Fort Worth schools expect COVID-19 stress among students. Here’s how they will help.
Cynthia Cano often finds her granddaughter Stevie anxious and distracted from her online classes when she checks in on her during the day.
Stevie, a second-grader at North Hi Mount Elementary School, never seems to have a problem following what’s going on in class, Cano said, but she doesn’t want to do the work.
Besides Stevie, Cano has three other grandchildren living with her — two fourth-graders and an eighth-grader.
When Fort Worth ISD began online classes last month, her grandchildren were excited, she said. But after a few weeks, they began to get frustrated, Cano said. They knew they had to get their work done on time, and problems with their Chromebooks or navigating the online classes made it hard to do so. And the youngest children didn’t understand why they couldn’t go back to school in person, she said.
“It really has affected the school year,” Cano said. “This year just hasn’t panned out as it should.”
Fort Worth ISD began bringing some groups of students back to school in person Oct. 5. As more students return to school, counselors are preparing to help them deal with the heightened stress and anxiety many are feeling not only as a result of COVID-19, but from unrest over police violence against Black people. On top of those issues are the ordinary stresses and anxieties of school and trying to make sense of the world, said Kathryn Everest, the district’s director of counseling services.
“It’s not just the pandemic,” she said.
Trauma affects many in Fort Worth schools
Mental health professionals are concerned about how school shutdowns affect students’ mental health. Last month, Cook Children’s Medical Center reported an “alarming” uptick in the number of adolescents being admitted to the hospital following suicide attempts. Not all of those attempts were related to COVID-19 — about 30% of the children admitted reported having issues with sexual identity and gender — but hospital officials said children’s feelings of hopelessness about returning to normal life were a factor, as well.
Even before the pandemic, there was a growing focus in the district on how to recognize and manage the trauma students had experienced, Everest said. Many of the district’s students come from “hard places,” she said — backgrounds where trauma was a factor even before the pandemic began, she said. About 84% of the district’s students are economically disadvantaged, according to state data.
Trauma is an emotional response to deeply distressing events or severe stress. It can cause volatile emotions, strained relationships and persistent feelings of sadness, isolation or hopelessness.
The district plans to send needs assessments to families to get a better idea of how the events of the past six months have affected students and what they need in terms of social and emotional support, Everest said. The questionnaire will ask how students have been affected by COVID-19 and the protests against police violence against Black people.
“We don’t want to assume that everybody is impacted, and we don’t want to assume that nobody is,” she said.
It’s critical for schools to help students process those difficult emotions so they can learn and grow, Everest said. When people experience trauma, the amygdala — the part of the brain that triggers the fight-or-flight response — takes over, she said. That response makes it more difficult for students to study, reason and learn. People’s brains aren’t fully developed until they’re 25 years old, and many school-aged children don’t have the emotional coping skills they need to manage those feelings, she said. So the district is working to put strategies in place to help students deal with their emotions, she said.
One of those strategies is teaching mindfulness and self-management, Everest said. That can be as simple as reminding students to take a deep breath and calm themselves before they speak, she said. The district has also developed activities that teachers can use to help students develop social and emotional skills like understanding that other people are different from themselves and those differences don’t need to be a source of conflict.
Counselors are also coming up with creative ways to help students who feel anxious or stressed calm down and focus, Everest said. Some younger students who are anxious may have a hard time sitting still, she said, so counselors put together calming kits full of things they can stretch, pull and bend without making any noise. Something as simple as a pipe cleaner to bend and twist can help younger students take their minds off their worries and focus on their work, she said.
Counselors help students redirect anxiety
Lauren Vasquez, a counselor at Washington Heights Elementary School, is putting together bags of things like stress balls, stuffed animals and small books of calming strategies for teachers to hand out to students who need them. Each bag includes a Slinky so students can practice what Vasquez calls “Slinky breathing” — taking a deep, slow, deliberate breath while pulling the Slinky apart and exhaling slowly while pushing it back together.
Most years, teachers at Washington Heights have corners of their rooms where students can go to calm down if they feel frustrated or sad or need a quick break, Vasquez said. Those areas usually have calming tools like stuffed animals, pillows and stress balls. After they spend a few minutes in the calming area, students usually feel better and are ready to rejoin their classes.
But this year, teachers can’t create shared spaces or fill them with calming tools for entire classes to use because of the risk of spreading COVID-19, Vasquez said. At the same time, many students have heightened anxiety and need those strategies more than ever, she said. The bags are designed to give students access to some of those same tools in ways that don’t put them at greater risk of exposure to the virus, she said.
Vasquez has also had online conversations with parents about calming strategies like breathing techniques that both students and their parents can use at home. It’s important for parents to have those tools, too, Vasquez said, because if they have a hard time coping with the added stress of life during a pandemic, that stress will affect their children, as well. She also works with them on ways to build routines into their children’s days. Especially for children who attend virtual classes, those routines are an important way to bring stability into a chaotic time, she said.
