remember that, rather than being at odds with academic success and learning, an emotionally healthy and community-focused learning environment will only heighten engagement and make lessons learned more meaningful and consequential. 

As one student put it, “I hope teachers approach whatever our return to normal looks like with the same degree of empathy as they have during the pandemic. People are just much more understanding of our lives and pressures.”

It’s a conversation I’ve had with many of my fellow parents in recent months, as our children have reunited at park play dates, and soccer matches: We’ve noticed our kids put on some extra weight during this pandemic, and we’re not sure what, if anything, we should do about it.

“You are not alone,” says Dr. Sandra Hassink, medical director of the American Academy of Pediatrics Institute for Healthy Childhood Weight. “This is happening to many, many people.” She says the pandemic created “the perfect storm for having issues with weight gain,” with its mass disruption of school, sleep and physical activity schedules, as well as stress and social isolation.

“I think everybody’s shifting upward,” she adds. “Kids that were in the healthy weight range are shifting upward. Children with obesity are shifting upward and children with severe obesity are shifting upward.”

Weight is an incredibly fraught topic — and an imperfect indicator of health. As parents, a kid’s sudden weight gain can be hard to know how to tackle.

The last thing we’d want is to set the stage for poor body image or eating disorders for our children. “If we focus on weight, that can cause so many other problems,” says Anna Lutz, a registered dietitian in Raleigh, N.C., who specializes in family feeding issues.

Instead, Lutz and other experts say parents should focus on they’re supporting healthy habits in their kids. Here are what doctors and specialists who work with kids say about what to do — and not to do — to get your family back on track.

Do: Check in with your pediatrician to see whether the weight gain is outside the norm

A pediatrician can help assess whether your child’s weight gain is just part of their normal growth pattern, says Lutz.

Kids grow at different rates, and healthy kids come in all shapes and sizes, she explains. “But where we might get concerned is when a child veers off of their growth pattern significantly.” So, for instance, a kid who has been growing consistently along the 25th percentile and then suddenly jumps to the 90th, that might be a signal that something’s going on.

If so, the pediatrician may suggest ways to slow the rate of weight gain so that a kid’s height can catch up, Hassink adds.

Your child’s doctor might also want to make sure that a child isn’t developing health problems like elevated cholesterol, fatty liver disease or sleep apnea. Or, a sudden jump in weight could be a signal of other health issues. “There could be something going on emotionally that’s interfering with someone’s eating or movement. It could be a change in medication,” says Lutz.

“A lot of things happened during COVID to maybe make us a little less healthy,” says Hassink. She recommends that parents assess their family routines and figure out what got out of whack during the pandemic.

Don’t: Tell kids there’s something wrong with their weight

When you’re talking to kids, focus on healthy habits, not weight, experts say. This is important because weight isn’t as easily changed as behaviors, and “we are not all supposed to look the same,” says Lutz. “Bodies do come in all shapes and sizes and bodies change over time.”

Focusing on a number on the scale might lead a child to develop poor body image, says Lutz.

“When we start to send our children the message that there’s something wrong with their body, we’re setting them up for all these health concerns and emotional concerns, self-esteem problems,” she says. “Really, focusing on behaviors is what supports health.”

And ultimately, the goal is to foster healthy habits in children that they’ll maintain throughout their lives, says Hassink.

“This isn’t a 10-week program. We’re really aiming for these patterns that will start now and go across their lifespan.” And it’s about more than weight — good nutrition and physical activity are also key to preventing chronic illness, she says.

Sleep, regular meal times and physical activity are a good place to start.

Do: Get bedtimes back on track

In the chaos of the pandemic, and during summer breaks, sleep and wakeup times slid later and later for lots of kids, says Dr. Nazrat Mirza, medical director of the pediatric weight management clinic at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C.

“I’ve had kids [going to sleep] at 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m. And then they nap during the day,” she says — instead of engaging in physical activity. Research has linked regular, adequate sleep to improved mental and physical health in kids. “So sleep is equally important,” as nutrition and exercise, she says.

If sleep routines have become a problem in your household, Hassink suggests trying to move kids’ bedtimes back by 15 minutes every two or three nights. Do the same thing with wake-up times, moving them 15 minutes earlier every few mornings, she says. “Work your way back into a sleep routine that matches what you’re going to need for school.”

Don’t: Put your kids on a diet.

Clinicians who work with kids are unanimous on this count: Restrictive eating is not for kids. “We know that children and adolescents that engage in dieting behaviors are more likely to develop eating disorders,” says Lutz.

