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Madison looks to start the 2021-22 school year with a focus on student mental health

Wisconsin State Journal - 5/30/2021

May 30—The Madison School District will start the upcoming school year with renewed emphasis on student mental health and wellness as Wisconsin continues on its path toward recovery amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kristen Guetschow, the mental health coordinator for the district, said she believes academic progress and social-emotional learning go hand in hand, a philosophy that will be emphasized as the administration plans for the new school year.

"In some ways this is a universal experience so we really need to think about how we're supporting student mental health and wellness for all students," Guetschow said. The district will focus on "building community, building from a place of relationships, and directly teaching social-emotional learning skills."

Federal Elementary & Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) II funding, as well as a grant from Dane County, will be used to bolster long-standing mental health programs and on-site therapy and to hire two temporary "mental health navigators" who will focus on supporting social and emotional wellness for students and families as they start the 2021-22 school year. Emphasis will also be placed on culturally relevant support for students.

"It's been a time where there's been other pandemics, with the awakening over racial inequalities and some real trauma that people have seen and experienced related to other parts of their world as well," Guetschow said.

The district's Student Senate played an active role in providing feedback to the administration regarding access for students to mental health support — many students weren't aware of support services offered by the district during the pandemic.

A main goal of the administration in the upcoming year is to make sure teachers, students and families know how to access new and existing mental health and wellness resources while making sure students feel safe at school.

"The more we have a strong universal support and safety for students, the less that we have to individually support each student with more intensive mental health needs," Guetschow said.

Middle and high school students across the state reported experiencing high or increasing levels of stress, anxiety and depression during the pandemic, and, for some students, COVID-19 made existing mental health challenges even worse, according to a study by the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service.

Sharon Belton, principal investigator on the report which examined the effect of COVID-19 on student mental health across the state, said many of the students described experiencing significant challenges with their learning environment, whether online, hybrid or in-person, which worsened new or increased mental health challenges.

"Even kids that were learning in-person experienced challenges with feeling more disconnected from their friends because they would have to maintain social distancing at school," Belton said.

Access to teachers and help during assignments was another contributing factor to increased mental health challenges, but students were explicit in not blaming their instructors because they understood the difficult circumstances educators were working through, according to the study.

"It's like a perfect storm of factors that came together over the last year to really make it challenging for a lot of kids," Belton said. "At the same time, we also noticed that kids had limited awareness of resources to help them with mental health-related concerns."

Most high school students in the study said they would seek out support from friends or parents, but it was unclear if those peers or parents had the tools necessary to effectively help students with mental health struggles. Most of the students commented that their schools had a counselor, but many said they thought the counselor was too busy or overwhelmed to help them. Students also noted stigma surrounding mental health challenges as one of the main reasons they did not seek help.

Despite the mental health challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Belton saw a silver lining in student responses.

"While there were significant challenges that students described over the past year, there were many, many examples that students cited that demonstrated their resiliency," Belton said. "Despite the challenges, they found a lot of reasons to be positive and developed a lot of new coping skills."

The vast majority of the middle and high school students who participated in the study were learning through some form of online-only instruction. The focus group included students from rural, suburban and urban districts across the state. Of the high school students who participated, 77% identified as female, 20% identified as male, 2% identified as nonbinary, and 1% preferred to self-describe; 39% of the students were on a free or reduced lunch plan; and 58% were white, 17% were Asian, 10% were African American, and 8% were Hispanic or American Indian.

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