Schools can play an important role in promoting children’s mental health, but they can’t do so without more resources, argues PDK’s CEO.
Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of worried talk about young people’s mental health. Researchers keep warning that social media has adverse effects on adolescents’ coping skills. News programs keep reporting on elevated suicide rates among teen girls. And everywhere, schools now seem to be mobilizing to support traumatized students.
These issues should concern every educator and parent, and I agree that schools should do whatever they can to assess students’ mental health needs and ensure their overall well-being. But at the same time, I find myself wondering whether we’re getting the whole story. Perhaps we’ve been too quick to react to kids’ needs as they appear, without stopping to ask why they’re suffering in the first place. Perhaps we’ve rushed to treat their symptoms, rather than identifying and addressing the varied reasons for their distress.
For starters, it’s important to recognize that children whose behaviors are quite similar may be afflicted by very different mental health problems. Recently, “trauma-informed care” has become a popular buzz-phrase among educators, suggesting that great numbers of students — particularly those growing up in impoverished neighborhoods — require a certain kind of specialized and intensive support. But not all students from “underprivileged” backgrounds are traumatized, and not all traumas are the same. It’s true that many U.S. kids who grow up in abject poverty experience food insecurity, housing instability, and fear of neighborhood violence. Other kids, however, may have fled warfare in another country and experienced a dangerous journey to America. Are these traumatic experiences similar, or should they be addressed in different ways? Is trauma-informed care a one-size-fits-all approach, or does it have to be modified and tailored to children’s specific experiences?
Similarly, the mental health needs of middle-class students are far more varied than we might think. Given that more affluent children tend to have sufficient food, secure housing, and relatively safe environments, we might assume they suffer from their own characteristic set of woes: overattachment to social media, exclusion, overscheduling, and intense competition. But in fact, our assumptions are often inaccurate. For instance, not all students who receive free and reduced-price meals live in abject poverty and unstable homes. And, as Christina Cross (2019) recently described in the New York Times, not all two-parent households are stable and supportive, and not all single parents are overwhelmed or neglectful. ZIP codes alone don’t reveal children’s destinies, nor do they predict which kids will muster the resilience they need to succeed in school. Some kids from fancy neighborhoods are very much in need of trauma-informed care.
Moreover, when educators do assess students’ mental health status correctly, they don’t necessarily support them in ways that get at the underlying problems. For instance, having discovered that a lot of their affluent students are overscheduled, stressed out about grades, and anxious about college applications, schools often respond by adding mindfulness to the curriculum or offering yoga as an option for gym class. But if the school has created an environment in which students must compete ruthlessly for social and academic status, then what good does it do to pause, once a week, to tell those students to relax? Doesn’t that just put the locus of responsibility on children to manage the effects of problems that we adults have created?
Invest in expertise
If educators are going to try to address students’ mental health needs — and I think they should — then they will have to be extremely careful to identify those needs correctly. At the same time, they should resist the temptation to see every personality quirk or classroom outburst as a sign that a child has a mental disorder or should be medicated. If students are acting out, for example, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something wrong with them — they may very well be responding to an unhealthy school culture, bullying by classmates, or an unkind teacher.
I don’t see how schools can make serious efforts to address students’ mental health needs unless policy makers are willing to make significant new investments in staff and other resources.
In short, teachers and staff must get to know their individual students, rather than making assumptions about them based on their demographic features or a couple of teachers’ reports about their behavior. The challenge, though, is that it takes time and expertise to build relationships with students and their families, learn their stories, and assess their mental health needs. Most schools simply haven’t been set up to do that kind of extensive personal outreach. Administrators are tasked with carrying out bureaucratic and managerial functions; they rarely have time or training to conduct home visits or diagnostic interviews. And the personnel who are best equipped to do this work — school psychologists, social workers, and community liaisons — tend to be stretched thin, where they exist at all.
Frankly, then, I don’t see how schools can make serious efforts to address students’ mental health needs unless policy makers are willing to make significant new investments in staff and other resources. For example, districts will have to create new early-warning indicators and scale up existing wraparound services, both through partnerships with community agencies and the development of school-based clinics and counseling programs. They’ll also need to perform asset mapping of community services to determine their proximity to schools, and they’ll have to coordinate with agencies to provide case management to students and families.
Again, though, assessing and treating students’ mental health needs is only half the challenge. Schools also need to create environments in which young people feel safe and supported — or, at least, environments that don’t make their mental health problems any worse. For instance, that likely means dialing back on the ranking and sorting of students. For a generation, we’ve focused on standardized tests as the sole measure of our collective success. And to some extent, such measures have their place. However, we have to offer young people other ways to understand their value, beyond their grade point averages, their Advanced Placement credits, or their SAT scores.
Similarly, if we want to create an environment that doesn’t cause undue anguish and stress, then we should consider putting an end to punitive disciplinary policies, refraining from practices that shame students (such as the use of progress charts that show which students have fallen behind), and making proactive efforts to establish healthy norms for interpersonal behavior, both in person and online. In short, if we truly care about the mental health of our students, then we will have to invest in the professional capacity to build relationships with them, assess their needs, provide them with appropriate services, make sure that our school culture and practices don’t make things worse, and — perhaps most important — help them see the purpose of school and the joy that can come from learning.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joshua P. Starr
Joshua P. Starr is the managing partner at the International Center for Leadership in Education, a division of HMH, based in Boston, MA. He is the author of Equity-based Leadership: Leveraging Complexity to Transform School Systems.