And restrictive diets can also backfire. “In the long run it actually leads to increased weight gain,” she says, and it can set someone up for gaining and losing weight over and over again, which can have health consequences of its own.

Do: Create more structure around meal times.

All-day-long, unsupervised grazing became a habit in many households in the early days of the pandemic — even for trained experts — as many parents found themselves on constant work Zooms.

“It was sort of this buffet-style experience where they were noshing throughout the day,” says Stacey Rosenfeld, a Miami-based psychologist who specializes in eating disorders. This was the case with her kids, twin 7-year-old boys, one of whom ended up gaining 20 pounds in six months.

As things calmed down, Rosenfeld decided it was time for a reset, including getting back to more structured eating. While putting kids on a restricted diet can lead to unintended consequences, creating and sticking to set meal and snack times can help kids regulate their appetites and develop sensible eating habits, experts say.

“If a child’s not sure if dinner is going to be five o’clock or eight o’clock and they get hungry at 4:30, they might just reach for a snack, not knowing exactly when dinner is coming,” Hassink says. “So regular meal and snack times of eating together is a very positive health behavior.”

Lutz and Rosenfeld both embrace an approach known as the division of responsibility in feeding: Basically, your job as a parent is to decide when and what kids eat, offering them a variety of healthful foods. The kids’ job is to decide whether and how much to eat — so don’t force them to clean their plate and don’t be a short-order cook.

“Provide the food, take a deep breath and let them listen to their body. Let them do their jobs,” Lutz says. Ultimately, she says, you want to raise kids who are mindful eaters, in touch with their hunger and fullness.

Do: Build movement breaks into the day.

The pandemic has had us all glued to screens. Break up all that sitting — and cut back on screen time — with small and frequent bouts of movement, Hassink says. That could be a quick game of tag or an outdoor playdate or walking to the corner store with mom or dad.

Family walks are always a good idea. If you have a kid that is less than enthused about joining you for a stroll, Hassink has some suggestions. For smaller kids, she says a star chart might work. Give them a star for every walk they complete each day, and at the end of the week, they get to pick a fun family activity for you all to do.

For older kids, she suggests having them invite a friend over to play or join you in a family outing, such as a family bike ride. You could sign the kids up for an activity like soccer or swimming, pandemic permitting. Or take your child along for an errand and park far. “The focus is on getting kids moving again,” Hassink says, adding, “Any activity is better than sitting at your computer or watching a screen.”

Don’t: Try to overhaul everything all at once.

It takes energy to make change, and tackling too many changes at once can be overwhelming, Hassink advises. Instead, pick one or two changes you want to make at first to get your family back to healthy habits.

“If you take the first step and then you succeed at that, it gives you energy” to keep moving in the right direction, she says.

Do: Make changes as a family.

No matter what changes you make, make sure you make them for the whole family, experts advise. Why? For starters, you need the support of the people around you, says Hassink. “If you’re living in the midst of your family and you’re the only one trying to make the change or having to make the change, it’s not going to work.”

Even if you have multiple children, but only one child gained weight, don’t single them out, says Rosenfeld. “I hear so many stories about that backfiring,” she says, “stories of kids who say, ‘I was the heavier person or I gained weight, and so I wasn’t allowed to have desserts and my sibling or siblings were.’ Or ‘I had to do this exercise.’ And I think that can be so damaging.”

If the goal is to raise healthy children, then the changes you adopt should apply to everyone in the family, she says. She often encourages parents to ask themselves, “Would I do this if my child were thin? And I use that as a litmus [test].”

Do: Have compassion for yourself, and model it for your kids.

We’ve all been through an incredibly stressful and exhausting year and a half, and it’s not over. And some families, particularly in low-income communities of color, have been especially hard hit by this pandemic, experiencing job losses, food and housing insecurity, as well as higher rates of COVID-19. All of these things can make it harder to get back on track with healthy habits.

“We have to show ourselves a little compassion and realize we’re going to work our way out of this, and it’s not going to happen with a snap of the fingers,” says Hassink.

That compassion is something we should also foster in our children. Even if your kid didn’t gain excess weight, teach them not to tease others. Pediatrician Mirza says she’s hearing these fears from her patients. “We’re having children who are scared to go back to school because they now realize that they have changed and they don’t want to meet their classmates,” she says.

If you hear these fears from your kid, experts say encourage them to talk about it. Validate their feelings and help them think ahead. If this happens to them, how will they respond?

Ultimately, “we want to be building our kids up. We want to be focusing on who they are outside of their bodies,” says Rosenfeld.

