How did the pandemic disrupt learning for America’s more than 50 million K-12 students?

For two years, that question has felt immeasurable, like a phantom, though few educators doubted the shadow it cast over children who spent months struggling to learn online.

Now, as a third pandemic school year draws to a close, new research offers the clearest accounting yet of the crisis’s academic toll — as well as reason to hope that schools can help.

1. Surprise! Students learned less when they were remote

But really, this should surprise no one.

Most schools had little to no experience with remote instruction when the pandemic began; they lacked teacher training, appropriate software, laptops, universal internet access and, in many cases, students lacked stability and a supportive adult at home to help.

Even students who spent the least amount of time learning remotely during the 2020-21 school year — just a month or less — missed the equivalent of seven to 10 weeks of math learning, says Thomas Kane of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.

Much of that missed learning, Kane says, was likely a hangover from spring 2020, when nearly all schools were remote and remote instruction was at its worst.

Kane is part of a collaborative of researchers at Harvard, the American Institutes for Research, Dartmouth College and the school-testing nonprofit NWEA, who set out to measure just how much learning students missed during the pandemic.

And notice we’re saying “missed,” not “lost,” because the problem is that when schools went remote, kids simply did not learn as much or as well as they would have in person.

“We try not to say ‘learning loss,’ because if they didn’t learn it, they didn’t lose it,” explains Ebony Lee, an assistant superintendent in Clayton County, Ga.

Not everyone agrees. Some parents who saw their kids struggle while trying to learn remotely believe “learning loss” fits — because it captures the urgency they now feel to make up for what was lost.

“It would mean so much for parents if somebody would acknowledge it. ‘You know, we have learning loss,’ ” says Sheila Walker, a parent in Northern California. “Like our board, they don’t even use those words. We know we have learning loss, so how are we going to address it?”

Kane and his fellow researchers studied the test scores of more than 2 million elementary- and middle-schoolers, comparing the growth they made between fall 2017 and fall 2019 to their pandemic-era growth, from fall 2019 to fall 2021.

Though researchers focused on math, the instructional time students missed in reading was “comparable,” Kane says.

One quick caveat: Obviously, test scores can tell us only so much about what students actually learn in a given year (social-emotional skills, for example, are harder to measure). But they’re a start.

2. Students at high-poverty schools were hit hardest

Students at high-poverty schools experienced an academic double-whammy: Their schools were more likely to be remote and, when they were, students missed more learning.

Let’s break that down.

First, high-poverty schools spent about 5.5 more weeks in remote instruction during the 2020-21 school year than low- and mid-poverty schools, the report says. Researchers also found a “higher incidence of remote schooling for Black and Hispanic students.”

And second, in high-poverty schools that stayed remote for the majority of the 2020-21 school year, students missed the equivalent of 22 weeks of in-person math learning.

That’s more than half of a traditional school year (roughly 36-40 weeks).

By contrast, students in similarly remote, low-poverty schools missed considerably less learning: roughly 13 weeks, Kane says, and he warns that closing these gaps could take years.

This new data backs up what many teachers and school leaders have been saying.

“It’s very disconcerting,” says Sharon Contreras, the superintendent of North Carolina’s third-largest district, in Guilford County. “Because we know that the students who are most vulnerable saw the most amount of learning loss, and they were already behind.”

Why did students in high-poverty schools miss more learning while remote? Recent U.S. Government Accountability Office surveys of more than 2,800 teachers offer some explanations.

Teachers in remote, high-poverty schools were more likely to report that their students lacked a workspace and internet at home, and were less likely to have an adult there to help. Many older students disengaged because the pandemic forced them to become caretakers, or to get jobs.

Making matters worse, as NPR has reported, high-poverty students were also more likely to experience food insecurity, homelessness and the loss of a loved one to COVID-19.

“These gaps are not new,” says Becky Pringle, head of the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers union. “We know that there are racial and social and economic injustices that exist in every system … what the pandemic did was just like the pandemic did with everything: It just made it worse.”

3. Different states saw different gaps

Kane and his fellow researchers found that learning gaps were most pronounced in states with higher rates of remote instruction overall.

For example, in the quarter of states where students spent the most time learning remotely, including California, Illinois, Kentucky and Virginia, “high-poverty schools spent an additional nine weeks in remote instruction (more than two months) than low-poverty schools,” the report says.

On the other hand, in the quarter of states where overall use of remote instruction was the lowest, including Texas, Florida and a host of rural states, the report says, high-poverty schools were still more likely to be remote “but the differences were small: 3 weeks remote in high poverty schools versus 1 week remote in low poverty schools.”

The report says, “as long as schools were in-person throughout 2020-21, there was no widening of math achievement gaps between high-, middle-, and low-poverty schools.”

Kane says he hopes that, instead of relitigating districts’ choices to stay remote, politicians and educators can use this data as a call to action.

“That student achievement declined is not a surprise,” Kane says. “Rather, we should think of it as a bill for a public health measure that was taken on our behalf. And it’s our obligation now, whether or not we agreed with those decisions, to pay that bill. We can’t stiff our children.”

4. High school graduation rates didn’t change much

One more study, from Brookings, looks at the impact all this pandemic-driven turmoil had on high school graduation and college entry rates.

It turns out, for the 2019-20 school year, when graduation ceremonies were canceled and students ended the year at home, high school graduation rates actually increased slightly.

“The message clearly was ‘just show up,’ ” says Douglas Harris, the study’s lead researcher and director of the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice at Tulane University.

“So it became pretty easy,” Harris says. “Anybody who was on the margin of graduating at that point was going to graduate because the states officially relaxed their standards.”

For the 2020-21 school year, Harris says, states and school districts largely returned to pre-pandemic standards and, as a result, the high school graduation rate dipped slightly.

5. Many high school grads chose to delay college

While the pandemic appeared to have little impact on students’ ability to finish high school, it seemed to have the opposite effect on their willingness to start college.

Harris says entry rates for recent high school grads at four-year colleges dipped 6% and a worrying 16% at two-year colleges. Why?

Harris has a theory: “I think for anybody, regardless of age, starting something new, trying to develop new relationships in the pandemic, was a nonstarter.”

6. Schools can do something about it

School leaders are now racing to build programs that, they hope, will help students make up for at least some of this missed learning. One popular approach: “high-dosage” tutoring.

“For us, high-dosage means two to three times per week for at least 30 minutes, and … no more than three students in a group,” says Penny Schwinn, Tennessee’s state education commissioner.

Schwinn led the creation of the TN ALL Corps, a sprawling, statewide network of tutors who, Schwinn hopes, can reach 150,000 elementary- and middle-schoolers over three years. High school students with busier schedules can access online tutoring anytime, on demand.

In Guilford County, Contreras says the benefits of their tutoring program go well beyond learning recovery. Their new tutoring corps draws heavily from graduate assistants at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, a regional HBCU.

“We want to continue to grow the number of Black and brown teachers in the district,” Contreras says. “So hiring graduate assistants was a very intentional effort to make sure our students saw themselves, but also to introduce those graduate assistants to the teaching profession.”

Multiple superintendents, including Contreras, emphasized that the purpose of these tutoring efforts was not to look backward, over old material, but to support students as they move forward through new concepts.

“We don’t want to remediate,” Contreras says emphatically. “We want to accelerate learning.”

Kane says districts should also consider making up for missed learning by adding more days to the school calendar.

“Schools already have the teachers. They already have the buildings. They already have the bus routes,” Kane explains. Extending the school year may be logistically easier than, say, hiring and scheduling hundreds of new tutors.

But that doesn’t mean extending the school year is easy.

In Los Angeles, where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho says he would love to expand the next school year by as many as 10 additional days to help address what he calls “unprecedented, historic learning loss.” But, he says, “[that idea] ran into a lot of opposition” from parents and teachers alike.

So Carvalho has had to settle for four additional student learning days next year.

Kane acknowledges that adding time to the school year is asking a lot of teachers and some families and would likely require a pay bump above educators’ normal weekly rate.

“Everybody is eager to return to normal. And I can appreciate that,” Kane says, “but normal is not enough.”

If there is a silver lining for districts rushing to create new learning opportunities, it’s that many school leaders — and politicians — are realizing they make good sense long-term too.

In Los Angeles, Carvalho says many students attending high-poverty schools “were in crisis prior to COVID-19,” academically speaking. And he hopes these new efforts, forced by the pandemic, “may actually catapult their learning experience.”

Tennessee’s ALL Corps “is now funded forever more,” Schwinn says.

“So this isn’t going to be a COVID recovery. This is just good practice for kids.”

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Excerpted from “How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t A**holes” by Melinda Wenner Moyer. Copyright © 2021 by Melinda Wenner Moyer and excerpted by permission of G.P. Putnam’s Sons. All rights reserved.

By Melinda Wenner Moyer

First, I want to correct a misconception that many parents have about self-esteem. There’s a widespread worry that if you foster healthy self-esteem in your kids, you could inadvertently turn them into self-loving narcissists. I have good news on this front: Narcissism is a very different beast from healthy self-esteem, and it develops differently, too. You can’t just fill a child’s self-esteem bucket “too high” and turn him into a narcissist. (Also, you may have heard of well-publicized research suggesting that we are experiencing a new “epidemic of narcissism” in the US, in that teens today are much more narcissistic than teens from decades past, but recent studies have challenged these claims.)

As it turns out, there’s a big difference between self-content kids and narcissists. Kids with healthy self-esteem accept and love themselves for who they are and don’t base their sense of self- worth on others. Narcissists, on the other hand, are constantly in comparison mode, believing that they’re better than everyone else—but also consumed by the need to prove their superiority.

How do kids become narcissistic? Eddie Brummelman has been studying this question for years, and he’s found that narcissists usually have parents who put their kids on pedestals—who believe their children are smarter and better than everyone else and treat them that way. (Interestingly, these parents also tend to give their kids unusual first names.) We have all met parents like this, who would probably look adoringly at their children even as those children were throwing dog poop at them. He just has so much spunk, doesn’t he, the parent might say, just before getting smacked in the face with poodle feces.

Unfortunately, though, kids with narcissistic traits often are quite troubled. They can bully (because bullying makes them feel superior to their peers), and they can respond to criticism or rejection with anger and aggression. Their lives are also often pretty sad: Narcissists boast and brag and criticize others to get others to like and admire them, but their strategies ultimately backfire, alienating the very people they want to win over. To make matters worse, they rarely seek help for their problems, perhaps because they cannot recognize they need it. (Note, though, that narcissism doesn’t develop until the age of seven or eight. Before that, kids can certainly act like narcissists, but their declarations that they are the Most Exceptional Humans Ever is, in fact, developmentally appropriate and not a sign that a kid is growing up to be Donald Trump.)

Again, if you’re not the kind of parent who smiles lovingly at your child while he does obnoxious things, you probably don’t have much to worry about with regard to narcissism. But as I’ll explain next, parents often do make mistakes—albeit well-intentioned ones, ones I’ve made myself—that can have lasting effects on kids’ self-esteem.

What today’s parents get wrong

Raising a kid is not easy these days. In addition to all the age-old child-rearing challenges, we also have to contend with the fact that our children’s success feels more elusive to us than it did to our parents and grandparents (not to mention that we’ve recently weathered a pandemic that has kept our kids out of school). Every year, elite colleges receive more and more applicants for the same number of spots. At the ten most competitive US universities, the admissions rate dropped by nearly 60 percent between 2006 and 2018, from an average of 16 percent in 2006 to 6.4 percent in 2018; at the top fifty universities, the rate dropped by nearly 40 percent. No wonder admissions scandals have been rampant.

The issues parents face today encompass a lot more than just college admissions. When the Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD) asked parents in 2019 to rank their top three long-term economic and social fears, 60 percent said that they worried that their children would not achieve the level of status and comfort that they have. That’s in part because kids will have to earn a lot more money than their parents did in order to maintain the same standard of living. We’re all terrified on behalf of our kids, and for good reason.

So it probably comes as no surprise to most of you that American parents—especially those from the middle- and upper- middle classes—now put a ton of pressure on their kids to be exceptional. It starts young: Kids who haven’t yet turned two are being professionally coached for preschool interviews; three-year-olds are taking Mandarin and coding classes to “get ahead”; kindergarteners are being required to learn chess; fourth graders are taking SAT prep classes and working with private sports coaches. There’s even a national chain of preschools called Crème de la Crème that teaches toddlers Mandarin, theater, and robotics in facilities that feature on-site STEM labs, baseball diamonds, art studios, basketball courts, and computer labs. (Important note: Research suggests that kids who attend play-based schools learn just as much as, if not more than, kids who attend more academically focused schools.) It’s no longer good enough for our kids to be nurtured and well-rounded, and to enjoy learning; they now have to win competitions, make All-American sports teams, and get leads in the musicals while also, of course, getting straight As and acing the SATs.

In his 2015 book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, Harvard emeritus political scientist Robert D. Putnam explained that in the 1980s, middle- and upper-class American parents— especially highly educated ones—began to shift their ideas about what it meant to be a good parent. They began moving away from Benjamin Spock’s “permissive parenting” approach and toward a new kind of “intensive parenting,” fueled in part by the idea that children will be more successful if we push them harder at a young age. So now, forty years later, toddler STEM labs. Don’t get me wrong; I’m one of these parents, too. I haven’t enrolled my kids in Mandarin classes, but I worry perhaps too much about whether they will succeed and what I need to do to ensure they will. When my son brings home his report card, it’s all I can do not to analyze every grade and ponder what his poor marks for handwriting mean for his future. If competition is much fiercer than it used to be, how can we not feel the pressure and, intentionally or not, shift some of that pressure onto our kids? Who can blame us for feeling scared and wanting to do everything we can to give our kids a leg up?

Here’s the thing, though: This pressure is not good for our kids’ self-esteem. Research suggests that when parents overemphasize achievement, kids start to infer that achievement defines who they are and how much value they have. And sometimes, our disappointment and anger over their failures is so palpable that they feel like our love for them is contingent upon their success —reinforcing the idea that their value, and lovability, is defined by what they do, not who they are.

I’m not saying any of us outright say that we won’t love our kids if they get Cs, but kids make these inferences based on how we act. In a survey published in 2014, Harvard University Graduate School of Education researchers interviewed more than ten thousand middle and high school students from thirty-three schools across the country about what they thought their parents wanted most for them. Two-thirds of the students said they believed their parents would rank achievement over caring for others. The students were also three times more likely to agree than to disagree with the statement “My parents are prouder if I get good grades in my classes than if I’m a caring community member in class and school.” In her book “Kid Confidence,” psychologist Eileen Kennedy-Moore argued that healthy self-esteem is essentially the ability to let go of the question “Am I good enough?”— and when parents pressure their kids to achieve, they never give kids the chance to stop asking that question.

Melinda Wenner Moyer is a contributing editor at Scientific American magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Times, Washington Post, and other national magazines and newspapers. She is a faculty member in the Science, Health & Environmental Reporting program at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Her first book, “How To Raise Kids Who Aren’t A**holes,” was published in July 2021 by J.P. Putnam’s Sons. You can follow her on Twitter at @lindy2350

State and county officials used to think bachelor’s and graduate degree students deserved more money than those pursuing two-year associate degrees, but during the pandemic they changed their minds.

