It has been more than a month since New York City students returned to classrooms, and, for many, the reunion with friends and return to routine has been a joyful relief. But educators said a number of students are also struggling.
Some schools are reporting a spike in confrontations, with one middle school administrator saying there have been more fights in the past month than there usually are in a year. A teacher in charge of restorative justice at a high school said he has overseen 70 peer mediations since September.
“Across the board there’s a quickness to agitation, less patience, kids are more easily overwhelmed,” said Jenna Klorfein, a counselor at Lower East Side Prep, a transfer high school that serves kids up to age 21 who need to make up credits in order to graduate. “I would attribute some of that to not being used to socializing with other students and not being used to the routine of a school schedule.”
The New York City Department of Education has promised a $147 million investment in mental health resources to support students, including an increase in social workers to ensure that each school has at least one, and a universal mental health screening. But even with more counselors onsite, educators said they are having trouble meeting students’ needs. While they said the new screening could be useful, it requires 13 hours of training for each school’s designated point person, time some educators said could be better spent counseling kids.
A “Historic Expansion” of Mental Health Support at School
For the first time, the city is rolling out a mental health screening to assess all students from kindergarten through 12th grade. Schools received the materials earlier this month and are set to administer the 10-minute questionnaire by November 12th. The $18 million Devereaux Student Strengths Assessment (DESSA) asks questions about students’ confidence, ability to complete tasks, and relationships to classmates, among others. It is to be filled out by the adults who know students best, usually the teacher. Teachers will use the results to direct classroom discussions and activities to help students process feelings, and students who need additional support will be referred to counselors. Parents can also opt out if they do not want their children to participate.
“Our message to children, parents, and guardians is clear: we will heal our city together,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said trumpeting the initiatives in April.
Some schools have used the DESSA screening before. “It’s just a really powerful tool for helping to understand students’ behavior in much more specific ways,” said Emily Paige, principal at the Urban Assembly Unison School, a middle school in Brooklyn. “It gives you a really specific set of actions that you can implement during class time.”
The city has also increased its ranks of social workers and counselors substantially, pledging to hire 600 more for this academic year, although the ratio of kids to counselors system-wide is still around 1-to-190.
Dr. Jessica Chock-Goldman, director of clinical services at Bard High School Early College of Manhattan, praised the influx of social workers and increased emphasis on students’ mental health, calling it a “night and day” difference from when she began working in schools a decade ago.
But Anna Waters, assistant principal at the Highbridge Green School, a middle school in the Bronx, questioned the value of the new screener, and said there are still far too few workers in schools. “I could tell you right now who needs help,” she said. “I don’t need a screener. I need an army of mental health professionals.”
“It’s almost like kids don’t have the skills to take a breath.”
For some students, the transition back to school has been surprisingly smooth. But counselors at many middle and high schools said tempers are flaring. Sara Kliger, community school director with Counseling In Schools, works with middle schoolers in Queens. She said there have been six suspensions at her school over the past two weeks, mostly for fights between students on and off campus. “It’s never happened this early in the school year,” she said of the suspensions.
Kliger said kids are having trouble interacting with each other face-to-face, after being able to log off whenever they got overwhelmed last year. Some are confronting each other about conflicts that simmered virtually over the course of remote learning. “It’s almost like kids don’t have the skills to take a breath,” she said. “It goes from 0 to 100 and they storm out of the classroom.”
Waters said her middle school’s incoming sixth graders are acting more like fourth graders. “They don’t know how to do school, and have trouble keeping their hands to themselves,” she said.
The seventh and eighth graders have not had the chance to develop the trusting relationships with adults they usually have at this point, she added, so they are less likely to seek help defusing conflicts. She said more students are in crisis, and there have been more confrontations this fall than there typically are through June.
Nathaniel Styer, an education department spokesperson, said that “serious incidents” between students were down substantially in September, compared to September 2019.
But administrators said many conflicts that fall short of physical fights can be equally disruptive as students misread social cues or behave outside classroom norms.
Paige, at the Brooklyn middle school, described a student who has been laughing loudly in class, making it hard for his classmates to concentrate. “He has been frustrated with teachers correcting his behavior,” she said. “He’s becoming argumentative because he doesn’t understand why he’s being corrected.” Paige recently called the student to her office, where he began sobbing. “He has a lot going on at home, a family member with long COVID.”
“What they feel is the larger ominous pressure to be normal,” Paige said of her students. “It’s this cultural messaging that we have to accelerate their academics. Everybody is under an incredible amount of pressure.”
Myles Maldonado, a senior at Harvest Collegiate High School in Manhattan, said he sometimes has trouble getting out of bed. “I struggled with depression for a while and it got a whole lot worse being locked down,” he said. “I’m still struggling.” But he said he has been “proactive” by seeking out help from counselors in school and therapists outside. Some of his friends have had a harder time, he said, and several have been hospitalized for mental health treatment.
“If you respect children and trust them, they’ll catch up”
Among younger children, educators and psychologists report a range of responses.
“For many children coming back to a routine has been really good,” said Tovah Klein, associate professor of psychology at Barnard College. “It's gotten them off of screens, and that's helping.”
But on the flip side, kindergarteners, first graders, and even second graders are learning how to be in school for the first time, and Klein said some are grappling with the demands of a classroom: “Whether it’s listening to a teacher or waiting your turn or just managing yourself in a group all day long, it’s a lot for them,” she said. “There are more meltdowns, maybe from children who are a little bit older than we might expect.”
Klein said educators should be comfortable adjusting their expectations, even if that means slowing down their lesson plans. “I think for many schools teachers are being told the children have to be on grade level, and the children can't be right now,” she said. “I think what we have to do is shift and say everybody is living through a pandemic. This is not necessarily behind. This is where they're supposed to be because of what they've been through. If you respect children, and trust them, they'll catch up.”
Diamond Graham, principal at KIPP Elements Primary School, a charter school serving kindergarten through second grade in the Bronx, said students are largely thrilled to be back in school, but need extra help relating to their classmates. “Some kids are really good at communicating with the adults around them,” she said. “We’re working on communicating with kids their age, sharing, taking turns. It’s something we do every year with kindergarteners, but we’re revisiting it with second graders this year.”
KIPP second grader Jannatu Mohammed, 7, said she is happy to be back at school, though she is still getting used to the classroom. “I haven’t followed directions,” she said. “I haven’t written on school paper before.”
Even speaking up in class has been a challenge.
“Sometimes I think I have to go on the computer and press the unmute button,” she said. “Then I stop and raise my hand.”