“We’ve survived this very serious time in our history,” says Lutz. “And if that meant that people gained more weight than they would have, it’s a body’s way of surviving.”

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

There are many reasons students don’t like math: stressful timed tests, right and wrong answers, isolated work, math anxiety learned from adults around you. A 2012 PISA survey found that one third of high school students feel helpless and emotionally stressed when doing math. And if you don’t see people who look like you succeeding in a subject or a field, it can be isolating, especially for young people. 

“Something that’s really important, particularly for adolescents and high school students, is that they feel a sense of belonging inside STEM,” said Stanford maths education professor Jo Boaler. 

Researchers have found that a sense of belonging helps students succeed, in part because feeling like you’re a part of a community of learners is a powerful motivator to do well. “And unfortunately, a lot of students do not feel that they belong inside traditional high school maths classes,” said Boaler.

But there is one subject that students, including those who are math confident, enjoy learning: data science. As of 2020, data science is accepted math coursework for University of California and Cal State University’s A-G requirements, so students might see it offered in more schools.

Over the last decade, teams of teachers, researchers and academics have been developing data science curriculum and tools for the classroom, and having a modern approach to teaching is resonating with students. 

“It’s kind of a unique opportunity because there wasn’t a high school data science course before,” said Suyen Machado, director of the Introduction to Data Science program, which was started as a partnership between UCLA and the Los Angeles Unified School District nearly ten years ago. The program was funded with a National Science Foundation grant to increase the amount of students going into STEM careers and to bring computational and statistical thinking to underrepresented high school students, according to Machado. 

“Engaging lessons that are inquiry driven, student driven and collaborative are really well suited for underrepresented groups, and you will find all of that in our curriculum. And they’re good for students in general,” Machado said. 

REAL WORLD USES

The data science curriculum gives students opportunities to look at real data instead of abstract formulas.  

“It’s just so much fun,” said James Molyneux, a professor at Oregon State University who was involved in the development of IDS. For example, students can collect their data and compare themselves to larger government data sets, like the American Time Use Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Students can measure how much time they spend grooming, eating, being with family and consuming social media, according to Molyneux.

Among students, there’s a growing interest in data sets, such as pollution in school communities and which gender character is most likely to survive a horror film. For IDS participants, the most popular data project involves snacks. 

“It honestly made me more aware of what I was taking in and putting in my body,” said student Linda Solares of Leuzinger High School of the snack project. Not to worry, the unit is not about encouraging weight loss or anything. Students used the IDS app to track information like the amount of salt, sugar content, cost, number of ingredients or their reasons for eating.

“We’re in quarantine, we’re eating a lot more out of boredom and stuff. So honestly, it really helped me,” said Solares. “After I finished the survey, I was like, whoa,” she said, “I was really eating not so healthy.”

Surveys of IDS students in LAUSD found that coding was the most challenging part of the course, but also, the most important skill students learned. Using programming tools, like RStudio, they persisted by trying over and over again to get their code right. And that helped boost confidence in their ability to problem solve.  

“The lab is a lesson for us to learn about the codes and how we can implement them in certain situations,” said Leuzinger student Peter Tran, who would test different variables against one another, like finding the most common time of day students ate unhealthy snacks. 

An important part of the data science curriculum is understanding privacy matters, and knowing how data is collected about people and used against them. This knowledge can help develop a person’s media literacy.

“There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” said Boaler. “Having students develop a critical perspective – that’s one of the things we can teach in data science. Be skeptical of data that’s put in front of you, ask questions of it, think about who put that data together, what purpose did they have for it.”

LEARNING GETS MESSY

The messiness of the data sets is part of the appeal for students; it’s what engages them in learning and not shying away from unknown outcomes, according to Concord Consortium’s Chad Dorsey. 

“It’s almost sort of pre-chewed and preordained,” said Dorsey of traditional curriculum that doesn’t engage students. “And when we do that, we take a lot of the discovery away. We’re finding the value in putting students into the place of needing to ask and answer questions with data that might be ambiguous or that might have a missing value,” said Dorsey. As part of an NSF grant, the group developed the free CODAP tool so teachers can integrate data skills into their classes, such as science. The group also provides teachers with professional development.  

“We’re finding the value of putting students in the driver’s seat to do the exploration themselves, to uncover new things in the data that maybe the teachers didn’t understand was there in the first place and where students are finding something different than their neighbors,” said Dorsey.

