Remote school has
kids isolated and
stressed.

“I know that when I go into this classroom, I start this warmup; I know that I need to bring this; I know that I have lunch every day at 11:15.” Routines like these, he told Vox, are “so linked to middle–school students sense of safety”

But when school buildings closed due to the Covid–19 pandemic this spring, those routines were completely disrupted. And with the fall term beginning and the crisis still in full swing, students predictable days arent coming back anytime soon.This can have an effect on their learning — but it has a major impact on their mental health, too.

But when school buildings closed due to the Covid–19 pandemic this spring, those routines were completely disrupted. And with the fall term beginning and the crisis still in full swing, students predictable days arent coming back anytime soon.This can have an effect on their learning — but it has a major impact on their mental health, too.

Most students will be attending school either remotely or on a hybrid model, with some days in classrooms and some days at home. And even these new routines are still in flux, with some areas — including Needham, Massachusetts, where Guerriero teaches — delaying the start of in–person school due to concerns that aging school buildings simply aren’t ready to accommodate even a hybrid model.

Before Covid–19 hit, school was a constant in the lives of millions of American kids — a place they went to learn, play, eat lunch (and often breakfast), and socialize with their peers. The latter is key — in normal times, schooling by its very nature is a space for social interaction “and a place where we can connect and build these relationships,” Justina Schlund, director of field learning at the nonprofit CASEL: Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, told Vox.

But in the spring, with schools nationwide shifting to remote learning, kids lost that physical space to connect with each other and with teachers. And while educators were once able to create a supportive place for education in their classrooms, they suddenly had to rely on kids and families to construct such places at home.

Guerriero said. Without a teacher in the room to keep them on task, students have to rely much more heavily on executive functioning skills like self-control — which aren’t fully developed in middle schoolers to begin with. As a result, “they feel like they’re working harder, they feel lonelier, they feel like if they’re struggling with something, they’re the only one,” Guerriero said.

Kids who get mental and behavioral health services at school for disabilities or learning differences are also facing additional disruption. “All these professionals that normally connect with kids in person in school, now you’re over Zoom,” Guerriero said. “It’s just not the same.” This has particularly impacted districts with a higher percentage of low–income families, Vinson said.

Overall, the challenges of online education and the general isolation and stress of the pandemic could lead to a spike in mental health problems among kids. While nationwide data on the impact of thepandemic is still sparse, one study of students in China’s Hubei province, an early Covid-19 hot spot, found that 22.6 percent reported depression symptoms and 18.9 percent had symptoms of anxiety after about a month in lockdown. And in the US, a enters for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey conducted in June found an increase in anxiety and depression among adults since the pandemic began, NPR reported on Thursday. Experts are concerned about a possible uptick in suicides among teenagers and young adults, with one infour 18–to 24–year–olds telling the CDC they had “seriously considered” suicide in the last 30 days.

Anecdotally, Vinson saw an uptick in anxiety and sadness among her patients in the spring, as well as increases in psychotic symptoms among patients who already exhibited those before the pandemic. Now, “some families have been able to sort of re–equilibrate and find a new normal, and for those kids, some of them are doing better than they were in April or May,” Vinson said. In other cases — where a parent has lost a job, for example, or where lack of internet access makes online learning impossible — kids are doing even worse.

Despite these challenges, experts say, there are ways for schools, districts, and families to help kids through this unprecedented time. For Vinson, it’s important to start with making sure students’ most basic needs are met. “Kids’ nutritional status and having reliable, consistent access to food is really important in terms of how they do mentally,” she said. “School lunch and school breakfast in certain communities is something that families rely upon.”

Programs to continue providing meals while school buildings are closed, such as one launched by the Miami–Dade County school district in the spring, are crucial for kids’ mental as well as physical health. And to make sure kids without internet at home can still connect to their schools, programs like mobile wifi hot spots or in–person learning hubs can be helpful, Vinson said. The San Francisco school district, for example, has pledged to set up hubs serving 6,000 students, where they can get supervision and access to wifi if those aren’t available at home.

When it comes to the content of classes, many say that social and emotional learning — “learning who I am, my emotions, my identity, my values, and how that fits into the larger world,” according to Schlund —is more important than ever. In collaboration with other education groups, CASEL has put together a slate of recommendations for supporting students’ social and emotional learning during the pandemic that is being used by a number of school districts around the country, including those in Chicago and Baltimore.

The recommendations include strengthening relationships between schools and families, something the Cleveland school district did in the spring with a program to call every family to make sure kids had what they needed for remote school. They also include embedding opportunities for social and emotional learning in the remote school day — for example, by having students discuss current events and how they connect to their daily lives, and “using that discussion to help students think about what actions they can take to support themselves, their families, or their communities during this time,” Schlund said.

Schools can help students meet the challenges of pandemic schooling by taking care of their social needs as much as possible. The school where Guerriero teaches, for example, is organizing online clubs around nonacademic interests, like student leadership and spirit days. Schools also need to be thoughtful about how they manage transitions, like the shift from hybrid to fully remote if there are positive cases, because those transitions risk upsetting kids’ sense of predictability and making them feel alienated from school. “When they feel disconnected, it’s almost impossible to reconnect to them remotely,” Guerriero said.

Of course, for many families, school this year is as much about what goes on at home as what happens on Zoom. And parents can do a lot to support their kids’ mental health during a difficult time. “One of the things that’s really important is to have a good baseline of how your child functions,” so you can spot any problems early on, Vinson says. And even though families may be spending lots of time in the same physical space, parents should make sure “it’s quality, interactive time where they really do have your full attention and you have theirs, so you can have a sense of how you’re doing.”

Overall, experts and educators agree that while kids crave structure, they’re also often highly adaptable and resilient. And the transition to online schoo hasn’t been wholly negative — some kids prefer remote education, perhaps because they were bullied or ostracized in their classrooms, Vinson said.

But to help the kids who are struggling, and to support everyone’s ability to learn and heal, schools and families alike need to understand how deeply different this year is from what came before. Guerriero, for his part, might start his first class of the school year with some icebreakers — in the spring, “we’d do silly things like kids holding up a pet to a camera,” he said. But “my main message to them will be, you don’t have to know everything I’m telling you right now,” he said

I just want you to know that im going to

take care of you,

im going to be with you for the whole year, and if you have questions,

you can come and ask me