Public two-year community colleges achieved a new budgetary milestone in fiscal year 2021 as they reaped 6 percent more money per student from state and local governments than public four-year institutions did for their regular operating expenses: $9,347 versus $8,859 for each student. That’s a reversal from 2019 when two-year students received 5 percent less than four-year students.

These numbers were supplied by an association of officials who oversee public colleges and universities in their states, called the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO), which released a higher education finance report in June 2022. The funding figures exclude additional state and federal money for university research, agricultural projects, medical schools and hospitals in order to put a spotlight on funds that are available for students’ educations. Community colleges don’t receive these sorts of funds.

“All public institutions need more funding for operations, but community colleges are particularly reliant on state and local funding,” said Sophia Laderman, who leads research and policy analysis at the association. “Community college students are more likely to be low-income and students of color and this can help close equity gaps.”

Even with increased state and local funding, much less is spent on community college students in total. The difference is tuition. Tuition collected from community college students adds up to only about 20 percent of what community colleges spend on their educational operations. Almost 80 percent of community college revenues come from state and local funds.

Public four-year colleges, by contrast, charge far higher tuition and ultimately spend more than double their state and local funds on their students. Flagship universities attract big donors and can dip into their endowments. “They can still provide a much better education,” said Laderman.

As an aside, I was struck by how much less we as a nation spend on public higher education than we do public school for younger students. Per pupil funding of kindergarten through high school students averaged $15,711 during the 2019-20 school year, according to the most recent data from the Department of Education. Then again, it makes sense for the government to spend more on children’s education which is mandated by the state. College is optional.

Lawmakers have historically funded public four-year institutions that confer bachelor’s and graduate degrees, such as the University of Texas, more generously than two-year colleges, such as Austin Community College, which award associate degrees and educate more than a third of undergraduate students across the country. When the 2008 recession hit, both community colleges and four-year universities alike were hit with big budget cuts.

As the economy recovered, however, state lawmakers restored funding to community colleges, which positioned themselves as places for blue-collar workforce training. In addition to appropriating more money directly to two-year colleges, lawmakers created many new free community college programs and scholarships, which now operate in hundreds of cities and counties and statewide in almost 30 states. By contrast, a conservative backlash against “liberal” academics tamped enthusiasm for funding increases at more elite four-year universities.

Community colleges also gained from regional real estate booms, which increased property taxes that flow to two-year colleges.

Funding for community colleges, already on the upswing, then surpassed that of four-year universities during the pandemic. State lawmakers had discretion over how to spend a portion of their federal stimulus money and steered a big chunk to community colleges. Some states dug even deeper into their own pockets. Washington, for example, increased its funding of community colleges by 27 percent in 2021, as it introduced a free community college program. By comparison, the state boosted funding of its four-year colleges by 6.5 percent that year.

Ironically, some of the increase in per-student funding was also driven by misfortune. Community colleges hemorrhaged 827,000 students during the pandemic as young adults chose work over school. Some government funding is tied to the numbers of enrolled students but some isn’t. With fewer students, there was more of that untied funding to spread among remaining students.

Laderman cautioned, however, that this aspect of the increase was not a boon for community colleges. They still had to cover many of the same bills as they had before the students left, from faculty salaries to custodians and electricity. Many are struggling financially.

Per student funding would have gone up even without the decline in student enrollment at community colleges. Laderman calculated that state and local education appropriations per community college student would have increased by half as much, or 7 percent, if enrollment hadn’t declined.

It’s unclear how higher education finance will fare going forward. If a recession hits and unemployed adults return to school, that could increase funds for community colleges. But lawmakers may also be pressured once again to cut funding if tax collections run dry.

This story about community college funding was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

As President Biden inches toward an announcement on federal student loan forgiveness, a new NPR/Ipsos poll has found slightly more than half of Americans support what has been reported to be Biden’s likeliest path: forgiving up to $10,000 per person. But an overwhelming majority – including a majority of those with student loans – said the government should prioritize making college more affordable over forgiving existing student loans.

The nationally representative poll of 1,022 Americans was conducted between June 3 and 5, and included an oversample of more than 400 student loan borrowers. The margin of error is +/- 3.3 percentage points for all respondents and +/- 4.8 percentage points for those with student loans.

Here’s what we learned:

There’s general support for some debt cancellation

A majority of the general public (55%) supports forgiving up to $10,000 of a person’s federal student loan debt. But the more generous the relief, the more that support narrows.

Forty-seven percent of all respondents said they support forgiving up to $50,000 in debt, while 41% expressed support for wiping the slate completely clean for all borrowers.

Support for debt relief was, not surprisingly, far higher among borrowers themselves.

“One thing that comes through really clearly with this poll is that those closest to the issue, people that currently hold student loan debt, are in a very different position from the American public as a whole,” says Mallory Newall of Ipsos.

Eighty-four percent of borrowers supported $10,000 of relief, 78% backed a jump to $50,000 and still two-thirds (68%) supported forgiving all student loan debt.

Support was far weaker among respondents without student loans: Half supported $10,000 of relief, and just 37% supported full debt cancellation.

The Biden administration has also hinted it might exclude high-income borrowers from relief – those who earn more than $150,000 a year or couples who earn more than $300,000. But when asked about income limits, poll respondents’ views about debt relief didn’t budge.

Don’t leave out grad school borrowers

The Biden administration has floated the possibility of forgiving only undergraduate debt, based on the assumption that a borrower with a graduate degree is in a better position to pay off their debts. But according to this new survey, Americans don’t see a meaningful difference.

Sixty-five percent of all respondents agreed: If the government forgives some student loan debt, it should be for any type of education, whether that’s undergraduate or graduate.

Just 30% said, if the government is going to forgive debt, it should only be for undergraduates.

Erasing old debts vs. fixing the system

In one of the poll’s most unexpected findings, respondents were asked to choose which sentence they agreed with more:

1. “The government should prioritize making college more affordable for current and future students”
2. “The government should prioritize forgiving some debt for those with existing student loans”

A whopping 82% said the government’s priority should be making college more affordable for current and future students. Just 16% believed forgiving student debts should take priority.

“What that tells me is that, while student loan forgiveness for some is seen as a good proposal and a short-term fix, where we actually need to go from here is true, systematic change,” Newall says.

The other surprise is that respondents with student loans felt similarly.

Fifty-nine percent of respondents with student loans said the government should focus first on fixing the system, while 41% said the government should prioritize debt cancellation.

“If I had to pick one for me, today: Forgive student loans,” says Briana Ford, 27, of Columbia, S.C. She has roughly $50,000 in student loan debts from college and is now earning a graduate degree.

Ford says she has tried, at every turn, to pay for her education without relying on loans, but she’s incredibly frustrated with the high cost of college and worries that a generation of students are taking on loans they cannot afford because they see no other viable path into the middle-class.

That’s why, even though Ford wants Biden to prioritize forgiving the debts of past borrowers, she says the federal government must also do something to help future borrowers.

“I acknowledge that just forgiving student loans without addressing the problem is like draining a tub without turning off the faucet,” Ford says, but “in reality it isn’t an either-or. Political leaders actually can do two things.”

This could be a key fissure in the student debt debate as President Biden’s most ambitious efforts to remake the system moving forward remain unfulfilled, including his pitches to make community college free and to double the Pell Grant for low-income college students.

The general public seems to understand what economists have been worrying over for months: That a move to erase student debts without a plan to help future borrowers will simply lead to a new mountain of debt for a new generation of student debtors – and quickly.

In fact, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that “outstanding debt would return to its current level in 2027 for $10,000 of forgiveness, in 2034 for $50,000 of forgiveness, and in 2039 for full cancellation.”

What borrowers have done during the student loan payment pause

Federal student loan payments have been on pause since March 2020. According to the poll, 57% of borrowers have not made a single payment during the pause, and 20% have never made a payment toward their student loans.

Twins Morgan and Trianna Downing are among the roughly 4 million college students who graduated in spring 2020, directly into the student loan payment freeze. They’ve never known the pressures of regular loan payments. Now, a couple years into the job market and with their sights set on grad school, the twins have very different views of their finances.

Trianna wants to pay down her undergraduate debt before taking more loans out for grad school.

“I don’t mind starting to pay mine back now. My hope is to pay them off in less than four to six years, and I’ve made a budget so that I can do that.”

The poll suggests she’s an unusual case – just a small slice of 18- to 25-year-old respondents said they have made payments during the pause.

Morgan feels differently. She says she made a few loan payments after graduating, but “after like the second or third payment, I was like, ‘This is ridiculous. Why am I making payments?’ ”

She says her undergraduate loans don’t feel real, and she’s waiting to see if President Biden will come through on his campaign promise to cancel at least $10,000 in student debt per person.

“I was excited to vote for a president that was saying [he] was going to clear [my] debt,” Morgan says.

In fact, 42% of borrowers in the NPR/Ipsos poll said they haven’t made a payment during the pause because they’re hoping their debts will be forgiven.

The payment pause gave borrowers room to breathe

Forty-seven percent of the borrowers NPR and Ipsos surveyed said the payment pause has improved their mental health.

Newall at Ipsos says that’s evident when you look at how borrowers spent the money they didn’t have to put toward their loans. The top three expenses in that category include essentials like food, rent and gas (51%); paying down other debts (45%); and putting money into savings (44%).

“It’s clear that it offered people financial freedom in some capacity,” Newall says, “but that freedom is not really to make a big purchase like a house or a car or take a vacation. It really is about a reprieve – a little bit of breathing room in your day to day life.”

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

To her relief, Elissa Levy’s ninth graders remembered how to make friends when they returned this September to East Harlem’s High School for Climate Justice.

But after spending prolonged time out of the classroom during the pandemic, they seem to have forgotten how to “do” other parts of school, the physics teacher said.

Many are about four or five years behind academically, as opposed to the past when her students were about two to three years behind. Some have been cutting class, hiding in bathrooms and stairwells during the day. Those who show up have been spending class time dancing to TikTok videos, doodling on furniture, and generally acting out.

Levy is trying everything in her toolkit to help them feel engaged in coursework again. One thing that’s helped is a practice known as cogenerative dialogues, or cogens, for short, in which teachers hold formal conversations with groups of students with an explicit goal: to create a plan of action aimed at improving learning and classroom community.

“Your whole life, school is a given. Even if you don’t like it, you have to do it. But then it disappears for 1.5 years,” Levy said. “So when it comes back, you have less patience for it.”

Popularized by Christopher Emdin in his 2016 New York Times best-selling book “For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too,”  cogens can vary from teacher to teacher, but the practice often hinges on shifting the power dynamic. It creates space for students to critique what is or isn’t working in the classroom, and for teachers to incorporate that feedback into their instruction.

School leaders in New York City and across the nation have been reaching out “more than ever before” about cogens, said Emdin, a professor at the University of Southern California and Scholar/Griot in Residence at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Emdin previously had featured cogens prominently in his work, but saw less traction, with school leaders often saying they had to focus more on standardized tests. However, more schools now are taking a closer look at the practice as districts elevate social-emotional learning as a way to address the startlingly high student mental health and academic needs exacerbated by the pandemic.

“We tell teachers all the time it’s important to build relationships with kids,” Emdin told Chalkbeat. “Teachers say, ‘How?’ What the cogens allow you to do — it gives you a way to invite different students in. It gives a set of practical tools to get to a big idea.”

In a cogen, no voice is more important than any other, and everyone gets equal turns to talk, Emdin explained. The practice gives students a chance to vent, as well as teachers, and in doing so, it helps the teachers develop more care for their students and vice versa.

Giving students a say — “in a world where they’ve been robbed of agency and power and they’re just passively receiving information” — can be transformative, he believes.  “It gives the opportunity to meet those emotional and psychological needs while delivering the content.”

More importantly, it’s not costly to implement.

“You don’t have to buy a new curriculum or iPads,” said Emdin. “I love giving professional development, but there’s no better PD you can get than from a cogen. That is probably the most essential piece: the experts are your students.”

For Levy, holding cogens has enabled her to better understand the everyday realities of her students and how those shape their experience in the classroom, so if they’re not handing in assignments, she feels better equipped to respond.

“Cogens build empathy,” said Levy. “The first thing you say isn’t, ‘Please focus.’ It’s: ‘How are you?’ It might be that you need a break or guidance, or are confused or maybe other things are just more important to you right now.”

She, too, has seen the practice gain traction as educators grapple with this particularly rough time for many students across the nation. Levy recently co-facilitated a four-part workshop with Bronx algebra teacher Brian Palacios for Math for America, a nonprofit focused on building community among the city’s accomplished math and science teachers. Both learned the practice from Emdin’s book but have never talked with the professor, calling him the “Beyonce” of the education world. Levy’s also discussed cogens with some national groups, including the Underrepresentation Curriculum, STEP UP (APS Physics), and RedesignU.

Levy, who switched to education from corporate America five years ago through the New York City Teaching Fellows program, quickly adapted to the classroom, becoming an instructional coach and winning a prestigious early career fellowship from Math For America.  She began using the practice three years ago, as part of a schoolwide initiative. That didn’t last, but Levy stuck with the practice and is doing cogens in various forms about once a month.

During some cogens, for example, Levy will order Domino’s pizza for a small group of students, some she knows well, some who are less involved. They’ll talk about life and what gets them out of bed in the morning. She’ll listen to their experiences, and together, they agree on how to improve class moving forward.

After one fall cogen, Levy and her students agreed to begin class with an 8-minute “chill time,” in which she allowed her students to hang out and be on their phones. A big part of allowing them to do that was because they didn’t seem to have the stamina for back-to-back 45-minute classes. She hoped the shift would lead to more sustained engagement for the rest of the class.

It didn’t necessarily pan out that way, but that practice had its benefits. It allowed her to  spend one-on-one time with students at the start of class and help deepen her relationships with many students, she explained. While cogens haven’t erased this year’s challenges, she still feels like they’ve helped her be more responsive to her students’ needs.

“I think my students need group therapy more than they need my physics class most days. It’s a way of approaching that space that teachers are not prepared for — it’s not something we trained for,” Levy said, explaining how she’s often needed to be more like a social worker this year. “Cogens are a small thing I’m doing that makes things maybe just a little better. I understand how little their coursework seems to matter in their lives right now because of the weight of life.”

For Palacios, an algebra teacher at the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics who blogs about his weekly cogens, the practice has been a game changer.

He had read Emdin’s book several years ago but wasn’t ready to put it into practice until re-reading it last summer and trying cogens when his students were learning remotely.

“It was a bright thing that came out of a dark time. It lit up my instruction,” Palacios said.

With his students, he devised this year’s homework policy, tutoring schedules, and several lessons. He used cogens to help him shape a math project about farming loans incorporating compounding interest that brought social justice into his class by focusing on the systemic racism of the farming industry.

After kicking off the project and debriefing with his students, he saw that they were less engaged in the activity than he thought they would be. He realized the lessons weren’t reaching them not because of what they said, but because of what they didn’t say, he explained. Seeing their mood and lack of enthusiasm, he had a “breakthrough” and pivoted: Instead of following fictional farmers of color, he had the students assume the role of farmers while he pretended to be the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.

The role-playing aspect sparked more “joy,” and helped them both understand the math and the inequitable treatment of the farmers of color, he explained.

For Palacios, the feedback he gets from his students has been more helpful in transforming his instruction than other kinds of professional development in which he’s  participated. It’s important to have a space away from the “teacher world” where it’s just educators talking to each other and instead to create a place that invites students to the table and then “actually” listen, he believes.