For Leuzinger High School IDS teacher Ding-ay Tadena, that has meant giving students agency over the topics they want to investigate, such as sports. “They learn how to think deeper and then use these math skills and eventually they love it,” says Tadena, who has seen students of all math levels succeed in data science. She says that in data science class, students see themselves as more than the math track they’re in.  

“It taught them how to dream bigger rather than just being profiled as lower performing in terms of math,” she said. “And that is the beauty of it because you teach them how to code, how to do this data, how to scrape data from the internet and push it in R in the field that interests them.” Tadena, who has been teaching math for about two decades, says data science is in many ways a respite for math teachers like herself who are looking for ways to engage their students. 

“The students are so interested,” Tadena said. “They’re so into it.” 

For science teacher Emerlyn Gatchalian, having Concord Consortium’s CODAP tool makes understanding the periodic table easier for some of her students. “They’re looking at the different properties of elements in the periodic table using data like the atomic size, ionic size,” she said. “Because they’re using data using CODAP, it’s so easy for them to look for patterns and trends and make them feel that they can actually understand and interpret data instead of using all the equations that they’re learning in math.”

For high school special education teacher Michelle Murtha, students’ ability to graph their data using digital tools helped them understand it. “Sometimes, graphing itself is so hard for the students. But because the program helps them through it,” she said, “they’re able to actually see the graph. And for us, that’s more important, so they can actually analyze the data versus, ‘can you plot this point?’”

REDEFINING HIGH SCHOOL

When Emilio Jaime was a student at Phineas Banning High School, he was on track to take AP Calculus his senior year. He had been confident about math throughout school, but decided to take IDS based on a teacher’s suggestion. Plus, one less AP class would help ease his senior year course load. 

“I decided to let go of calculus and took on IDS, which I’m so glad I did, because I guess I was just scared because it wasn’t the norm that students were doing,” said Jaime, who graduated from UC Berkeley last spring.

What he liked about data science was the ability to play with formulas and not feel limited by right and wrong answers that were the hallmark of his math education. “This is how the formula is, and this is the answer, and there is a wrong answer,” he said of his earlier relationship to math. But data science was more fluid. “On our projects, I tried so many different graphs and so many different solutions to try to create so many different conclusions.”   

“I think IDS and data science really allows students to try different things without being scared to fail,” he said.   

IDS trains teachers across the country and abroad on how to teach data science as a course. It’s one of several programs, including ones operated by the Concord Consortium and Boaler’s YouCubed. The outcome of getting more underrepresented students in the STEM field has yet to be seen. But for now, these educators are shifting students’ experiences with STEM to increase the odds that they’ll stay.   

All of these skills will hopefully help students become better informed members of society. 

“I think that’s the biggest gift that we can give students right now – no matter how we’re doing it – is to help them understand that there are data all around them, that those data have answers, that they come from people, and that the things that they are doing are generating data all over, and to give them the ability to start to feel empowered to work with this data themselves,” said Dorsey. 

Subscribe to the MindShift Podcast in your favorite podcast app so you won’t miss a single episode. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, NPR One, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. 

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — It was the end of the school day at Ashley Park PreK-8, in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the yellow buses were just pulling up in front of the red brick building. The kindergartners, with their cartoon backpacks and cornrows, filed out first, followed by the first through fifth graders.

Then, from the side of the school, the “big kids” came running, spilling from their modular middle school in headphones and hoodies to line up behind the younger children.

When Ashley Park was converted from an elementary school to a K-8 a decade ago, over the objections of the community, it was the bus ride, with its noisy, chaotic comingling of kids, that many parents feared the most. They worried that their younger children might be corrupted, bullied or worse.

But now the bus ritual has become routine, and many families here have come to embrace the K-8 model, with its smaller cohorts and sense of community. Four years ago, when district leaders asked Ashley Park parents and teachers if they wanted to go back to being an elementary school, their answer was an emphatic no.

“They said, ‘don’t do this to us again. Let us stay a family,’ ” said Meaghan Loftus, the principal at the time. “ ’Listen to us this time.’ ”

Ashley Park’s experience is not unusual. Over the past two decades, several urban school districts, including Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Milwaukee, New Orleans, New York City and Philadelphia, have shuttered some middle schools and converted elementary schools into K-8s.

Proponents of K-8 schools, or “elemiddles” as they’re sometimes called, say they promote strong relationships between not only teachers and students but also teachers and parents and offer stability to young teens during a tumultuous time in their lives. They argue that early adolescence — a period marked by more rapid physical and cognitive development than any stage other than the first two years of life — is a terrible time to transition to a new school.