Patricia Tamayo, a counselor at O.D. Wyatt High School, said it’s easier to keep in contact with her students this fall than it was last spring. Last year, it was a challenge to reach students during school shutdowns because they couldn’t stop by her office.
This year, Tamayo has virtual office hours to give students a chance to connect. Some students have things they want to talk through. Others just like seeing her in her office at school. It gives them a sense of normalcy, she said. Students drop in online from wherever they happen to be at the time. She’s seen some join a chat while they’re in line at McDonald’s and others while they’re standing in their bathrooms combing their hair.
“I’m seeing all kinds of different backgrounds,” she said.
Tamayo can tell that the school shutdowns have been hard for many of her students. But O.D. Wyatt students are survivors, she said. The majority of the school’s students are recent immigrants, many of them from families who live in a nearby apartment complex that Catholic Charities uses to settle refugee families. Many of the school’s homegrown students come from difficult circumstances, as well, she said.
Anxiety symptoms differ by age
The pandemic and the disruption of routines, rituals and social relationships has been stressful for many children, said Sharon Hoover, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and co-director of the National Center for School Mental Health. Many children have heightened anxiety, she said. Some have more serious issues like post-traumatic stress, she said.
Those issues may manifest themselves differently, depending on the age of the student, Hoover said. For younger children, outward signs may look like regression, she said. Students might cling to their parents or show signs of separation anxiety, she said. Younger students are also more likely to act out because their needs aren’t being met, she said.
Older students, those in middle school and high school, might be more likely to report having depression or anxiety, Hoover said. They might also appear withdrawn or not show up for classes at all, she said.
Hoover said she’s seen parents hold those mental health concerns up as an argument that school shutdowns are doing more harm than good. But she said it’s too simplistic to say that school closures, by themselves, have created heightened stress. The pandemic has brought about stress and anxiety to people of all ages and in all arenas of society, she said. School shutdowns likely contributed to that anxiety for some children and families, she said, but they aren’t the sole cause.
Returning students to school in the context of a pandemic could also create heightened fear and anxiety as students worry that they could get sick or bring the disease home to family members, Hoover said. That fear will only grow if students, teachers or staff test positive for the virus after schools reopen, she said.
“We know that across the board, we are experiencing heightened anxiety, stress, loss, grief, because we are in a global pandemic,” Hoover said. “But that doesn’t mean that we should all be returning to work and school in the same fashion.”
Even during remote learning, there are effective ways for schools to spot students who may have emotional problems, Hoover said. Some districts have trained teachers to spot the signs of anxiety or emotional distress, she said. Others screen students about whether they’ve experienced grief, loss, stress or anxiety as a result of COVID-19.
There’s a reasonable concern among some school officials that, if they ask students about social and emotional issues when they return to school, they’ll have to contend with a flood of students who report those issues, Hoover said. But if schools let those issues go unaddressed, it will affect those students’ ability to learn, she said.
Districts need to make sure their schools will give students a welcoming, positive environment to return to, Hoover said. That means attending to teachers’ emotional well-being, too, she said. Teachers are under an even greater amount of stress than usual, she said, and if that stress goes unmanaged, it could affect school climate. Districts need to make sure teachers feel supported and give them a venue to talk through those issues, she said.
As students return to school in person, districts need to work with them on how to cope with the stress and trauma they’ve experienced over the past several months. School counselors should talk to classes about identifying their feelings and strategies for dealing with them, she said.
Teachers take pressure off students
Cano, the North Hi Mount grandmother, said she’s been happy with how counselors and teachers have helped students deal with the frustrations and anxiety the shutdowns have caused. On the morning of Oct. 5, Cano watched as her youngest granddaughter’s teacher told her class that it was OK to take a break and step away from their online classes if they needed to. That message is important, Cano said, because it takes pressure off students when they don’t understand how to do everything right away.
Since the shutdowns began, Cano has been impressed with how everyone at her grandchildren’s schools has worked together. Things haven’t always gone smoothly, she said, but teachers and counselors have done their best in difficult circumstances. The same goes for students, she said.
“This is not something anyone wanted or expected to have to do,” Cano said. “It was given to us, and we’re working with what we have.”
Warning signs of trauma in children
The telltale signs of trauma in children vary for different age groups, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Here are some of the warning signs experts say could indicate trauma.
Preschool children
- Fear of separation from parents or caregivers
- Excessive screaming or crying
- Eating poorly and losing weight
- Nightmares
Elementary school children
- Becoming anxious or fearful
- Feeling guilt or shame
- Having a hard time concentrating
- Having difficulty sleeping
Middle and high school children
- Feeling depressed or alone
- Developing eating disorders or self-harming behaviors
- Beginning to abuse alcohol or drugs
- Becoming sexually active
This story was originally published October 8, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