“When I collaborate with teachers, that’s valuable,” Palacios said. “But the cogen allows me to tap into the students. It helps me see how I can adjust and be more responsive. It’s kept me solution-oriented. It’s fueled me.”

His advice to other teachers: “Just listen to students. They’ll give you what they need.”

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Across the nation, 13 percent of Black students were diagnosed with disabilities at school, far higher than the 9 percent disability rate among white children, according to the most recent tally of the U.S. Department of Education. The disabilities range from dyslexia and speech impairments to emotional and psychological disorders that include hyperactivity and aggression. Many civil rights advocates argue that hundreds of thousands of Black students who don’t have disabilities are misdiagnosed with them, separated from their peers and funneled into low-level classrooms. The federal government monitors this removal and calculated that in 2019, 22 percent of Black students with disabilities were learning outside of a regular classroom 60 percent or more of the time. Only 16 percent of white children with disabilities were separated from their peers to this extent.

But a team of scholars from Pennsylvania State University and the University of California, Irvine, believe that these raw disability numbers are misleading. They argue that the incidence of more severe disabilities is much higher in impoverished populations. Black children are more likely to live in poor communities where premature births, poor nutrition and healthcare, drug addiction, stress and high levels of lead can lead to higher rates of disabilities, and more severe ones. There may genuinely be more need among Black children for intensive services and a different pacing of instruction.

“We’re not finding evidence that special ed placement is being used as an alternative method of racially segregating students of color,” said Paul Morgan, lead author of the study and a professor of education at Penn State. “The federal regulations don’t take into account anything like we were doing here, like are there differences in impairment? Are there differences in the potential need for more intensive services?”

Morgan’s views are controversial, and they are at odds with the Department of Education’s directive to make sure that rates of removing children from general education classrooms don’t diverge too much by race and ethnicity. Schools that fail are required to fix their inequities by spending a big chunk – 15 percent – of their federal funds designated for helping students with disabilities. This penalty has, in turn, made some schools with high numbers of Black children in special education reluctant to diagnose additional Black children and assign them to special education classes – regardless of a child’s needs, some researchers say.

In the study, “Which Students With Disabilities are Placed Primarily Outside of U.S. Elementary School General Education Classrooms?,” published in the Journal of Learning Disabilities in May 2022, researchers analyzed a nationally representative survey of students who began kindergarten in 1998 and another survey of students who began kindergarten in 2011. Roughly a thousand children in each survey had a disability diagnosis. Their teachers noted whether the student primarily learned in a regular classroom with their peers, or if they were pulled out for special services most of the time and primarily learned in a separate classroom or a separate school for students with special needs.

Morgan and his colleagues found that Black and white children who had been diagnosed with a disability and posted the same low test scores were equally likely to be removed from a general education classroom and placed in a separate special ed classroom. The main reason that Black children are more likely to be funneled into separate classrooms is because more of them were struggling with reading and math and were among the lowest 10 percent in achievement.

Morgan checked the figures for different entry points into special education, at first, third and fifth grades. He found that Black children with disabilities were just as likely as similar white children to be placed outside of general education in almost all cases. The exception was among students in first grade in 2012, where he found that Black children were more likely to be separated from their peers than similar white children. However, this gap in special education placement disappeared as the children aged and was no longer detected at third grade.

Daniel Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies, an initiative at the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, is critical of Morgan’s analysis. Losen argues that it’s faulty logic to compare children with the same academic achievement. He points out that children in poverty, regardless of disability status, tend to score lower on tests – in part because per pupil expenditures are lower, their teachers are less experienced and teacher turnover is high. Losen argues that we should fix the underlying reasons why children in poverty score lower and improve schools for low-income Black children rather than put thousands of Black children with low test scores in separate special education classrooms. Another solution, he argues, is to give more support to Black students with disabilities within general education classrooms.

Prior research has often found that students with disabilities who remain in their regular grade-level classrooms outperformed students who are placed in separate special education classes. But students who are removed tend to have more severe disabilities and it’s hard to know if they would have done better had they remained with their classmates. One well-designed 2020 study in Indiana found that inclusion was better for children with mild disabilities, but there have also been randomized controlled trials finding that students with disabilities learn a particular topic, such as fractions, better when they learn it separately.

I talked with other special education experts, several of whom asked not to speak on the record because the combination of race and disabilities has become so controversial. Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez, an associate professor of special education at the Peabody College of Education at Vanderbilt University, agreed to talk on the record and said adjusting the raw data in various ways, as Morgan has done, is an important step in understanding what is going on in special education. Mancilla-Martinez is concerned that in many low-income communities, there is a “wait and see” approach when children are struggling with reading instead of intervening early, when it is most effective. But she also acknowledged that some schools are over-identifying children who don’t really need special education services and stigmatizing them. “That may not be at all what they need, they just may need better opportunities to learn,” said Mancilla-Martinez. She wants researchers to look at what is happening in a more granular way, community by community, instead of just crunching national data.

Some academics are questioning whether schools should be focusing so much on the numbers and whether too many or too few students are being identified and where they are being placed.

“We need to move beyond this civil rights debate of under-representation and over-representation,” said Catherine Kramarczuk Voulgarides, an assistant professor of special education at the City University of New York —Hunter College. “We know that there’s a problem with special education and we need to just think of new ways to address it.”

Kramarczuk Voulgarides is organizing a conference for December 2022 with younger scholars to chart a new way forward in special education. (The Spencer Foundation, which is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report, is funding this conference.)

It’s an issue I’ll be following.

This story about racial bias in special education was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

Jane McGonigal is a game designer, future-forecaster, popular TED speaker, and the bestselling author of Reality Is Broken and SuperBetter. Her new book, Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things That Seem Impossible Today, is a practical call to action that encourages readers to envision and shape a better future. Imaginable offers a potent antidote to the sense of helplessness felt by so many as we face a growing climate crisis, global conflicts, runaway technology, and political divisiveness. 

Drawing from her work as the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, McGonigal synthesizes cutting-edge research, playful future-thinking simulations, and an array of futurist methods to chart an actionable path forward. In our conversation, she shares how parents, teachers, community groups, and youth can mine futurist techniques to undertake powerful acts of imagination and confront an uncertain future with resilience and hope.

When I think of a futurist, I imagine a 21st century oracle who parts the veils of time and glimpses into the future. So, what exactly is a futurist? What do they do?

McGonigal: The type of futurist that I am tries to inspire others to think about how the future could be different in two ways. First, how might the future include new crises or risks or disruptions that we’ve never lived through before? The more deeply we can intellectually and emotionally place ourselves there, the better we can prepare. Secondly, futurists think about how the future can be shaped in ways that we want it to be different. Futurists try to help people imagine extreme versions of better futures so that we can find the motivation to take action today. The computer scientist Alan Kay said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. 

What inspired you to write Imaginable?

 McGonigal: I hit my limit of reading headlines and news stories that described world events like the pandemic and extreme weather as “unimaginable”. In recent years, we’ve had so many shocking political events in the United States, and extremism and new kinds of protests and social movements, and this word just kept showing up. It was exasperating because we’d predicted so much of this for a long time. It wasn’t that they were “unimaginable” or “unthinkable,” we just didn’t want to think about them because it’s stressful and it makes us feel anxious. Or, we didn’t have the tools or information to vividly imagine what living through a pandemic would be like or how social media might fuel extremism. I wanted to write a book to help people confidently see that no future is unthinkable because we refuse to think about it, or no future is unimaginable because we don’t believe that transformative change is possible. 

One of the book’s driving ideas is urgent optimism. What is urgent optimism and why should we strive for it?

McGonigal: Urgent optimism means we definitely need to act and not sit around and wait for the future to happen. We will take action to shape how the future turns out. The optimism comes from a sense of agency or self-efficacy where the future is shaped by actions that we take today to prepare, plan and change the way the world works. To stay engaged with the future we have to fuel the fires of hope and creativity. We have to feel that the future can be better due to our own actions. At the end of the day, urgent optimism allows for the mental flexibility to internalize a realistic sense of hope that is grounded in an awareness of risks and threats, but engages with new technologies, solutions, and movements that will make things better. 

What are some accessible futurist techniques that might translate well to schools or other youth-oriented environments? 

McGonigal: There’s a simple habit of collecting and sharing what we call signals of change. Anybody can gather signals, and they would definitely work for teachers who want to bring future-thinking into their classrooms. A signal of change could be a news story, a surprising social media post, or something from the world around you. It’s something you’ve never seen before that represents a new way of doing things or a new way of being in reality. You can take a picture of it or take notes about it. It’s not a hypothetical idea or fiction: it’s a real change happening somewhere.

Every art form has its medium, and signals of change are the raw material of the futurist. Writers use words, computer programmers use code, musicians use musical notes, and artists use paint or clay. We create ideas about the future out of these signals of change. Examples might include a “No Drone Zone” sign in a park, a pay-what-you-can restaurant in Berkeley that had no prices on the menu, or a story about the new virtual real estate market unfolding in the metaverse. These concrete examples make you stop in your tracks and say, “Wow! I guess things can be different.” These, to me, are signals of change. 

Schools and teachers can create a culture of investigating signals, sharing signals, responding to them, and reflecting on them. Students might discuss whether the signal makes them feel more hopeful or more worried. Does it make them feel powerful? Are they curious to learn how to engage with it? Where will it lead? You can even organize signal scavenger hunts.

Every subject benefits from future-thinking, and it makes learning more relevant because it’s about things happening in the world that are cool, interesting, weird, and surprising. My background is in gaming, so I’m always looking for opportunities to generate the positive emotions that we easily get from games, but maybe not from our everyday lives. The surprise, the delight, the curiosity inspired by signals of change are great ways to bring those positive emotions into the classroom.

What are some exciting futures for schools that have emerged from your work?

McGonigal: One of the biggest ideas for driving change in schools that I’m excited to see is the concept of a grand challenge. Instead of traditional subjects or declaring a major in university, students might undertake a challenge to solve a global issue like climate action, ending poverty, gender equality, or zero hunger. I’m excited to see how people use the idea of connecting learning at all levels and across disciplines to global grand challenges to create more meaningful learning experiences.

In the book you describe a future-thinking technique where you immerse groups in large-scale scenarios and social simulations, usually set 10 years in the future. How can schools, parents, youth, or community groups run or participate in these scenarios?

McGonigal: The most practical thing to do is take scenarios from the book, those we share publicly at the Institute of the Future, or visit the Urgent Optimists website, which has a club you can join with new scenarios every month. Teachers, parents, community groups, or anybody can adapt scenarios to local lived experience. You play with it, see how people react and what emerges. It could be like a school newspaper or a school play, where kids are eager to roll up their sleeves and be a part of creating something together. It could be a simulation club, a scenario club, or a signals club, but they can be integrated in classrooms as well.

Can you share a powerful or memorable experience that emerged from your work with youth?

McGonigal: We invited teens to a 10-year forecast conference and asked them to imagine a future rite of passage. A lot of teenagers don’t get driver’s licenses anymore, and it was such a rite of passage for decades. It meant freedom and independence and growing up. Today, teens are less interested in driving for sustainability reasons, economic reasons, or mental health reasons. We asked them “what do you think teenagers are going to do as rites of passage in the future?” The rite of passage that they came-up with that they all agreed sounded the most plausible was the first time that they would personally experience a climate catastrophe or terrible extreme weather. That was in 2018, before Greta Thunberg came on the scene and really channeled this righteous anger of young people. It was definitely a clue to us that this generation was already experiencing a pre-traumatic experience of climate change. They knew it was something that they would personally live through. The old teenage ritual was about freedom and independence, and this new rite of passage was going to be about coming to terms with loss and trauma. When young people imagine their future, we should believe them. What they’re saying is that they feel like there’s a lot of trauma and suffering coming, and they need ways to imagine better worlds.

Running a scenario seems to be as much about personal growth and building resilience as it is about predicting the future. What are the benefits of running a scenario or a simulation, even if they might not accurately predict the future?

McGonigal: Future scenarios and simulations are all about how things could be different, so that fundamental creative skill of thinking differently is at the heart of it. It also is a big driver of hope, particularly for young people. Often, it’s less about preparing for the challenges of the future and more about imagining the world we want to wake up in. It’s about being the authors of our own worlds; to use the power of the future as a place where nobody has said no yet.  

Learning how to visualize the future more specifically can help people experience less depression and less anxiety. When we’re anxious, we tend to fixate on vivid mental images of things that scare us, but we can imagine a future where we deal with things effectively. We can imagine ourselves taking actions that are within our power in order to deal with situations. Or, we can just redirect our imagination towards something that is a better representation of our hopes and values so that we don’t get stuck. 

In the book you also discuss cultivating empathy for our future selves. Can you tell me more about that?

McGonigal: It stems from research done at UCLA that used neuroimaging to study how we think about our future selves or our far-future selves. Our brain reacts to our future self as if they were a stranger. This explains why we often have a hard time taking action today that benefits our future selves, whether it’s saving money for a long term goal, exercising, sustainability choices, or even voting. It even leads to procrastination. We avoid doing tasks and hand them over to our future selves. Future me will be fine writing this paper! But, you’re still going to be you when you get there.

We can build a relationship with our future self by vividly imagining future-thinking scenarios and what our life in the future might look like. It’s kind of like neurological cross training because it helps us develop what is called hard empathy for our future self, which then can translate into empathy for other strangers or other people we perceive as different from ourselves. Our empathy grows by thinking about differences: how the future could be different, how our future selves could be different, and how other people’s experiences of a crisis or change is different. Some people are very motivated by helping others and not helping themselves.

And, finally, this is a nice segway into the empowering concept of learned helpfulness.

McGonigal: By imagining what we might do in a possible future, we can learn our own helpfulness. It is so powerful to imagine how our own unique skills and abilities and strengths, no matter how small, might be of service to others. We often give ourselves more creative latitude when we imagine our future selves. We think, “future me can be really powerful and capable and amazing and accomplished.” We set higher goals for our future self, and we can more easily see ourselves take action in the future because we’re not there yet and our imagination has room to play. We feel the power of our agency when we imagine ourselves doing things that tend to be more ambitious, more audacious. When we envision what we might do to help others in the future, we are empowered to realize we could take that action today and change the future accordingly.

Jane McGonigal is the author of “Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things That Seem Impossible Today.” You can follower her on Twitter at @avantegame.

Advocates sold free preschool as a way to improve the lives of people in poverty and help level the playing field. Oft-cited research from a high quality preschool in Ypsilanti, Michigan concluded that 58 low-income kids who attended in the 1960s were more likely to hold a job, earn more money, own a home and less likely to commit a crime than similar kids who didn’t go to preschool. It not only seems fair, but a wise use of public dollars to give poor children the same early childhood education that wealthier children enjoy.

In practice, as communities around the country offer free preschool to more and more tiny Americans, the results are uneven. Tennessee vastly expanded its free preschool programs in 2005 but a study released in January 2022 showed that the programs can be so low quality that some kids are worse off. They might have done better without preschool. In New York City, which expanded free pre-K to all four-year olds in 2014, the quality is better. But researchers from the University of California, Berkeley found that lower income kids are learning in notably lower quality classrooms than higher income kids.

“We found these particularly low levels of quality in heavily Black communities,” said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education at Berkeley and lead author of the May 2022 study. “We’re not going to close disparities unless we equalize the distribution of quality.”