The recent conversions represent a return to old ways of educating early adolescents. Up until about 1900, the American education system operated on a two-tier structure, with eight years of primary school followed by four years of secondary school. More than a century of experimentation with the middle grades hasn’t provided much clarity about which configuration works best.

The research comparing outcomes of students at K-8 and middle schools remains inconclusive. While some studies have shown that students who move to a middle school experience steeper declines in academic achievement than those who stay put, other research has found few differences between the groups.

For many districts — Charlotte included — the decision to merge elementary and middle schools has been more expedient than philosophical, driven by space constraints and budget shortfalls rather than what’s best for students.

“The pendulum swings,” said David Rosenberg, a partner with Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit that advises school leaders on resource use, the “research goes back and forth, and the districts go back and forth, but they’re not always thinking about how to create the conditions for success.”

Arguments over how to create the best learning environment for young adolescents go back decades. One pair of researchers called it “the longest-running debate in middle level educational research” — and that was nearly thirty years ago.

Around the turn of the century, educators and psychologists started advocating for a reorganization away from the old primary school system. College presidents complained that the later years of primary school were wasted, and the National Educational Association published a report that called for college prep to start in the seventh grade.

The NEA argued that the seventh grade was a more natural turning point in a child’s life, according to a 2004 book by The RAND Corporation, “Focus on the Wonder Years,” and that moving students more gradually from a single teacher to a system of special teachers would help prevent “the violent shock now commonly felt on entering the high school.”

About the same time, the prominent psychologist Stanley Hall was arguing that puberty was a distinct developmental phase that demanded new educational approaches. “The pupil in the age of spontaneous variation … suffers from mental ennui and dyspepsia, and this is why so many and an increasing number refuse some of the best prepared courses,” he wrote.

These concerns, coupled with crowding in primary schools — the result of an influx of new immigrants — led to the creation, starting around 1910, of standalone “junior high schools” for seventh through ninth graders.

But it quickly became clear that the junior highs weren’t living up to their promise. Instead of serving as a bridge to high school, they were operating as mini-high schools, with little attention paid to adolescents’ unique needs. Dissatisfaction with junior highs peaked in the 1960s, when William Alexander, chairman of the department of education at George Peabody College, proposed the creation of schools that would specifically cater to adolescents.

Meanwhile, secondary school enrollment numbers were shrinking, while elementary enrollments were exploding, due to the postwar baby boom. The resulting shortage of space in elementary schools led to sixth grade being pushed up into what would become known as “middle schools.” The new schools multiplied rapidly, displacing junior high schools. Between 1970 and 1980, the number of middle schools tripled, while the number of junior highs shrank by a quarter.

Yet, because many of the new middle schools had been built for pragmatic reasons, rather than ideological ones, they tended to resemble the junior highs they’d replaced. They were “middle schools in name only,” said Mary Beth Schaefer, an associate professor of adolescent education at St. John’s University.

By the 1980s, however, the middle school movement that Alexander started had solidified, coalescing around a set of practices, said Schaefer, who has studied the movement. These included interdisciplinary team teaching, flexible scheduling and the provision of regular academic and social-emotional advising to groups of students. Proponents argued that freestanding middle schools were the ideal setting for implementing such practices.

Then, in the 1990s, standardized testing revealed that most eighth graders weren’t proficient in math and reading and were falling behind their peers in other countries. Whether due to teacher resistance, or a lack of institutional support, middle schools had adopted the adolescent-focused reforms “at only superficial levels,” according to the RAND book. Critics once again declared middle school “a floundering ground,” “the wasteland of our primary and secondary landscape” and “holding pens for preadolescent children.”

If middle school is a time of tremendous turmoil, it’s also a time of tremendous opportunity. Phyllis Fagell, a school counselor and the author of “Middle School Matters,” calls it “the last best chance” to transform the trajectory of students.

“This is the age when they are the most malleable,” said Neodria Brown, the principal of Ranson Middle School, in West Charlotte, which serves grades 6-8. “This is the age when you can help them chart their course.”

While the transition to middle school can be tough on kids — “you’re not the head honcho anymore,” Brown explained — she doesn’t see much of a difference in the way adolescents are educated in a K-8 versus a standalone 6-8 school.

“There’s more opportunity to interact with younger children in K-8,” she said. “But middle school is middle school.”

