A looming crisis for our schools

Schools on Long Island are closed for the summer, but administrators still have homework. As the coronavirus pandemic exacerbates an ongoing adolescent mental health crisis, schools must prepare to meet the mental health needs of their students come September.

The sad truth is that a mental health crisis affecting young people existed before the pandemic began. One in five adolescents has a diagnosable mental health issue, but only half receive any treatment. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for people under the age of 24. The suicide rate for children ages 10-24 increased by 56% from 2007 to 2017.

With added stressors like COVID-19, economic recession, widespread protests, and months without social interaction, the headlines of the last few months could be mistaken for the “Trauma Types” checklist from the National Childhood Traumatic Stress Network. Recent events are especially concerning because trauma, especially in childhood, has been shown to increase the risk of long-term mental health issues.

Schools must help tackle this looming crisis because they represent the one institution that virtually all adolescents interact with every day. Schools began to take on mental health in part because they could offer a centralized point of care. Research suggests that schools are the most common provider of mental health services for youth. Also, 50% of all mental illness cases begin before age 14; 75% begin before age 24. This means that for students who are going to have a mental illness at some point in their lives, the illness will most likely be apparent while they are still in the school system. Schools have the opportunity to treat students early on and have the structures in place to connect students to services.

But the pandemic has fundamentally changed the way schools provide students with mental health resources. The process usually begins when a teacher identifies concerning behavior in a student like missing class often, failing to hand in an assignment, or letting grades slip. Virtual learning makes it more difficult to notice such behavior with little face-to-face time, muted microphones, and pass-fail assignments.

This means that not only is it likely more students need mental health resources, but also it is more difficult to identify those students in need.

The exact nature of education in September is still unknown. On Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that New York City schools would only partially reopen. On the same day, President Donald Trump threatened to cut federal funding to schools that did not completely reopen in the fall. 

Even if schools are in-person in September, administrators need to expand procedures to make up for six months of interrupted services during a traumatic time. If schools remain online, even greater effort is needed to build out virtual processes to help students. These plans need to detail how schools will communicate with students, identify possible cases, and connect students to services. For help, the National Childhood Traumatic Stress Network has produced guidelines for creating trauma-informed schools during COVID-19.

Parents have a role to play as well. They can demand answers from their local school boards and principals. They can also learn how to better care for their children’s mental health needs. The National Association of School Psychologists has a guide for talking to children about the coronavirus, and the National Alliance for Mental Illness has a guide for identifying the warning signs of mental illness. Together, we can rise to the occasion and protect our young people, but the first step is to acknowledge the expanding crisis already in our midst.

Aidan Brown of Garden City holds a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Virginia.