Fuller also expressed concern that universal pre-K may have unintentionally lured some of the best early childhood educators away from programs that serve poor children, but he doesn’t yet have enough information about the movements of early childhood teachers in the city to prove that.

My colleague Jackie Mader wrote extensively about the disappointing Tennessee study and the quality problems in Tennessee preschools. So I wanted to focus on this latest New York City study, “Do preschool entitlements distribute quality fairly? Racial inequity in New York City,” published in the journal Early Childhood Research Quarterly.

New York put resources and effort into creating high-quality programs for all. It initially invested $300 million in 2014, spending the same amount on rich and poor alike, $10,000 per child. That spending increased over the years. Currently the city pays preschool providers between $18,000 to $20,000 per student, according to Gregory Brender, director of public policy at the Day Care Council of New York, Inc. That’s comparable to some private programs in the city. The city also hired 120 people to observe classrooms to monitor quality and share the ratings with parents to help them pick the best programs for their children.

Fuller analyzed these ratings and characterized the overall quality of New York City’s 1,800 preschools as “medium to slightly above medium quality” from 2015 to 2019. They’re not as good as San Francisco’s, but much better than Florida’s or Tennessee’s preschools, based on qualitative measurements that are commonly used by researchers.

Fuller mapped these observer ratings against census tracts in New York City and noticed that the early childhood programs in poorer neighborhoods, such as East Tremont in the Bronx, were lower rated than public programs offered in wealthier neighborhoods, such as Brooklyn Heights.

Fuller’s team also saw high levels of segregation and many programs that were predominantly filled with Black or Hispanic children. A third of New York City’s preschoolers attend a program that is at least three-quarters populated by one racial or ethnic group. Preschools located in neighborhoods with a high percentage of Black residents were some of the lowest rated, raising concerns that these programs aren’t giving Black children a firm foundation for their future school years.

“It’s a fragile floor especially for kids in predominantly Black communities,” said Fuller. Many of the ratings and observational scores “are falling to very dangerously low levels for those youngsters. And we don’t really know why.”

The quality measures cover a wide range of things, from play space and furniture to the school’s daily routines for going to the toilet and hanging up a coat. Fuller was especially focused on instructional measures, activities and how teachers interact with children.

“Child-teacher relationships are quite different between medium and high-quality pre-K,” said Fuller. “There’s a big difference between teachers that are really down on the floor, engaging with kids versus teachers that are kind of hovering above and not really interacting with youngsters.”

Some aspects of preschool quality, such as physical space, aren’t as important for kids’ future development, Fuller said. But “instructional support,” he said, is highly predictive of kids’ future learning trajectories. One of the biggest gaps between rich and poor, Fuller noticed, was in “program structure.” Low-quality programs weren’t organizing a variety of activities for kids, from playing music and reciting lyrics to playing with math concepts and objects around a table.  Kids in low-quality programs also seemed less engaged. Fuller found that programs run by community groups had higher quality overall, regardless of the neighborhood, but city schools provided stronger instructional activities.

Fuller wants to understand if teacher quality is responsible for the quality differences but he doesn’t yet have data on the training and years of experience of teachers at different preschool sites. New York City has spent a lot on professional development training to improve the instruction in low-quality programs, but other than some big improvements in the first couple years after universal pre-K launched in 2014, Fuller didn’t detect meaningful improvements after 2016. Some aspects of quality, such as instructional support, continued to deteriorate throughout the city’s preschools.

Before New York City introduced universal pre-K, low-income children already had access to free preschool through community organizations financed by federal Head Start and the Child Care and Development Block Grant. But participation was low. After a big marketing campaign to encourage everyone to go to free preschool, the number of poor children in preschool more than tripled from about 12,500 in 2013 to more than 37,000 in 2015. But more than 12,000 poor children remained not enrolled, according to a 2015 estimate by Berkeley researchers.

The critical question is whether low-income children are better off now, even if their preschool programs are not as good as those of wealthier kids. We’re still waiting for the research to learn whether this pricey preschool experiment is making a difference.

This story about universal pre-K was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

As part of teacher appreciation month, Morning Edition asked NPR’s audience to write a poem about teachers who have had an impact on their lives.

We put out this call a week before the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, so the majority of contributors are not reflecting on that horrific day but a late addition did reflect that loss.

We received over 300 responses, and NPR’s poet in residence Kwame Alexander took lines from submissions to create a community poem.

This poem is dedicated to all teachers, but especially to Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles, fourth grade teachers who lost their lives at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.

Who Will Clean Out The Desks

Teachers make a dent.

A soft curve in the gray matter

A crevice where light shines in

a seed to germinate.

They open eyes

kick open Imagination

Make us see

encourage change of mind

and change of heart

NOT to force the walking of a single path

But the revelation of many.

Teachers make and shape

They weave through the constraints on their vision

creating and molding the students.

Teachers celebrate

Teachers conquer hate and foster expectation

teachers make light go

where darkness has resided

make chrysanthemums of wildflower seeds,

tall stems and fragile blossoms exploding in their reach.

They make statements that linger long after the lessons have been absorbed. Like Mrs. Tucker who wrote, “Amy is like a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day” on my first-grade report card,

Teachers bring forth dreamers and thinkers.

They make us Stretch

make us Wake up

Make us Realize compassion

Make us feel

Make us Cry

Make us Laugh

make us understand our Connection

make us grateful.

This is for Mr. Wilke

who taught Vocational Electronics

at Romeo High School in Michigan.

He helped make a creative mind

Crafted, molded and helped find

New interests and ideas, refined

To create new words, undefined.

Trips like Sisyphus each year,

Another journey up the hill,

Another class to teach,

Another state test to endure and stress over,

Another prom, graduation, homecoming,

Another break to look forward to.

Teachers are there despite it all

Even when the world makes you feel small.

Mrs. Hunney didn’t do it for the money.

She saw I had potential,

even with dyslexia I could be Presidential.

You see, Teachers make bad days into good

Make the journey as meaningful as the destination

Make reading rewarding

make good trouble.

Teachers make decisions.

Around 1,500 per day.

What to say, how to say it, and when

Teachers make love

out of everything.

Teachers make me feel like I am special

like I am safe

Teachers make Sense

Of a jumble of eighth notes and

Then quarter notes

And a smear of dark chords

They make music.

On the day that he died, not just me but the whole school cried, ” he’s the reason I graduated” ” he’s the reason I ate lunch” “When my own dad ran out, he helped me so much” They’d honk as they passed by our house day and night , a constant reminder of his touch on their life

A teacher is nothing without a student

As is a farmer without a field

A mind rich with knowledge

A teacher is nothing when stripped of their power

As is a train when emptied of fuel

Censored and idle

We are here because teachers make students

From saplings to majestic Trees of potential.

They make us whole.

They make impressions

subtle hands that make themselves available

to guide us on this trail of woe

and wonder

Teachers leave the door open for us to walk through

but when the last bell rings

when the classroom is locked down

who will clean out all the desks?

The math worksheets

The missing LEGO,

the one goldfish cracker

the paper clips and crumpled post-its that say “I love you!”

the Pencil boxes and old erasers,

the one Pokemon card (Cramorant)

the empty glue stick,

the dusty Harry Potter mask.

the dirt-smudged backpacks?

At the end of the day

Who will help the teachers prepare for the next

Who will make a home for the heavy hearts,

for The sacred ones who can’t stop thinking about those 19 desks,

those 19 backpacks

those 19 summer vacations,

those 19 new pairs of sandals.

those 19 next school years and school years after that

and after that and after that.

Teachers don’t let us give up on the words

They help us find them

They help us find ourselves

Just breathe and keep being kind to children

is their mantra –

Who will hold them in kind and caring arms

when the world is not so beautiful

when the summer burns red

when there are no more children

to be kind to.

I say, Let it be us.

Because teachers matter.

This community poem was created using submissions by:

Meg Frost, Mapleton, UT

Patricia Stevenson, Shaker Heights, OH

Matthew Monte, Houghton, MI

James From, Dunwoody, GA

Amy Walter-Peterson, Victor, NY

Ben Ark, Louisville, KY

Alexander Simanovsky, Charleston, SC

Lacey Reach, Macon, GA

Sarah Colerick, Seattle, WA

Carol Sadewasser, Parma, OH

John Douglas, Saint Louis, MO

Eileen Hennessy, Joelton, TN

Aaron Bowen, Morristown, TN

Shelley Sollars, Bloomfield, MI

Ron Meyers, New York, NY

Bhavya Reddy, Green Brook NJ

Maddie Radcliff, Omaha, NE

John Linder, Jr, Brooklyn, NY

Tim Josephs, Greensboro, NC

Karen Sherlock, Boulder, CO

Jeet Chadha, Saint Louis, MO

Beverly Peterson, Williamsburg, VA

Robert Warden, Bryan, TX

Chelsea Quam, Sonora, CA

Matthew Friday, Bend, OR

Marina Roytman, Fresno, CA

Morgan Deane, Outer Banks NC

George Asdel, Atascadero, CA

Sonya Jaworski, St Paul, MN

Cheryl WhiteDear, Peabody, MA

Sarah Kirn, Cumberland, ME

Richard Taylor-Kenny, Sherwood, OR

Jen Nails, Las Vegas, NV

Jeevika Verma and Reena Advani produced and edited the audio story. Reena Advani and Rina Torchinsky adapted it for the web.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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The news can be devastating: Communities are reeling after a mass shooting killed 21 people — including 19 children — at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. That’s after a shooter, motivated by a racist conspiracy theory, shot and killed 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., and another shooter in Dallas injured three women of Asian descent in what the police chief called “a hate crime.”

These events can be incomprehensible for adults — so how do we talk about them with kids?[aside postID=’news_11915314′ label=’Read this story in Spanish’]

We spoke with a handful of child development experts about what parents, teachers and other caregivers can say to help kids process all the scary news out there. Here’s what they had to say:

Limit their exposure to breaking news

“We can control the amount of information. We can control the amount of exposure,” says Rosemarie Truglio, senior vice president of curriculum and content at Sesame Workshop.

Truglio says that for starters, try not to let your children experience the news without you. That includes letting the TV or audio play in the background. In 2017, 42 percent of parents of young children told Common Sense Media that the TV is on “always” or “most” of the time.

As a little girl growing up in rural Louisiana, Alison Aucoin remembers her father watching the evening news during the Vietnam War. “The way that our house was set up, it was kind of impossible for me to completely miss it.”

Aucoin vividly recalls the rapid fire of rifles and the shouting of soldiers, but it was two words that the reporters and anchors kept using that truly frightened her.

“[I] heard the words ‘guerrilla warfare’ and … thought, gorillas — like apes,” Aucoin says. “And I literally had a plan for where I would hide in my closet when the gorillas came.”

Truglio says that because we can’t control the news itself, adults need to control the technology that exposes kids to potentially traumatic news.

For big stories, ask: “What have you heard and how are you feeling?”

While it’s important to limit your kids’ exposure to potentially frightening media, some stories are simply too big to avoid. And as kids get older, if they don’t hear about it at home, they’ll almost certainly hear something from classmates at school.

Tara Conley, a media researcher at Montclair State University, says adults should choose a quiet moment to check in with their kids, maybe at the dinner table or at bedtime.

The idea, she says, is to allow kids to “ask questions about what they’re seeing, how they’re feeling and what do they think.” In other words: Give kids a safe space to reflect and share.

Give kids facts and context

Check-ins also allow you to debunk memes, myths and misconceptions, and that’s important in the social media maelstrom, says Holly Korbey, author of Building Better Citizens, a new book on civics education. In the days since the recent Iran news broke, she says, “My own teenagers were showing me these memes and rumors on Instagram spreading about boys being drafted for World War III, no kidding.”

Korbey says, “One of the most important things parents can do in this scary climate is to talk to kids about facts. For example: ‘No, there is not a draft, and no we haven’t started World War III.’ ”

Truglio says that if scary news is happening far from home, the best thing a parent or caregiver can do is to reach for a map. Then, she says, a child could “see distance, that it’s not in their immediate environment.”

Some traumatic events, however, might be closer to home — a school shooting, for example. In that case, it’s important to convey that, overall, such events are incredibly rare. After all, that’s why it’s news.

When they ask why something happened, avoid labels like “bad guys”

Evan Nierman, a father of two, lives in Parkland, Fla. His son turned 11 the day after the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and his daughter was 8. He says one of the toughest moments for him as a father was when his kids asked why the shooting happened. “And there’s obviously not a great answer for that. It’s hard to explain.”

Truglio says we should resist the temptation to label anyone “bad guys” or “evil.” It’s not helpful, and it may increase fear and confusion. Instead, she says, talk about people being in pain, being angry and making bad choices. That’s what Nierman and his wife settled on, telling their children that the shooter wasn’t well and needed help.

And according to Truglio, there’s one important thing parents shouldn’t be afraid to say: I don’t know.

“Sometimes we don’t have the answers to all of these whys,” she explains. “It’s important for parents to say … ‘I don’t know why it happened.'”

Encourage kids to process the story through play and art

Children often try to make sense of what they see and hear through art and creative play. Sometimes it can be disturbing for adults to see children reenact or draw something scary or violent, but this kind of play serves an important purpose.

Conley says, “Play is part of reconstructing [children’s] own stories.” She calls it “meaning-making” and says adults do it too — by discussing stories with friends or even sharing memes on social media. “It also helps us make sense of the world around us … when we’re being bombarded with information,” she explains, “and it helps us discern credible information.”

“Look for the helpers”

Fred Rogers, the beloved children’s TV host, famously passed on this advice from his mother: “When something scary is happening, look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

Truglio did this when she talked to her then-young son about the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. The shooting happened on a Friday, and she kept him away from the television all weekend.

“We didn’t turn on the TV until President Obama spoke and there was a memorial service,” Truglio says. “We focused on the positive — how people were gathering and taking care of each other.”

There’s evidence that talking about helpers really does make a difference in how kids see their world. After the Columbine school shooting in 1999, Sesame Workshop studied school-age children’s perceptions of the world through their drawings. The images were full of violence, Truglio says: “guns and knives and dead people.”

But after the Sept. 11 attacks, just two years later, media coverage changed, she says, focusing more on themes like “the country is strong. The country’s coming together. We are united. We are going to get through this.” And this made a difference for kids: Their drawings featured American flags and heroes like police officers or firefighters.

Take positive action together

Alison Aucoin, who shared her memories and fears of the Vietnam War, is white; her daughter, Edelawit, was adopted from Ethiopia. Edelawit was just 7 years old when Michael Brown, a black teenager, was shot and killed while unarmed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.

“I was scared that something like this would happen to me,” Edelawit, now 12, says, and ever since, whenever a similar, police-related shooting happens, she and her mother follow a few steps. First, her mother shares the news.

“I always have time to process it,” Edelawit says. “And then she says what I can do to protect myself. And then we go and protest.”

“In talking with our children,” Conley says, “we also have to show them how we’re helping too, and asking them, ‘How do you see yourself as a helper in these situations?’ ”

You might consider bringing your child to a peaceful rally or protest, collecting donations together or writing to an elected official. A sense of agency can dramatically reduce a child’s anxiety.

In other words, don’t just look for the helpers … be the helpers.

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Additional resources

Common Sense Media: Explaining news to kids

Child Mind Institute: Articles on kids, trauma and grief

The podcast portion of this story was produced by Chloee Weiner.