Brown, who came home to Charlotte in 2018 after leading a school in Hilton Head, belies the idea that large middle schools must be more impersonal than smaller K-8s. Though her demeanor is no-nonsense and reserved, there’s a warmth underneath. The tattoo on her arm reads “Warrior,” but the notebook that she scribbles in has a kitten on the cover. In one corner of her office, there’s a decorated cart that she used to deliver donuts to her students on Valentine’s Day, with a sign reading “love train” affixed to it.

Walking the halls of her school, she stopped a pair of boys who were swearing. “Uh-uh, not today, not using profanity,’” she admonished them.

A few steps later, she stopped a girl to ask her if her mother was going to call.

She turned a corner and bent to collect a candy wrapper, handing it to another student to throw out.

A few more steps, and she picked up a pencil, asking a passing girl if she needed one. The girl took it.

Outside, some boys were goofing off. Brown got on her walkie talkie: “10-4, they should be in class. And can we get a sweep in the hallway?” The students had eaten lunch in class, and there were crunchy bits of Cheetos on the floor.

In the cafeteria, she talked to a girl who wanted to switch classes. At a table nearby, a girl with dreadlocks and a pink “Save Animal” sweatshirt sat alone, looking sad.

“Are you having a better day?” Brown asked.

“No,” the girl told her.

“Why?” asked Brown.

“People,” the girl responded.

“Some days are like that,” Brown said.

The girl came over to the principal, rested her head on her shoulder, and whispered in her ear.

Even with the recent resurgence of K-8s, middle schools outnumber “elemiddles” in the United States 2:1, federal data shows. Ten times as many eighth graders attend a middle school as attend a K-8.

In Charlotte, middle schools remain the most common configuration after a decade of experimentation. A decade ago, the school board decided to close three struggling middle schools in predominantly black West Charlotte and send their students to eight new K-8s. In an effort to sell the plan, supporters pointed to research on the benefits of the K-8 configuration. The new model, they argued, could raise achievement at the poorly performing West Charlotte schools.

But in reality, the decision was driven by financial considerations, not research on adolescent learning and development. The superintendent and his supporters on the school board said the move was necessary to save teacher jobs in the face of massive budget cuts.

“We were in the depths of a recession,” recalled Eric Davis, then the chairman of the board. “We were trying to do everything we could to avoid laying off hundreds of teachers.”

But not everyone on the board was convinced that the change would benefit the schools.

“If it was good for the one part of town, why wouldn’t it be good for the others?,” wondered Joyce Waddell, one of four members of the nine-member board who voted to block the closures. “It seemed a bit discriminatory. Why was this happening only to these inner-city schools?”

Denise Watts, who was a top administrator for the district at the time and now works for the University of Virginia advising districts on school reform, believes the board picked the West Charlotte schools over others on its initial list because “it didn’t want to risk social capital” closing schools in more affluent communities. The parents whose schools were closed reacted in fury, crying racism. They demanded to know why their schools were targeted, while undersubscribed and aging facilities in wealthier and whiter parts of the city were spared.

“It was very racialized,” said Watts. “It was the district doing unto the communities.”

To understand the uproar that surrounded the school board’s decision to close the West Charlotte middle schools, it helps to know a little bit about the district’s history.

In the mid-1960s, less than five percent of black children in Charlotte attended integrated schools. Then, a 1971 Supreme Court decision in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education led to a citywide busing plan that became a model for districts nationwide. By 1980, the district’s schools were mostly integrated, and Charlotte was being called “the city that made desegregation work.”

But the plan didn’t hold. In the late 1990s, a white parent sued the district because he believed his daughter was rejected from a local magnet school because of her race. The district ended up adopting a “Family Choice” plan that was heavily based on neighborhood schools. Because most neighborhoods in Charlotte are segregated — the result of decades of housing discrimination — the schools resegregated.

When the district redrew its student assignment boundaries in 2017, the new superintendent proposed a do-over, asking the eight West Charlotte elementary schools that had been converted into K-8s to decide their futures. Three schools went back to being K-5, while five remained K-8.

But in Charlotte, at least, the switch to K-8 — and back, in those few cases — has had little impact on student achievement. Ashley Park and the other affected elementary and middle schools had low test scores and poor attendance rates before the 2010 decision, and they still do today. All but one is rated either “D” or “F” by the state.

Roslyn Mickelson, a researcher who has studied the impact of desegregation and resegregation on Charlotte’s schools, believes those outcomes say more about the demographics of the schools than the merits of either model. Even as they toggled between grade-span configurations, the West Charlotte schools remained segregated by race and income, populated almost exclusively by students who were Black and low income.

