Sebastian Ponder-Freeman is a rising senior in Chicago Public Schools with plans to go to a small liberal arts college next year. His future seemed more tentative a couple of years ago, when all his interactions with his teachers, counselors and classmates were virtual.
“More in-person time with teachers and peers, more in-person college advising and test support, more support to talk and think about next steps, more rigorous classes, just getting back into school – all those have been good,” says his mother, Paige Ponder. “He’s ready to launch.”
Three and a half years after the pandemic halted in-classroom education, scrambling the worlds of students throughout the country, parents are seeing a rebound in their children’s mental health. As the new school year starts, parents are reporting that their kids are improving academically, too.
Children need mental health and academic support
This is encouraging news, given the youth mental health crisis our nation has experienced this decade. Although the pandemic clearly set students back, the scars might not be permanent. Kids, it turns out, are resilient.
It’s likely, however, that the nation’s 55 million K-12 public and private school students could be doing even better if every school was able to provide them sufficient mental health and academic support.
COVID-19’s “seismic effect on communities across the country” especially affected our young people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey, an ongoing data collection. “More than 1 in 3 high school students experienced poor mental health during the pandemic and nearly half of students felt persistently sad or hopeless.”
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In 2021, in fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health.
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy followed with an advisory on the youth mental health crisis.
A new Harris Poll of parents and legal guardians of school-age children confirms the pandemic’s widespread impact. Roughly a third of respondents say their child’s emotional health and behavioral health suffered because of the pandemic, while 43% say it hurt their child’s social development.
At the same time, though, almost half of all parents say their child’s emotional, behavioral, social and physical health has improved over the past year. Despite startling declines in standardized test scores, almost half also say their child’s academic health is better, while only 6% say it’s worse.
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The recovery is more profound among students of color, with more than half of these parents judging their child’s mental (e.g., emotional, behavioral) and academic health to be better today across the board than it was a year ago. That’s fully 9 to 13 percentage points greater than white parents’ assessments.
Before we take a victory lap, we need to note that 1 in 10 parents say their school-age children are worse off today – emotionally, behaviorally and socially – than they were at the beginning of the 2022-23 school year. The percentages were slightly higher for students of color.
Kara Korte is the mother of three children. She says that during depths of the pandemic, when they were in kindergarten, third grade and sixth grade in Chicago Public Schools, all three were affected, academically and socially, by their isolation.
“They’ve definitely recovered,” she says, “though I think they’re in a different place.”
Parents deserve credit for being there for their kids. School counselors do, too. School counselors often are the first line of defense when students experience mental health needs, which pose barriers to learning and development.
Without planned intervention for students exhibiting early-warning signs, setbacks in academic, career and social/emotional development can result during later school years and even into adulthood.
Parents and caregivers agree children need support at school. Overall, 86% at least somewhat agree that schools should be a resource for parents, families and students, and almost 60% are at least somewhat satisfied with the level of support related to emotional or behavioral health their child receives at school versus the 1 in 6 who are dissatisfied.
Further, three-quarters at least somewhat agree that they trust their child’s school to share information about concerning behaviors displayed by their child.
Unfortunately, significant portions of Harris Poll respondents indicate that mental and physical wellness resources are lacking at their child’s school: Half report that their schools provide neither academic/career counseling nor mental health counseling.
The American School Counselor Association recommends a ratio of 250 students per one school counselor. The national ratio, while inching closer to that level, was 408 to 1 in the 2021-22 academic year (the most-recent for which data is available) and can be as high as 787 to 1 for K-8 students.
Families and school counselors know what kids need to succeed. Let’s let both do their jobs. The wounds of the pandemic are healing as students return to their classrooms, but children still require care.
Jill Cook is the executive director of the American School Counselor Association. Will Johnson is the chief executive of The Harris Poll.