We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org. For more Life Kit, subscribe to our newsletter.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

If you have school-age children, chances are they’ve already talked to their classmates about the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. So what’s the best way to know how they’re feeling and what they’re thinking? Ask them.

“Children’s questions may be very different from adults’,” says David Schonfeld, a pediatrician who directs the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. And the best way to determine how much information they need is to listen to them, he says.

“Before we can offer reassurance or help them with what’s bothering them, we have to understand what their actual concerns are,” Schonfeld says. His group has developed guidelines for talking to children after a tragic event.

Kids often ask who is to blame, what could have been done to prevent the tragedy or could it happen at my school? Truthful answers are important to build trust. In a year when the U.S. has already seen 27 school shootings and more than 200 mass shootings, the unfortunate answer is: Although school is typically a safe place, there are risks.

“A lot of people say to me, you know, ‘This is just the new normal,’ and my reaction to them is that there is nothing normal about this,” Schonfeld says.

When 19 children are gunned down, it is cause for deep distress. “It ought to be distressing — it’s an unacceptable situation,” he says. But for now, it’s an unfortunate reality of life in the United States. “We can help kids learn to cope with the distress that they feel when they recognize inherent dangers that are part of the world,” Schonfeld says.

A child’s age will determine how much information to share, but that’s not the only factor. Their emotional reaction may be linked to how much trauma they’ve experienced in the past or how closely they’re connected to a tragedy. If victims were their peers, the event will take a stronger emotional toll compared with children who hear about the shooting on the news. Regardless, it will take time for parents to comfort children and help them process such tragic events.

“We need to be patient, and sometimes especially young kids need to have these conversations over and over,” says Melissa Brymer, director of terrorism and disaster programs at the UCLA-Duke University National Center for Child Traumatic Stress. “Sometimes they need it in little chunks. They might not be able to digest everything in one sitting,” Brymer told NPR’s Morning Edition.

The American School Counselor Association has gathered a list of resources and tips to help after a school shooting. At the top is the recommendation to keep routines in place. Even if kids are anxious or fearful, there’s a benefit to going to school and maintaining daily activities. As the organization explains in its guide, “Kids gain security from the predictability of routine.”

The organization says it’s also helpful to limit how much media you and your children take in, whether it’s social media, radio, TV or reading news online. In a crisis, the main reason to watch, listen or read media coverage is to understand what’s happening. “But if you’re just watching the same coverage over and over again and it’s not helping you learn anything new that’s important to you and your family, then you probably should disconnect,” says Schonfeld.

In the days and weeks that follow a tragedy, parents should talk to their children about how to cope when they feel concerned or anxious. There are some really good books out there to have those conversations around, Brymer says. She recommends Once I Was Very Very Scared, by Chandra Ghosh Ippen, for the preschool set. In the story, lots of animals go through scary experiences, but each reacts differently and has its own way of coping. Brymer says books like this can assist parents and caregivers in helping children figure out the strategy that works best for them.

For parents of older children, another strategy is to help them convert feelings of anger or anxiety into action. Schonfeld says it’s natural to be angry and want to blame someone after a school shooting. But if kids direct their anger at an individual who acted in hatred — such as the shooter — it doesn’t take away grief or solve the problem. Anger can beget anger.

An alternative approach is to get involved in initiatives to address gun violence. For example, students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., began pushing for gun control after the 2018 mass shooting there.

“It didn’t solve the problem, but it did make a difference,” says Schonfeld. The students have been effective advocates in bringing attention to gun violence.

“So I think, yes, kids can be part of the solution, but the adults have to be a big part of the solution too,” he says.

The bottom line, Schonfeld says, is to keep having conversations with your kids. Ask what they’re thinking and feeling — it’s a good place to start.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Copyright © 2021 by Shane Safir. All rights reserved. Reprinted from “Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation,” by Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan. Corwin Press, Inc., www.Corwin.com.  

By Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan

The BALMA project was a social experiment where three teachers—one white (Shane), one Afro-Cuban (Lisa), and one Filipino (my teaching partner, Rex de Guia)—linked arms to pull back the curtain on educational inequity and empower our students as changemakers. Through this experience, our students developed college literacy and critical thinking skills; wrote incisive essays about the opportunity gaps they were witnessing, drawing on the work of James Baldwin, Paolo Freire and bell hooks; and created reflective art pieces about who society was molding them to be versus who they wanted to become. As they developed collective efficacy, they designed and led a community forum with over two hundred people from San Francisco and Marin counties to share their findings and attended school board meetings to demand structural change.

In short, they developed a profound sense of agency by connecting to each other and to something larger than themselves. Each of the examples above—essays, reflections, public speaking, community advocacy—provided us, their teachers, with rich street data on learning. None of them could have been captured in a “metric.”

If we are serious about creating equitable school systems, we need to stop measuring children on norm-referenced tests and start measuring what matters: student agency. Agency is the idea that people have the capacity to take action, craft and carry out plans, and make informed decisions based on a growing base of knowledge. In the social ecology of the classroom, agency is about connection to self, peers, adults, the community beyond the classroom, and ultimately the world. Agency doesn’t emerge in a vacuum, nor does it flourish in a traditional classroom where the teacher is positioned as a content expert dishing out knowledge. It emerges in a learning space where power is distributed, knowledge is democratized, diverse perspectives are welcomed, and children are intellectually and emotionally nourished.

Let’s think about agency in relationship to four domains: identity, mastery, belonging, and efficacy. To experience agency, you must first feel that your core identity—your ways of being, learning, and knowing in the world—is valued. Tunison (2007) notes that “lack of identity, lack of voice, and low self-esteem” can damage the learning spirit—an Indigenous concept that spirits travel with individuals and guide their learning, providing inspiration and the unrealized potential to be who we are. Author and founder of the abolitionist teaching movement Bettina Love defines spirit murdering in schools as “the denial of inclusion, protection, safety, nurturance, and acceptance because of fixed, yet fluid and moldable, structures of racism” (Love, 2013).

The second component of agency is mastery, framed as the ability to build knowledge and demonstrate understanding as a learner. To experience mastery, students must be able to show what they know in nontraditional ways. Pencil-and-paper tests not only trigger acute anxiety for many learners, they also lack the nuance and texture of street data. In reality, they are micro-versions of standardized tests that function like satellite data inside the classroom. Why did the student solve the problem the way they did? How were they feeling when they took the test? What happened earlier that day or morning that may have impacted their performance? With traditional assessments, we are left guessing. Project-based learning, performance assessment, and discussion-based classrooms, on the other hand, create an infrastructure for students to explore, construct, reflect on, and publicly demonstrate knowledge. Students become agents in their own learning rather than consumers of curriculum. For example, when our BALMA students presented their findings to a community forum of two hundred people, they enjoyed an authentic audience to share their learning with. This held them accountable and raised the stakes on their work in the best possible way.

At my second teaching job in Oakland, California, I was asked to create a graduate capstone project for seniors. I was teaching ninth and twelfth graders, almost exclusively Black, Latinx, Southeast Asian, and first generation to college students. My seniors would be the first class to present and defend their capstones to a committee of teachers, peers, and community members. I vividly recall Alberto—a young man who had left behind a life of stealing, stripping, and reselling Honda vehicles to become a budding scholar—presenting his capstone in a beautiful guayabera shirt, translating each part into Spanish for his proud mamá. I was Alberto’s advisor and English teacher, so I had the privilege to coach him through the process. He had meticulously prepared, did a fantastic job, and when the committee announced that he had passed his capstone, he broke down in tears. Why? He felt an overwhelming sense of agency in having shared his knowledge publicly in ways that honored his family, heritage, and language. What test could possibly capture that?

The third component of mastery is belonging, which is encapsulated in the statement, “I see myself, and I am seen and loved here.” Belonging emerges in a classroom characterized by deep and caring relationships. Author Zaretta Hammond frames relationships as the onramp to learning, particularly for marginalized students who may have little reason to trust their educators (Hammond, 2014). Herb Kohl describes the phenomenon of “willed not learning,” whereby students resist being intellectually vulnerable in the face of teachers who don’t authentically care about them (Kohl, 1995). Deep learning can only happen in a classroom where a child feels a sense of belonging.

Despite piles of research on the importance of relationships and connectedness to the neuroscience of learning, many Black and brown students experience an acute lack of belonging when they enter their school buildings. According to Californians for Justice, a youth organizing group, one out of every three California students cannot identify a single caring adult on campus. I have worked with districts where that number rose to 50 percent. Meanwhile, 30 percent of African American students and 22 percent of Latinx students in California enter high school only to drop out before graduating, a data point replicated in high-poverty regions across the nation. We have a crisis of alienation in our schools, driven at the highest levels by the insidious messages of satellite data, in effect: “You are not achieving on these measures; therefore, we have to fix you with interventions.

By extension, you don’t really belong to this academic community. You are a problem to be solved, a gap to be filled.” It hurts my heart to write those words because I know that so many young people experience school this way.

Fostering a sense of belonging does not mean plastering our classrooms and school walls with ethnically diverse posters and inspirational sayings or celebrating “diversity days”—the so-called Heroes and Holidays approach (Lee, Menkart, & Okazawa-Rey, 1998). Rather, it demands rigorous attention to systemic racism, school and classroom cultures, and the micro-interactions that characterize a student’s passage through the school day. This is why shadowing a student delivers such powerful street data: It gives us a ground-level view of the ways in which children are included, excluded, marginalized, or just plain invisible in their learning environments.

Finally, agency is about nourishing students’ sense of efficacy—a feeling that “I can make a difference here.” Collective teacher efficacy, the shared belief among teachers in their ability to positively affect students, has emerged in John Hattie’s research as the number one influence on student learning (Hattie, 2008). For our purposes of assessing student agency, efficacy means the learner’s ability to set an intention and produce a desired result, and it is absolutely critical to healing from and transforming oppression. Scholar Shawn Ginwright describes the importance of helping young people take “loving action, by collectively responding to political decisions and practices that can exacerbate trauma” (Ginwright, 2018). Taking action via project-based learning, peer surveys, organizing a walkout, or building a resource for your community vests students with a sense of power and control over their lives, which research has shown is one of the most significant factors in restoring well-being for marginalized groups.

Shane Safir provides equity-centered leadership coaching, systems transformation support, and professional learning for schools, districts, and organizations across the U.S. and Canada. After teaching in San Francisco and Oakland, California and engaging in community organizing to launch a new public high school, Shane became the founding principal of June Jordan School for Equity. You can follow her on Twitter at @ShaneSafir.

Jamila Dugan is a leadership coach, learning facilitator, and researcher. She began her career as a teacher in Washington D.C. After being nominated for Teacher of the Year, she later served as a coach for new teachers in Oakland, California. As a school administrator, Jamila championed equity-centered student services, parent empowerment, and co-led the development of the first public Mandarin immersion middle school in the Bay Area. You can follow her on Twitter at @JamilaDugan. 

BUFFALO, N.Y. — The mass shooting in a Buffalo grocery store that police say was committed by an 18-year-old man radicalized by white supremacist ideology has left the western New York city torn and searching for answers.

For many parents, confronting the ideology espoused by the murder suspect means having difficult conversations with their children about the realities of violence and racism in the United States.

“One of my sons is 18 years old, and his very first question to me was like, ‘Mom, how does someone my age do something so hateful?’ ” said the Rev. Denise O. Walden-Glenn. “How do you explain that to your child?”

Walden-Glenn is a mother of 12 and the executive servant leader for VOICE – a social activism group in Buffalo.

When she learned of the shooting spree Saturday that left 10 Black people dead, and an additional three victims injured, her thoughts immediately went to how she could support her community, including her children, ages 13 to 26.

When NPR spoke with Walden-Glenn on Monday, she said her middle school-aged children did not go to school that day. The emotional burden, she said, was too much for children to be expected to deal with in a classroom.

“We went through such a violent violation, and we are so shaken,” she said. “I don’t understand how it feels as though it’s expected to go on with life as normal when there is nothing normal about what we just encountered.”

Tyrell Ford also works at VOICE. He is the father of two young boys, who he said are too young to completely process the magnitude of Saturday’s attack.

“I don’t think they fully understand until they get a little bit older and start to see the world for what it truly is,” Ford said. “And that’s the risk we run exposing them to the dark side of the world so early on.

“My wife took the opportunity, as we discussed, to talk to them, to let them know that there’s people out here that will target you based on the color of your skin, and to be vigilant all the time, even though they’re so young.”

Since the attack, Ford, who is Black, said he and his wife have discussed getting a gun. He said the shooting has stirred up a redoubled a sense of protectionism toward his family.

“The war on black and brown bodies is real, and we don’t know when the next occasion will happen,” he said.

At a Tuesday vigil on the block where the Tops supermarket stands, still cordoned off with yellow police tape, strangers came together to pray, sing and support one another.

Danielle Wisinski was there with her two teenage daughters. They had dropped off flowers at the vigil. Balloons and other commemorations of the lives lost were piled high.

Wisinski, who is white, struggled through tears as she explained how she and her husband sought to raise their children to view everybody as equal.

“I’m just honest with them – my husband and I always have been,” she said. “We teach them that we are all one human race, and things like this should not happen.”

Her two daughters, 19-year-old Julia and 17-year-old Sarah, said they were shocked that someone so young could have been so radicalized to carry out such violence.

“It’s just awful that so many young people can be influenced like this to do bad things,” Julia said.

Her sister, Sarah, said, “It was really infuriating to me that it could happen so close to where I live.”

Their confusion was echoed by 5-year-old Alina, who was at the Tuesday vigil with her parents and younger sister, helping to distribute food and diapers alongside the family’s church group.

“We actually just spoke to her before we came,” said Candice Erni, her mother. “Didn’t fully get into details, but just let her know that an individual hurt a lot of people within a grocery store. And we just kept it at that for now. Of course, kids have a whole bunch of questions.”

Erni, whose family is Black, said her daughter asked her if the gunman had attacked the store because he had a bad day or if evil was responsible.

“We let her know that someone who had views that were against the word of God decided to act out of fear and violence rather than peace,” Erni said.

Alina was glad to be out with her family and helping the community, but as the sun set over Tops, the 5-year-old still had a question.

“How did it happen?”

Her mother did not have an answer.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

The town of Rockwall, Texas, has a few claims to fame: Bonafide Betties Pie Company, where “thick pies save lives”; the mega-sized Lakepointe Church; and Lake Ray Hubbard, which is lovely until the wet, Texas heat makes a shoreline stroll feel like a plod through hot butter.

Now add to that list: Rockwall is home to the middle-school winners of NPR’s fourth-annual Student Podcast Challenge.

Their entry, The Worlds We Create, is a funny and sneakily thoughtful exploration of what it means that so many teens today are “talking digitally,” instead of face-to-face. It was one of two winning entries (the high school winner is here) chosen by our judges from among more than 2,000 student podcasts from around the country.

The team behind the pod

Rockwall hugs the eastern shore of the lake and got its name from a wall-like thread of sandstone that unspools beneath the town. “Every street name sounds the same: Lakeshore, Club Lake, Lakeview, Lakeside, and so on…” says the podcast’s narrator, 8th-grader Harrison McDonald. “If it sounds like our town is boring, that’s because it is. But let’s zoom into the center of one of those neighborhoods, on Williams Middle School.”