“The reason none of these reforms is effective is because they don’t address the underlying causes of low performance, and that is concentrated poverty,” she said.

Today, Black and Hispanic students in Charlotte are half as likely as white students to earn a college degree or credential within six years of enrolling, according to a recent report by WestEd. But the most discouraging statistic is this: Charlotte has the worst “intergenerational,” or socioeconomic, mobility of America’s 50 largest cities, according to an influential analysis by researchers at Harvard and Berkeley. Compared to children in other cities, kids born poor in Charlotte have the lowest odds of reaching the top quintile of earners in their lifetimes.

Educators on both sides of the K-8 vs. middle school debate agree that the sixth through eighth grades are a pivotal time for kids, a phase in their education when self-concepts are formed and habits are established that can set students up for either success or failure in high school and beyond.

Yet for many students, they’re a time of growing alienation from school, of disengagement and declining achievement.

While there are probably many reasons for this drop, one prominent theory holds that it is due to a mismatch between the social and emotional needs of 11- to-14-year-olds and the structure of their schools. Young adolescents crave connection and autonomy. Yet when they enter the middle grades, they are suddenly held to a rigid schedule, rotating among a cast of teachers unfamiliar with their backgrounds and learning styles. Recess is taken from them, leaving students with little unstructured time to work on their social skills.

“We micromanage them,” said Fagell, the author of “Middle School Matters.” “They are like salmon swimming upstream in the hallways, with maybe two minutes to go to the bathroom.”

Porscher Enoch, the former head of the parent teacher association at Ranson Middle School, in Charlotte, believes many students aren’t ready for the newfound responsibilities. “They go from being coddled to being thrown out there,” she said.

Switching schools before the sixth or seventh grade can compound the challenges students face in the middle grades, leaving them feeling “untethered from everything they know,” said Fagel, who is a counselor in a private school in Washington, D.C.

Yet staying put in a K-8 doesn’t eliminate the drama and angst of the middle grades. Just ask the high schoolers on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Youth Council.

Calvin Duong, a tenth grader who attended a K-8 STEM-oriented school, said there were drawbacks to being with the same small group of peers all the time. “Sometimes, it’s like a dysfunctional family,” he said at a pre-pandemic meeting of the group.

Juliette Palacios Perez, an 11th grader who attended Waddell Language Academy through eighth grade, said she could have benefited from a fresh start in middle school. “I was bullied a lot in elementary school,” she said. “Sometimes I wish I could have gone to another school to start over.”

Students on the youth council who attended middle schools said the transition to a new school was rough – but ultimately worth it. “Sixth grade was like shock therapy,” said Gabe Schuhl, an 11th grader who attended Community House Middle School. “But by seventh grade, I made some of my best friends.”

Jean Rivera, a 12th grader who attended Mint Hill Middle, said advancing to a larger, more diverse school in sixth grade “was intimidating at first,” but taught him “how to get along with different types of people, to make new connections.”

He added, “If you never move, you won’t learn how to do that.”

Those who argue for a return to K-8 schools often point to the studies showing that students who attend such schools have higher test scores, better attendance rates and more self-esteem and feelings of competence than their middle school peers.

Researchers have attributed those findings, in large part, to the fact that students in K-8s aren’t asked to change schools when they’re at their most vulnerable. They can stick to a comfortable, familiar environment, remain “top dog” for longer, and continue relationships with teachers from the lower grades.

But many of the studies supporting K-8 schools have failed to control for student variables that could impact student achievement, such as poverty, or for families’ self-selection into certain types of schools. Other research has found that the achievement dips some students experience when they transition to middle school are temporary, and that attending a K-8 can have negative effects on elementary-aged students.

“We don’t have enough research yet to say everyone should go to one model,” said Jonah Rockoff, a professor of finance and economics at Columbia University whose own research has found that transitioning to middle school puts students on a downward path. “Neither is perfect. The jury is still out.”

Now, even the staunchest supporters of middle schools say that the movement’s best practices can work in any configuration. That acknowledgement led the National Middle School Association to change its name, in 2011, to the Association for Middle Level Education, Schaefer said.

“It’s not at all about what grades are in the school building,” said April Tibbles, the association’s chief communications officer. “It’s about making sure the programs and practices are developmentally responsive to the needs of the young adolescent students.”

Surveys of parents find that a majority favor K-8 schools, believing they foster stronger bonds. They like that they’re located close to home and allow families with multiple children to remain in the same school for longer.

Yet principals prefer separate middle schools, seeing them as better suited to address the physical, intellectual and social needs of adolescents, a national survey found.