That’s where Harrison, fellow 8th-grader Blake Turley and 7th-graders Kit Atteberry and Wesley Helmer made the podcast, as part of librarian Misti Knight’s broadcasting class. Knight began teaching Harrison and Blake last year, when they would make videos for the school’s morning announcements. “But then I realized how good [the boys] were, and so I would say this year, I’m honestly more their manager,” she laughs.

Meaning, often Ms. Knight just gives the boys the roughest of ideas and encourages them to get creative. Which is why, when Harrison came to her with an idea for NPR’s Student Podcast Challenge, she said, “Why not?”

Harrison’s interest in the contest surprised no one. He wears chunky headphones around his neck every day, like a uniform, and says he was raised on public radio. “[My family] have a system. On long road trips, we listen to This American Life. On shorter road trips, we listen to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.”

Kit also brought a love of podcasting to the effort: “My dad got me into listening to podcasts, and we would just listen to them in the car and listen to them in the house. You know, he never really got into music. He was mostly into podcasts,” Kit says, especially The Moth.

For their entry, Harrison, Kit and the team wanted to explore how students at Williams Middle School, and likely every other middle and high school in the country, interact on social media. Specifically, when they go on a platform like TikTok or Instagram and create anonymous accounts to share things about school and their classmates.

“People feel anonymous, so they feel like they can do whatever they want”

For example: An account dedicated to pics of students considered “hot.”

“My friend was on there,” Blake says, “and I texted him, ‘Hey, do you know that you’re on this Instagram account?’ And he’s like, ‘What?!’ ”

Most of these accounts “aren’t even gossip,” Blake adds, “they’re just pictures of people sleeping, eating, acting surprised, acting sad.”

One account was dedicated entirely to pictures of students sleeping in class. On some accounts, students are in on the joke, but often they’re not, Harrison says.

“Through the internet … people feel anonymous, so they feel like they can do whatever they want — and get likes for it without any punishment.”

The boys found at least 81 of these accounts at Williams alone. Then they got a bold idea.

Fake it till you make it

“After seeing all of these social media pages, we decided it would be fun if we just made our own profile and posted fake gossip to see the impact it has and how it spreads through a middle school,” they explain in the podcast.

Fake gossip is putting it mildly.

“We knocked on our school police officer’s door and asked if he would pretend to arrest one of our A-V club members for the camera. Surprisingly, he actually agreed,” Harrison says.

It was the first video to go up on their new gossip account. “We didn’t think it would actually get anywhere, but less than 15 minutes later, we heard people starting to talk about it.”

Next up: The boys staged a fight in the band room, hoping a shaky camera and sound effects added in post-production would convince their classmates it was bigger and very real.

“Some of us would have kids walking up to us daily to tell us how we got absolutely destroyed in that fight or how they didn’t know we were in band. We were having fun with it now,” Harrison says in the podcast. “It didn’t take long for our fake account to start getting more followers than any other gossip account we could find.”

“Our generation prefers talking digitally”

As a social experiment, these four middle-schoolers went from quiet observers of social media to the school’s master muckrakers – even though everything they posted was utterly fake. In that way, the podcast works as a warning about the importance of media literacy — at a time when Americans half-a-century their senior are being suckered by social media every day.

But the podcast isn’t just a scold about fake news. It’s also about how, for kids their age, this is communication.

“We don’t pass notes, we send texts with our phones hidden under our desks,” Harrison says. “We don’t tell people about incidents that happened in class, we post it on TikTok. Our generation prefers talking digitally with each other from a distance, [rather] than communicating with each other in the real world.”

The boys named their podcast, The Worlds We Create.

Ms. Knight, a veteran teacher, says she’s seen these changes in students over the years.

“I just think there’s a lot less talking and a lot more, you know, swiping through their phone instead of saying, ‘Hey, guess what I saw today?’ ”

Knight has even seen it in her own family. “I would talk to my husband about, ‘Oh, did you see our eldest daughter?’ She lives in California. ‘She did this or whatever.’ And he would say, ‘How do you know this?’ ”

Her answer: “‘Because I’m following her social media and her friends’ social media.’ Because if you don’t do that, she’s probably not going to pick up the phone and call us and tell us.”

Is that inherently bad? Knight says, no, not necessarily. She does get to see more of what her daughters and her friends, far and wide, are doing.

The boys’ views are similarly complicated. All this “talking digitally” can be a real “curse” for teens, they say, especially when it hurts or excludes others. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

After all, the boys say, the whole purpose of technologies from radio to the telephone, TV to the internet, has always been to help us feel less alone and more connected – by helping us create worlds – and build communities – bigger than the ones we’re born into.

If you’re looking for the high school winner of the Student Podcast Challenge, click here.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

At this point in the pandemic, American teens have spent a significant chunk of their formative years isolated from friends and in fractured learning environments. More than 2 in 5 teens have reported persistently feeling sad or hopeless, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of high school students. Many who were already struggling with trauma or mental health problems before the pandemic were deeply affected by the prolonged isolation.

But young people have also shown grace and resilience as they dealt with the challenges of COVID-19. NPR spoke to four high school students who marked the pandemic’s two year anniversary with a newfound sense of self, and big dreams for the future.

If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (en español: 1-888-628-9454; deaf and hard of hearing: 1-800-799-4889) or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.

Ruby, 17: “I left a toxic friendship, I explored myself more.”

By the time the pandemic closed her school in March 2020, Ruby had already spent weeks trying to ignore her mom’s warnings about COVID-19. Her mom is Chinese, and their relatives back in China had been updating her on the virus’ spread since its early days. Ruby says when her spring break got extended, her mom told her: “Oh yeah, you won’t be going back to school anytime soon.”

At first, remote learning heightened a lot of the anxieties Ruby already felt about her Minnetonka, Minn. high school. She transferred there in the fall of 2019 and was struggling to feel like she fit in because many of her new classmates came from wealthier families. NPR isn’t using Ruby’s last name to protect her privacy.

“It was just something I was worrying about constantly,” she said. “I was afraid to even move in class. I was just, like, sitting there, and I did not move because I was so anxious about what they were thinking about me.”

When school went online, Ruby, then a freshman, was self-conscious about showing her house on camera. She also had a hard time finding a quiet place to concentrate as her two siblings also switched to remote learning – she would often lose focus during Zoom class. During remote school, she says, “I didn’t learn anything.”

Ruby wasn’t the only one. In the first several months of the pandemic, two-thirds of U.S. students in grades nine through 12 told the CDC reported difficulty completing their schoolwork.

One upside to remote school was that it put some distance between Ruby and a friendship that she describes as toxic.

“She was the only person I really knew, so I kind of felt safe around her,” Ruby explains. “But at the same time, I didn’t really feel so safe because the people who she hung out with were not my people.”

Things changed for the better during Ruby’s sophomore year, when her school transitioned to hybrid learning and she decided to leave that friendship. She started to nurture relationships with the three people who are now her best friends.

“I left a toxic friendship, I explored myself more.” she says. “I would say [the pandemic] has definitely made me a stronger person.”

Teja, 18: “The lack of structure just led to me becoming obsessive.”

When her Seattle high school closed in March 2020, Teja’s world started to disintegrate. Her jazz choir trip and swim practices were canceled, her clubs were confined to Zoom meetings and her entire life was condensed to her family’s home.

Teja, then a sophomore, had been diagnosed with anorexia during her freshman year of high school and when the pandemic hit, she was in recovery. NPR isn’t using her last name to protect her privacy around her anorexia.

“School was a huge motivator for me, for… staying on track for recovery because school is something I love. I love to learn. It’s really important to me and that was only possible if I was eating,” Teja says. “And then all of a sudden school was canceled.”

Those early months of the pandemic were extremely destabilizing for Teja, and for other teenaged girls with eating disorders. The CDC found the proportion of emergency room visits for eating disorders increased among adolescent girls in 2020 and 2021.

Teja relapsed, and her family noticed. After a difficult conversation with her dad about how she might have to go to the hospital, Teja called a friend who talked her down. “She was like, ‘It’s not fair to frighten you, but on the other hand, that is the reality.’ ”

She says the conversation was a wake-up call.

“I realized the only way I would be happy and have structure is if I created that for myself. So I made a schedule and I set goals,” Teja says.

In the summer of 2020, she started going on daily walks with her dog, planning outdoor meetups with friends and writing music on a regular basis – all in addition to regular meetings with her psychiatrist. Eventually, she was healthy enough to attend outdoor swim team practices in nearby Lake Washington.

“It was a lot of fun to be back in the water again and be back with my teammates. So those things kind of helped ground me with why I wanted to continue in recovery.”

But that grounding didn’t last long. When remote learning continued into her junior year, in fall 2020, she says, “I just became really anxious about school in a way that I hadn’t really been before.”

“I’m very perfectionistic,” Teja explains, “and the lack of structure just led to me becoming obsessive.”

The things that usually brought her joy, like practicing with the jazz choir, didn’t feel the same without her classmates singing by her side. “I think the primary thing was the isolation. There was no one to catch me from spiraling.”

In the fall of 2020, Teja’s anxiety was getting worse. That’s when the seizures started – sometimes more than 10 a day. “I couldn’t leave the house,” she says.

Three weeks after her first seizure, she was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder called Functional Neurologic Disorder that can be triggered by things like anxiety, stress and trauma.

“That was a really, really hard couple of months because I couldn’t do anything. You couldn’t see friends without having seizures. My friends had my parents on speed dial for when I’d have seizures on Zoom.”

She and her family had to go all the way to Colorado to find treatment in February 2021 – and the treatment helped. She started having fewer seizures, and this past fall, she returned to in-person classes for the first time since the pandemic started. She says being back at school has been strange, but good.

“On my first day of school, my schedule was messed up and I was like, this is such an unusual experience. Like, it’s been so long since I’ve had an issue as small as like, ‘Oh, my schedule’s wrong.’ ”

Teja also got to return to some of the activities she loves most. She says getting back to some sense of normalcy has helped her recover from everything she went through during the pandemic.

“I was able to do a live production of Alice in Wonderland. And that, to me, was the first time I was like: It is important that I am here. Like, if I were to get sick and I couldn’t be here, it would matter. And that was the first time in my high school experience that I felt that way.”

Alex, 16: “I was asking myself, ‘Am I a male? I don’t look like the typical guy.’ “

Pandemic isolation was a mixed bag for Alex, who lives in northern Minnesota.

On the one hand, the isolation worsened a lot of the struggles he was already having around mental health. Alex, now a junior, had been sexually abused in middle school, and was later diagnosed with anxiety, depression and PTSD. NPR isn’t using Alex’s last name to protect his privacy as a minor.

He hoped being quarantined at home would make him feel safer and less paranoid. But it didn’t.

“Honestly, if anything, it made it worse,” he says. He felt trapped, and he constantly worried his abuser would find him.

Sitting at home, Alex had a lot of time to think. He started to look deeper into questions he had about his gender identity. “I was asking myself, ‘Am I a male? I don’t look like the typical guy. I don’t act like the other trans people I see online or in school,’ ” he recalls.

After months of contemplation, he began identifying as trans masculine.

Then, in spring 2020, at the end of his freshman year, he started seeing a new therapist via telehealth appointments, which he liked better than in-person therapy. He was able to do therapy from the safety of his bed. “You have all your comfort items right there.”

It helped him open up in a new way.

“I kinda just started getting braver. I started expressing what I was feeling,” he explains.

“It was like Jenga. Once one thing fell, everything else started falling. There was just kind of like word vomit.”

In the fall of 2020, Alex started his sophomore year in-person, at a new school. “I was basically like, ‘Look, it’s a new start.’ ”

He reconnected with an old friend, who quickly became his best friend. “We’re at the point where we could just sit in silence and one of us would randomly start laughing, and the other person would know what we’re laughing at already,” he says. They like to hang out and do each others’ makeup – Alex enjoys cosplaying.

But recovery isn’t always a straight line. In October 2021, Alex was hospitalized after attempting to take his own life. According to the CDC, in the first several months of the pandemic, 1 in 5 U.S. high school students had seriously considered attempting suicide, and 9% had tried to kill themselves.

Since his hospitalization, Alex has been working with his therapist on finding healthy coping mechanisms for processing his traumas, like “drawing, focusing on schoolwork and getting out into the community more.”

Right now, he says he’s doing “pretty good. I’m stressed, but I’m a high school student, so that’s inevitable. I’m working on my trauma, but trauma processing is all your life. You just learn new ways to cope with it.”

Daniela Rivera, 17: “I just lost all motivation”

Daniela Rivera enjoys learning, and she likes being in school – but not so much when she doesn’t understand the material, which was what made school during the pandemic so hard for her. In March 2020, Daniela was in her freshman year of high school in Cottonwood, Ariz. At first, her school’s remote learning option didn’t include live instruction, just packets of optional work – which Daniela didn’t do.

That fall, her school began using online lessons from an educational company. Daniela found herself alone in her room, clicking through hours of pre-recorded videos with no actual teacher.

“I didn’t get a lot of things. I gave up completely,” Daniela says. “Every day I’d just stay in my bed. I’d wake up…be on school in my bed and just get up to go eat.”

Her motivation for schoolwork instantly changed. “I was behind in all my classes. I would play [remote learning] videos…and go out to the living room and talk to my mom while the video is playing. I come in, like, 30 minutes later and the video is still playing. I just lost all motivation.”

“[The pandemic] got me into the mindset where, like, I’m just trapped in this house and I can’t do nothing. And like, I have stuff I could do outside, but I just felt like I couldn’t even open the front door.”

According to the CDC, nearly 2 in 5 teens reported experiencing poor mental health during the pandemic. That’s something Daniela struggled with, too. In the evenings, she would FaceTime her boyfriend, and they would talk about how the days were starting to blur together.

She had a part-time job as a hostess at a restaurant on the weekends, and that job made it hard to maintain her friendships because all her friends worked weekday shifts.

When her school started offering a hybrid option partway through the fall semester of her sophomore year, in 2020, Daniela was excited. But it wasn’t the same. Her lessons were still the same pre-recorded videos. She would sit in a classroom all day, separated from other students by a row of desks, with a single teacher to supervise her as she watched from a laptop.

Being back in school didn’t make it any easier to keep in touch with her friends – they chose to stay fully online so they could keep their jobs.

“[I’m] definitely sad because they… went from being one of the closest people to me to becoming a stranger. I don’t know how they are, I don’t know what they’re doing, I don’t know what’s happened in their life.”

Things got better as school permanently transitioned back to regular, in-person learning in spring 2021. But returning to business-as-usual has made Daniela realize how much she changed over the pandemic. “I’ve always been a shy, quiet person. But I feel like even now, I’m quieter and shyer than usual.”

She also noticed words don’t seem to roll off her tongue as easily as they used to, especially when she’s called on in class. “My fear of public speaking has gotten worse in all this because I haven’t been, like, speaking out loud to anyone.”

One thing she’s grateful for: The past two years gave her time and space to get to know herself better. In pandemic isolation, she discovered that she loves to go fishing with her boyfriend, and she’s now a big fan of indie music.

“I know who I am now.”

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

This story about college mental health was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Heidi Schmitt, a therapist at the University of Iowa, sat in her swivel chair and pulled on her snow boots: Time to move.

It was just after lunch on a gray day this spring, but already Schmitt had seen one student suffering from panic attacks; another struggling to connect with peers after two years of pandemic-induced isolation; and a third who was having a hard time adjusting to college.

She’d just finished preparing for a workshop on tolerating distress scheduled for the evening and was about to cross campus for another workshop she leads, on mindfulness.