When Charlotte was debating the switch to K-8, in 2010, district leaders circulated a study that showed that students who attended Philadelphia’s established K-8 schools outperformed students at the city’s middle schools.

But that study contained a caveat: The established K-8s had fewer low-income and minority students and more experienced teachers than the middle schools. Students who attended the city’s newer K-8s, which were more similar demographically to the city’s middle schools, performed about the same as their middle school peers on math, and only slightly better on reading. The researchers concluded that “much of the old K-8 advantage clearly resides in the different student populations that are served by the old K-8 schools and middle schools,” and warned that “a district is not likely to replicate the K–8 advantage based upon size and school transition alone if its student population remains unchanged.”

That summed up the situation in Charlotte in 2010, where the schools that merged in 2011 were comprised almost entirely of low-income Black students.

“You’re putting low-performing schools together,” warned Waddell, who is now a state senator, at a 2010 school board meeting.

When the board reviewed outcomes at the eight merged schools in 2017, it found that the results were uneven. While some schools had seen proficiency gains in some subjects and grade spans, others had slipped in some areas, and all continued to perform well below the district average. The buildings, which were well below capacity in 2010, were now almost all overcrowded, with utilization rates ranging from 99 to 175 percent.

That troubled board member Ericka Ellis-Stewart, who urged the board to “look at this through the lens of a parent. Is this good enough for your child?”

She said, “If these schools were not full of children of color, our community would never stand for this, not in a million years.”

Davis, the board chair, agreed that the results were unacceptable, but said he wasn’t sure that changing the configuration of the schools would make a difference. “I think we all know the effect of poverty on our children’s education,” he said. “How do we know if we change the grade-level configuration, we’ll get different results?”

When then-Superintendent Ann Clark asked the eight K-8 schools whether they wanted to go back to a K-5 configuration, their answers — and the board’s response — differed. At Bruns Academy, located in a gentrifying neighborhood, a small but vocal coalition of newcomers argued that restoring the school to an elementary would encourage more affluent families to send their kids to the school.

The board agreed, and Bruns became an elementary school again last year. But when a similarly small and vocal group of parents — predominantly Black, in this case — fought to keep Reid Park Academy K-8, the board split the school anyway.

At Ashley Park, where parents pushed for the school to remain K-8, the transition in 2011 from an elementary school had been rough. The first day of school, one middle schooler got off the bus with “RIP Spaugh,” scrawled on his arm in marker, a tribute to his shuttered school, Loftus recalled. There was no gym for the middle schoolers, and few sports teams and extracurriculars. Spanish and other electives were limited, due to the small size of the middle school classes.

But by the time the board revisited its decision, six years later, things were looking up. The district had created some composite sports teams by combining interested students from separate schools, and voters had approved a bond for a middle school gym. Students were traveling to the high school to participate in band, and the school was sharing a middle school Spanish teacher with another K-8.

So when the board asked parents and teachers at Ashley Park for their preferences, they said they didn’t want another change.

Still, Ashley Park, like many K-8 schools, tries to keep the “little kids” and “big kids” as separate as possible. Middle schoolers aren’t allowed in the hallways dedicated to the lower grades, and they are never in the section of the school reserved for “specials” like health and music at the same time as the younger kids. For most of the day, they’re confined to the modular structures on the side of the school.

On a Wednesday in early March 2019, before the schools closed due to the coronavirus, a class of kindergartners practiced phonics inside the main building. “Say hop,” the teacher told the class gathered on a blue rug with lighter blue dots. “Hop,” the students dutifully repeated back.

“Now chop it, said the teacher, making a chopping motion with her hand. “huh-op.”

“Huh-op,” the kids echoed, mimicking the movement.

Meanwhile, in the middle school modular building, a class of seventh graders sat in clusters of four desks, studying geometry. “What did we find yesterday?” the teacher asked. “The diameter,” said one student.

“And that’s the distance from…?” the teacher prompted.

“Side to side,” replied another student.

Today, only five of the eight middle schools that the district opened in 2011 remain. But former top administrator Denise Watts doesn’t think that Charlotte — or any other city for that matter — is done experimenting with grade-span configurations. “One of the things I’ve learned is that change is the only constant,” she said. “I don’t know if we’ll ever reach a place of stability.”

Brown, the middle school principal, said she doesn’t believe there is a right or wrong configuration for kids. “It’s about the adults in the building,” she said.

“Kids do better with adults who care about them,” she said. “It doesn’t really matter what setting they’re in.”

This story about middle school was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.