Such is the life of a campus counselor, at a time when the demand for mental health care seems limitless, and colleges are stretching to meet it.

On college campuses nationwide, the number of students seeking services increased by an average of 30 percent between 2009 and 2015 — more than five times the average rate of enrollment growth — and has continued to climb since then. At the University of Iowa, the number of clinical service hours provided by its counselors rose by nearly 90 percent in the 10 years preceding the pandemic.

Caseloads dipped in 2020 as students scattered to their homes and colleges struggled to serve them across state lines. But on many campuses they’re already starting to spike again, as the stress, grief and isolation that many students have experienced over the past two years rise to the surface.

In an effort to keep up, colleges have hired more therapists, contracted with networks of telehealth providers and sent more students to off-campus counselors and group therapy. They’ve spaced out appointments, set session limits and added students to waitlists.

They’ve innovated, too, subscribing to self-help apps and online peer-to-peer mental health communities, and started teaching resilience and coping skills to stressed-out students.

But the rise in demand feels relentless, and a growing number of counselors say they’re burned out. Roughly 60 percent of college counseling centers experienced turnover in their staff last year, an increase of nearly 10 percentage points over 2018, according to an annual survey by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors, and 70 percent of centers had difficulty filling open positions.

In the survey, counseling center directors said the Covid-19 pandemic had added to counselors’ stress and workload, while eroding staff morale and cohesion.

The question, said Marcus Hotaling, president of the association, is “Who is helping the caregivers? “Who is helping us?”

Once upon a time, college counselors functioned more like life and career coaches than therapists, supporting students through the often-tricky transitions to college and the workforce. They dealt mostly with coming-of-age challenges: loneliness, academic stress, uncertainty about the future.

No longer. These days, counselors are as likely to see a student with a severe eating disorder or crippling panic attacks as one who is homesick or worried about schoolwork. A growing number of students — 13 percent, in one survey — report having suicidal thoughts.

Rates of mental illness among college students have been climbing for years, reaching what some consider crisis proportions. In a 2021 survey by the Healthy Minds Network, nearly half of students screened positive for clinically significant symptoms of depression, anxiety or both.

That increase is partly due to advances in treatment that have made it possible for more students to enroll in college, said Hotaling, who directs the counseling center at Union College in New York. It also reflects the pressures of modern society, in which young people can witness traumatic and disturbing events unfolding worldwide on social media and 24-hour news channels, other counselors said.

“We’re all so much more aware of the beauty and ugliness that exists in the world,” said Holly Davis, interim co-director of Iowa’s University Counseling Service. “It was always there, but now, at the tap of a finger, you can see it.”

But colleges see an ever-expanding number of students with less serious concerns, too — students who in the past might not have considered their problems big enough for therapy. Pre-pandemic, the typical campus counseling center saw 13 percent of its student body for at least one appointment; on some smaller campuses, the number approached 40 percent or more.
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Ben Locke, a psychologist who founded the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, sees this opening up of campus counseling to a much broader swath of students as an unintended consequence of widespread efforts to prevent suicide and destigmatize therapy.

For the past two decades, colleges, aided by millions of dollars from the federal government and foundations, have been telling students to seek help, that it’s “OK to not be OK,” he said. They’ve trained faculty and peers to identify students in distress and refer them to counseling, and urged students not to suffer in silence.

Now, as a result of that well-intentioned and often helpful push, students are seeking therapy for even routine challenges, said Locke, who is now the chief clinical officer for Togetherall, an online mental health community.

Schmitt, who has been a counselor for a decade, said she’s seen a shift in cultural attitudes towards emotional well-being, with schools now teaching kids coping skills as early as preschool. “My 2-year-old son will come home from school and say: ‘I’m sad. I have a big feeling. I need a break,’ ” she said.

Schmitt said she was drawn to counseling work because she enjoys “being present with people,” supporting them through highs and lows.

“I see my role as a facilitator. They’re doing all the hard work,” she said. “I love being there to see that growth.”

But it’s not always easy to be present in her own life. She tries to practice self-care, going for walks with her toddler, or hitting the elliptical trainer after he and his baby brother are in bed. But sometimes a thought or worry about a client will creep into her head when she’s at home.

“The most challenging thing is being able to sit and be present and be as kind and compassionate towards ourselves as we are to everyone else,” she said.

At 1:15, heading for her mindfulness session, Schmitt left her office in the University Capitol Center, a shopping mall at the edge of the university’s sprawling downtown campus. The counseling center opened a second location here, around the corner from a tanning salon and next door to Candy Nails, in 2017, after it outgrew its other office, an aging brick building on the opposite side of the Iowa River.

She hurried through the midday gloom to the Campus Recreation and Wellness Center and climbed three flights of stairs to a yoga studio, where she settled onto a mat in the front.

“Do you ever feel like your thoughts are racing or are all over the place?” she asked the students.

“All the time,” answered one.

Schmitt instructed the students to sit silently, breathing slowly while they visualized their negative thoughts settling to the bottom of a snow globe, an exercise she called “emotional blizzard.”

Wellness workshops like this one, called “Mindfulness Matters,” have become common on college campuses, part of an effort to confront student stress before it becomes severe. The University of Iowa increased the number of hours it spends on outreach to students by 123 percent between fiscal 2013 and fiscal 2021, according to Kelly Clougher, the other interim co-director of Iowa’s University Counseling Service.

It’s not clear, though, if the programs are easing the pressure on counseling centers. For some students, a handful of coping strategies may be all they need to manage on their own. But for students with more serious concerns, outreach programs can serve as a soft entry to the counseling center, driving up demand.

Though the stigma surrounding mental health has diminished in recent years, some communities remain skeptical, or even dismissive, of therapy, and students of color are less likely to seek treatment than their white peers, research shows.

To reach students who might not seek help on their own, many colleges have begun “embedding” counselors in dorms and academic buildings, where they can build trust with students, on their turf.

At the University of Iowa, five counselors spend eight hours a day meeting with students in offices located in dorms and professional schools. The effort has been so successful that some of the embedded counselors are struggling to keep up with demand.

“We’re at a place where it feels unsustainable,” said Clougher.

After Mindfulness Matters, Schmitt hustled to the Iowa Memorial Union, where a group of students was hosting a suicide awareness event called “Send Silence Packing.” Backpacks with photos and heartbreaking stories of students lost to suicide nationwide lined the stairs and filled the ballroom, where the song “Just Keep Breathing” by We the Kings played over a loudspeaker, reminding listeners that they weren’t alone.

Annamaria Iarrapino, the president of Iowa’s chapter of Active Minds, a national student organization that sponsors the traveling exhibit, said the group was “trying to change the conversation around mental health, reducing the stigma.”

Iarrapino said her group isn’t pushing for major policy changes on campus, as some students at other schools have. But she would like to see colleges devote more resources to mental health.

“There need to be more mental health professionals, because so many students need help,” she said.

In fact, many colleges have ramped up their hiring in recent years. The University of Iowa doubled the size of its counseling center staff, to a couple dozen individuals, between roughly 2016 and 2019.

But they still couldn’t keep up with demand.

“We saw more students, but nobody waited any less,” said Barry Schreier, the former director of the University Counseling Service who spearheaded the expansion. “We figured out that we couldn’t hire ourselves out of the problem.”

Counselor caseloads vary widely among universities, ranging from 12 to 314 clients a year, with an average of 90, according to the latest numbers from the Center for Collegiate Mental Health. The University of Iowa’s caseload per counselor is 120.

Centers with larger caseloads tend to require clinicians to take on new cases even if they don’t have time available — what’s known as an absorption model. To accommodate everyone, they often set session limits and space out appointments, scheduling students on a biweekly basis.

Centers with smaller caseloads are more apt to use a “treatment” model, assigning students a counselor when a spot opens up. Though this can mean a wait for treatment, staff members get more predictable schedules, and students are more likely to attend therapy weekly, achieving better outcomes.

The University of Iowa tends towards an absorption model with its embedded counselors but uses a treatment model in its main counseling center.

To reduce wait times, the center uses a “stepped care” approach, directing students with less serious concerns to lower tiers of service — support groups and workshops, among them.

Still, during busy periods, wait times for individual therapy can stretch up to six weeks — particularly if a student has a specialized need, such as an eating disorder, or limited availability.

Though Iowa doesn’t have a strict session cap, it informs students that therapy will be brief, and focused on specific goals.

“It’s not ‘Let’s work on everything in your life,’ but ‘Let’s prioritize,’ ” said Davis.

Students who want or need longer-term therapy are typically referred to community-based providers, though students without private insurance are sometimes allowed to stay on longer. Staff will also help students sign up for Medicaid and connect them with free clinics in town.

But that doesn’t mean poorer students will get the same access to long-term treatment as their wealthier peers with private insurance, Davis said. As co-director of counseling, her job is not just to help students, but to protect her staff, too — and that can mean upholding boundaries.

“Access to health care is not equitable in this country. It just isn’t,” she said. “We’re always in conversations about how far we can stretch and make sure our clinicians stay well.”

At the University of Iowa, students without the financial resources, or transportation, to attend off-campus counseling can join a therapy group like one Schmitt led after the Send Silence Packing event.

The university offered more than 5,500 hours of group therapy in fiscal 2019, the last full year before the pandemic, more than quadruple the amount it offered in fiscal 2009. On this Thursday, in the small group of students gathered via Zoom, the focus was on managing and coping with emotions. Schmitt talked about how people choose to respond to situations, reminding students of a skill she calls “My Friend CARL,” an acronym for “Change It; Accept It; Reframe It; Leave It.”

Later, Schmitt would lead a support group for students seeking a healthier relationship with drugs and alcohol, followed by a workshop on tolerating distress. Her workday wouldn’t end until 8 p.m., more than 12 hours after it started.

College counseling was never a cushy job, but it used to be less consuming than it is today. Applicant pools were large, and hires tended to stay put for years, said Schreier, who has been in the field for 30 years.

Today, few counselors are applying for the jobs, and some who planned to stay forever are fleeing for private practice, where they can work fewer hours and make more money, he said. The University of Iowa currently has three open positions, including the director’s job.

“It’s bottomless demand, and finite resources, and that begins to erode on people’s feelings of efficacy,” said Schreier, who left the job in February to join the university’s newly formed Iowa Center for School Mental Health, where he’s focusing on staff and faculty well-being.

Schmitt, who came to the university from a community mental health center in 2019, said she’s learned that it’s “OK to say no to some things,” to turn down some of the requests to serve on committees or present to student groups after hours. She has no plans to leave; some days are exhausting, but she’s not burned out, she said.

And so, on this Thursday, she got into her car a little after 8 p.m. and drove 45 minutes to her home in rural Iowa to say goodnight to her 2-year-old, feed the baby one last bottle, and lay out everyone’s clothes for the next day. She ended the night quietly and purposefully with her husband, watching the Food Network and sipping one last cup of tea.

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) and the Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 — are free, 24-hour services that can provide support, information and resources.

This story about college mental health was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

Gym class can’t get a break. A highly unscientific sampling of the conventional wisdom on physical education reveals a lot about what kids think of regular, enforced school exercise. “My least favorite thing about elementary school gym class was the boys being absolutely psycho,” one young woman told me. “Locker rooms were definitely fraught,” said another, about her middle school PE. “It’s not so much the body, as it is performing,” offered another—that pressure to throw and run well for an impromptu team, “so if you screw up a catch or whatever in dodgeball you let them down.”

The humiliation of being passed over when kids pick teams; the awkwardness of having to socialize with strangers from different grades; the Hobson’s choice of either undressing and showering in front of peers or returning to class in sweaty clothes: all these features of physical education contribute to kids’ discomfort.

Studies of student views toward PE add to these accounts. According to researcher Analisa Packham, who examined the impact of a comprehensive physical education program in Texas, kids resist PE because it invites bullying. Packham reported to Alia Wong in The Atlantic that the lack of adult supervision in locker rooms, and ease with which unathletic and overweight kids are teased, explains why PE is unpopular.

The trouble with this resistance is that physical movement is linked to brain health and well-being. Exercise contributes to happiness. It blunts anxiety and thwarts depression. Even 30 minutes of daily “brisk walking,” the World Health Organization asserts, can lift the mood. A study comparing the brain MRIs of active and inactive nine and ten-year-olds found a higher volume of the “white matter” that’s associated with memory and learning among the fit children. In her book “The Extended Mind,” Annie Murphy Paul explains how moving at varied levels of exertion affects the brain: low-intensity enhances executive function; moderate improves problem-solving, focus, memory, and other cognitive advantages; and high-intensity exercise stokes creativity. “The best preparation for such (metaphysical) acts as wrestling with ideas or running through possibilities is to work up an (actual) sweat,” she writes.
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These cognitive and emotional advantages that come with exercise suggest that gym class, despite its stigma, is essential to learning. Is there a way to make physical education less alienating—and possibly even appealing—to the thousands of kids who take part?

Some schools have succeeded in making their PE programs popular and well-attended. At A.D. Henderson University School in Florida, the gym elective among middle schoolers is always full; though kids who play sports after school are allowed to skip it, 95 percent attend anyway. At the Girls Athletic Leadership Schools, charter programs for middle and high school kids, physical activity is integrated throughout the school day, and “morning movement” takes the place of PE. At Tuscarora High School in Maryland, where students are required to attend just one physical education section during their four years, about one-third of the students take it throughout high school.

These schools have adapted their physical education programs to help kids enjoy exercise. Educators there explained what makes their programs popular:

“We change it up a lot,” said Chris Childs, the athletic director at A.D. Henderson. Childs said that instructors switch units every two to three weeks and include sports that most students will have limited experience playing, like pickleball. Offering new sports options keeps PE fresh. Instructors also make up new games for the students to play as a way to level the playing field; even the most experienced athletes, then, have to learn these games from scratch. And teachers divide units into separate skills, so that a ten-day volleyball section, say, might start with four people working together to practice serving.

“Choice is a big buy-in,” Alyssa Worbetz, the director of athletics at GALS charter school, told me. Students progress through three large exercise “units” over the course of the year: team games and yoga; cardio; and choice, wherein kids decide for themselves if they’d like to play soccer or basketball, say, or take up self-defense or running, among other options. Free choice also appeals to students at Tuscarora High School, who get to decide for themselves, every “free-day Friday,” what activity they’ll play that day.

“We’re sensitive to kids’ wariness about the locker room,” said Howard Putterman, the athletic director at Tuscarora. As a practical matter, that means allowing kids who won’t change clothes to play anyway. “We work with the kids,” Putterman added. Instructors at A.D. Henderson permit some kids to use the locker room earlier, ahead of the crowd. They also put an adult in the locker room to preempt any bullying. “We accommodate kids who are awkward,” Childs told me.

They offer competitive and non-competitive games. Rather than throw aggressive athletes in with reluctant participants, the PE instructors at A.D. Henderson offer everyone the chance to choose between intense and relaxed play. Thus, kids who want to go hard at the game can compete against other gung-ho players, while those who prefer a relaxed and fun approach can participate with similarly mellow students. Childs said that the stigma around PE has persisted in part because the kids who relish gym class growing up are more apt to become physical education instructors as adults; they naturally assume that all kids enjoy aggressive play. More students will benefit from regular exercise if athletic departments find ways to reach kids who balk at competition.

“We don’t use fitness as a punishment,” Childs said. Sentencing the tardy student to three laps around the field won’t teach kids that exercise can be enjoyable. Students start moving as soon as they’ve changed clothes and teachers take attendance while kids walk the gym’s perimeter. Some kids use pedometers to measure their distance. At GALS, girls are taught that physical activity is central to life, and that anyone with a body is an athlete.

They focus on relationships. At Tuscarora, PE instructors strive to know the students personally. “They’re the most personable people in the building,” a 12^th grader there said. Students at GALS relish morning movement because the teachers participate with the girls. “We don’t just talk about it, we’re a part of it,” Worbetz said.

Linda Flanagan is the author of the forthcoming book, “Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports—and Why It Matters,” published by Penguin Random House.

Despite the growing body of evidence that shows how physical activity is essential for health, well-being and student engagement, high schools offer fewer opportunities for competition and play today than they did just a few years ago.

The Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program recently released the findings of its years-long study on high school sports. The report emerged from an extensive series of roundtable meetings with scores of experts in the field; data analysis on students, sports and high schools; and additional interviews to complete the picture.

Overall, a minority of kids are active in school through sports or physical education. The report included this data:

• On average, 38.8% of students in public schools played high school sports during 2017-18. The percentage was lower for kids in urban schools (32.6%) and higher among those in rural areas (42.2%). More high school boys (42.7%) than girls (35.1%) played sports.
• The number of kids who took part in physical education for one day a week or more has dropped precipitously since 1991. Just 35% of freshmen, 26% of sophomores, 22% of juniors and 20% of seniors engaged in PE in 2019. In 1991, the percentage of students by grade was much higher: 66%, 52%, 27% and 21%, respectively.
• Between 2011 and 2019, kids’ overall rate of physical activity fell: 29% of kids reported being active for an hour or more a day in 2011, versus 23% in 2019.
• The inverse was true of online activity. In 2009, just 25% of students reported spending three hours or more on their screens. That number had climbed to 46% ten years later.

The most surprising finding for Tom Farrey, who runs the Sports and Society Program, and who co-authored the report with Jon Solomon, is “that the supply of sports experiences provided by high schools doesn’t meet student demand.”

This “1970s model” of sports, as Farrey put it, is out of date for 2022. Kids want all kinds of athletic options, way beyond the standard menu of sports that schools typically provide—like football, basketball and track and field. Teenagers expressed enthusiasm for biking, yoga, strength-training and archery, among other activities, suggesting that more kids would participate in sports and PE if schools were open to expanding their options.

What also startled the study’s authors was the way small public and private schools often provide students no sports at all.

“The charter school movement has the lowest sports participation rate,” Farrey said. Some lack the resources to hire P.E. instructors or are short on infrastructure and space. Others define themselves strictly based on their academic purpose, making clear to families that sports are an outside-of-school endeavor.

Three broad reasons account for these trends: insufficient funding to cover the costs of athletic programs; national policy initiatives that shrunk physical education; and a dearth of insight on the part of schools on fresh ways to keep kids moving. What struck Farrey most was the disconnect between what kids say they want most from their sports—fun, exercise, learning and social opportunities—and what high school programs tend to fixate on, which is winning championships. High schools, Farrey said, “are using the wrong scoreboard.” A successful sports program should be defined not by titles and wins but by the number of students who are active at school.

The Aspen study identified eight overarching strategies that high school leaders can take to escape the 70’s model and invigorate their sports programs.

1. Coordinate the school’s sports program with its overall mission, so that the default goal for most school teams—winning championships—doesn’t crowd out larger educational purposes.
2. Keep on top of students’ athletic interests with regular surveys, then adjust sports options accordingly.
3. Work with every student to create a tailored activity plan that includes their interests, athletic experience, history of injuries and outside sports commitments as a way to formalize and elevate the role of physical activity in school.
4. Think beyond traditional team sports and offer kids intramurals and club teams, which are less expensive and more inclusive.
5. Ally with community groups like YMCAs and Boys & Girls Clubs to make up for limited space at school.
6. Expand the education requirements for coaches beyond the basic certification. Train them regularly in how to run healthy and positive sports programs.
7. To ensure student safety, have a qualified athletic trainer on staff or available when needed.
8. Evaluate teams using tangible metrics beyond wins and losses to determine their effectiveness.

What does Farrey, who has examined youth sports from all angles for more than a decade, think educators need to take away from this report? “They have a responsibility to give all students in the school, not just varsity athletes, the opportunity to play on teams,” he said. Sports shouldn’t be considered an add-on, or a “nice-to-have” option. Rather, they need to be regarded as an indispensable piece of a sound high school education.

State-based preschool programs suffered big drops in enrollment and state funding in the teeth of the pandemic, according to an annual review by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University. If there is good news in the report, it’s that, during the 2020-2021 school year, federal relief money filled the hole left by states’ spending cuts.

“There is no time to waste. State-funded programs desperately need the resources to address pervasive problems in access to high-quality early learning and to support teachers,” says Allison Friedman-Krauss, NIEER assistant research professor and the parent of a preschooler.

NIEER has been releasing its annual State of Preschool report for two decades now, and this year’s edition, looking at the 2020-2021 school year, offers a remarkable, albeit dated, snapshot of the pandemic’s impact on preschool in the U.S.

The review is a blizzard of swirling data points, so we thought we’d start by handpicking a few of the most compelling numbers.

Pre-K enrollment declined for the first time in 20 years

According to the report, nearly 300,000 fewer children were enrolled in preschool during the 2020-2021 school year compared to 2019-2020 – an 18% drop. Given the timeframe, researchers attribute the drop largely to pandemic-driven school closures and the challenges of providing preschool remotely. On average, states wound up serving less than 30% of all 4-year-olds. The news was worse for 3-year-olds: States served less than 5%.

“The pandemic wiped out a decade of progress increasing enrollment in state-funded preschool programs,” the report warns.

Some states cut funding, but Congress plugged the gap

States spent roughly $9 billionon pre-K during the 2020-2021 school year – an inflation-adjusted decrease of $254 million compared to the previous year and “the largest decline in funding since the Great Recession,” according to the report.

Now the good news: The federal government provided roughly $440 million in preschool pandemic relief that states were able to use to more than offset that $254 million drop.

States spent $5,867 per child, on average, a number that NIEER says “has not improved appreciably in two decades” after adjusting for inflation.

One caveat: This is an estimate, based not on programs’ actual enrollment but on capacity. That’s because with funding largely flat overall but enrollment significantly down, states actually spent more than $7,000 per child. But NIEER says measuring programs’ spending based on capacity last year, instead of actual enrollment, is a more accurate comparison to previous years.

Similarly, the report notes that, overall, state spending on preschool has more than doubled over the last two decades, from $4.1 billion in 2002 to roughly $9 billion in 2021. But when you slice the data another way, looking at state dollars per child, spending has been remarkably flat.

“I can tell you, preschool matters,” said U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on a Monday call with reporters. “Preschool should be available for everyone, but right now it’s not. We made some strides as a nation, but we still have a long way to go.”

Low-income families were hit hardest

Perhaps the most worrying data in the report come from parent surveys that capture the pandemic’s impact on preschool enrollment based on family income.

Before the pandemic, nearly half of low-income children, 47%, were enrolled in some kind of preschool. By fall of 2021, though, that number had dipped to 31%. By comparison, before the pandemic, 62% of children from families with incomes above $25,000 were enrolled in preschool, and, though that number likewise dropped, by fall 2021 it had returned to 58%.

In six states, enrollment dropped by more than 30%

The report includes a color-coded map showing which states suffered the greatest drops in preschool enrollment: Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Kentucky and Nevada.

Interestingly, half a dozen states saw enrollment increases: Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island and Washington.

Some states were close to universal pre-K before the pandemic

When you combine state preschool, special education and federally funded Head Start programs, NIEER found six states, plus Washington, D.C., were serving at least 70% of their 4-year-olds before the pandemic began: Florida, Iowa, Oklahoma, Vermont, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Only D.C. continued to serve more than 70% of 4-year-olds in 2020-2021.

Idaho, Indiana, Montana, New Hampshire, South Dakota and Wyoming did not offer a public preschool program during the 2020-2021 school year.

Enough about quantity, what about quality?

NIEER’s annual review isn’t just about enrollment and funding; it’s also about quality control. Researchers evaluate every state using 10 benchmarks of quality, including whether they have early learning standards, small class sizes and well-trained teachers.

Just five state programs scored a perfect 10 out of 10: Alabama, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Hawaii’s Executive Office on Early Learning Public Prekindergarten Program and Michigan’s Great Start Readiness Program.

West Virginia is one of a handful of state programs that scored between nine and a 10.

“West Virginia has now become the diamond in the rough that everybody missed,” said the state’s Republican governor, Jim Justice, on a phone call with reporters discussing the NIEER report. West Virginia’s Universal Pre-K program operates in every county in the state and met nine of NIEER’s 10 quality benchmarks. Justice called investing in preschool “off-the-charts important.”

“I don’t care if you’re a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent – first and foremost, we’re Americans. And we need to be constantly doing the right thing for America,” Justice said.

At the other end of the spectrum, programs in Alaska, Florida and North Dakota met just two of NIEER’s 10 quality benchmarks.

About 40% of all children in state-funded preschool are enrolled in programs that meet fewer than half of NIEER’s quality standards.

Whatever happened to President Biden’s big preschool plan?

NIEER’s review lands at an awkward moment for the Biden administration. The president is an outspoken champion of universal preschool and made the idea a central theme of his Build Back Better agenda, pledging $10 billion over the next two years to ramp up states’ pre-K capacity. That legislation has been stalled for months in the Senate, though Biden did also ask for additional pre-K funding in his 2023 budget proposal.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the in-person school days that once felt normal can feel totally draining for many educators. 

That feeling comes from the challenges of motivating students after two years of disrupted schooling, as well as the toll the pandemic has taken on educators and their families. And it’s all layered on top of an already demanding job. 

“I just feel like a whole mountain is on top of me,” said a special education teacher in Arizona, whose name KQED is not revealing due to concerns about retaliation.

The overwhelm is widespread. Across the country, teachers have said they feel like they are drowning, and many are considering quitting. But at Phoenix Union High School District, where this teacher works, she can access a resource that’s not so common: mental health support for teachers on campus. Last year the school district hired two licensed professional counselors specifically to serve its  4,000 teachers and staff members. These wellness specialists meet with employees on-site, where they offer an empathetic ear, teach strategies for stress reduction and conflict management and make referrals for additional support.

“We come to you. It’s not something where you have to interrupt your workday in order to get your needs met,” said Erika Collins-Frazier, one of the wellness specialists. That model, she said, “changes the access, which means more people are going to reach out when they need help.”

Dreading the alarm

Before the pandemic, the special education teacher I spoke with usually woke up excited for the school day. “I had joy in my heart and soul. I would think of all of the things that I had on my to-do list, but I had the energy to get through each of the items that I needed to accomplish,” she said. This past fall, that feeling morphed into dread. Difficulties at school were compounded by personal challenges and the responsibilities of motherhood. When her alarm went off, she’d think, “No, five more hours, please.”

In late October, at the suggestion of a colleague, she reached out to Phoenix Union’s wellness specialists. One of them, Cailene Pisciotta, responded “super quickly” and the pair scheduled an appointment for the end of a school day.

From the start of the school year through mid-March, Collins-Frazier and Pisciotta met with 208 teachers, administrators and staff members for a total of 438 individual counseling sessions, typically lasting an hour. They’d seen staff at every one of Phoenix Union’s 21 school sites. 

The counselors said the most common reasons that employees contacted them were grief, depression, anxiety, challenges with some student behaviors and fatigue from the uncertainties wrought by COVID-19. When asked how they respond to those stressors, Collins-Frazier and Pisciotta replied in unison: “validation.” Teaching during a pandemic is scary. It’s overwhelming. And teachers need to hear that acknowledged “because what they’re going through is so real,” Pisciotta said.

The teacher I spoke with said she first contacted the counselors because of marital challenges but ended up talking about tension caused by differences in classroom management styles between her and her co-teacher. Pisciotta helped her practice articulating her feelings with “I” statements, which led to a three-hour conversation between the two teachers about how to better support each other.

“I think now we’re connecting more in every way, like personally and professionally,” she said after her meetings with Pisciotta. “And that tension has started to go down, which has been a sigh of relief now because now I feel better about coming to work.”

In addition to individual sessions, the wellness specialists lead workshops on self-care practices, such as mindfulness. What they don’t do is crisis intervention or long-term treatment. If an employee needs more support after a few sessions, Collins-Frazier and Pisciotta refer them to an external provider. They’ve done a lot of outreach to find providers who can accept new clients and the district’s insurance, which can make a big difference when long wait times for mental health services are the norm.

“We are building a little network of people that are willing to jump in and help,” said Collins-Frazier.

“Let’s start loving our people”

Collins-Frazier and Pisciotta were hired in a time of heightened need for mental health support because of coronavirus, but the idea for their positions originated earlier, according to Phoenix Union Superintendent Chad Gestson. “We had an initial discussion right before the pandemic about, you know, if we’re investing so much money into the mental health and wraparound services of our 30,000 teenagers, why are we not doing the same thing for our 4,000 employees?” he said.

So amid school closures in spring 2020, Gestson proposed to the governing board that the district create up to three full-time wellness positions, funded out of the regular operations budget. The board approved that plan. That was the start of the vision, not the end. In recent months, Gestson said, he and his team got approval for two wellness manager positions — one to oversee the social-emotional programs, and another to oversee physical wellness initiatives for staff. Those positions will be funded with money from the district’s medical insurance trust and its medical provider.

Gestson said the program is being built out with a “ready, fire, aim” approach — a term from the start-up world that suggests it’s better to start with something and adjust, rather than spending years planning. “When we launched this, it was just like, ‘let’s start loving our people,’” the superintendent said. In addition to adding manager positions, his team is still figuring out the parameters of the existing roles. For instance, what does wellness for the wellness specialists look like? When are they not on call? Pisciotta said setting the same kind of boundaries she encourages teachers to set has taken conscious effort.

Administrators also are still figuring out how to evaluate the program’s success. Gestson said the numbers of employees requesting services, exiting services and being referred for additional support will be part of the equation, as will employee retention rates and an annual wellness survey that predates the creation of the positions.

But the anecdotal evidence of the benefits may be the most powerful. For example, Gestson said he’d received phone calls from two Phoenix Union administrators who told him that talking with the wellness specialists had been transformational for their mental health.

“They realize you’re not just a teacher”

The special education teacher I spoke with also expressed gratitude for the service. “It’s just so awesome that, you know, we’re already struggling enough, and now this free, incredible resource just comes right to me, and I can do it on my prep period.”

It’s not a cure-all, of course. During winter break, she felt dread rising again at the thought of school. After returning in January, though, the honest communication she’d started to have with her co-teacher started to pay off in their classroom. She said that by leaning into and trusting each other more, they’ve been better able to handle student behaviors and target their instruction. “I think we’re finally getting to some of the kids. So I’ve seen more success, maybe the last two weeks than I have before that this year,” she said in February.

Meeting with Pisciotta also inspired her to prioritize her own needs more. For example, she started reading novels during her students’ silent reading time, bringing her back to her childhood identity as a bookworm. “I always tend to put everyone else in front of myself, and Cailene’s taught me how to be more aware of that,” she said.

“What I love about the program is they realize that you’re not just a teacher, that you’re a human and you have all these other things in your life.”