In 1998, I began my journey as an elementary teacher under the tutelage of my aunt and revered educator, Marva N. Collins. My mother was also a teacher, so I saw firsthand what it meant to be a passionate educator who is deeply committed to students. Their commitment and passion for teaching were the reasons why I chose this profession. After watching them devote time and energy to their craft, I entered the profession with enthusiasm and excitement, not knowing what the next 25 years would bring.
I wanted to become a teacher with a calming presence and a positive attitude — a teacher who could help all students succeed. Unfortunately, becoming the teacher I wanted to be has taken more energy than I thought it would.
After more than two decades in the classroom, supporting students facing intense challenges in their home lives and trying to keep up with the unrealistic expectations set by administrators, I’ve finally hit my breaking point and all the compassion I have for my students and my dedication to the field may not be enough to help me recover.
How It All Began
When I began my first position as an English language arts teacher on the north side of St. Louis, I remember walking into the building as books and computers were thrown out of the third-floor window. Next door, there was a halfway house filled with young men, some of whom were fathers to the students I would be teaching. I remember wondering, “What in the world am I committing myself to?” My four years in college studying to become an educator did not prepare me for what I encountered. I was coming to teach the masses, full of hope and determination – how quickly I had to change focus.
Once I entered the school building, a young man was being detained for his behavior. I asked the school officer if I could speak with him, and she reluctantly agreed. When I asked him his name and why he was behaving this way, he became immediately defensive, asserting that I would soon be run out of the school like the teachers before me.
I knew from watching my mother that you couldn’t put out a fire with fire, so I decided to take a gentler approach, reminding him that despite his resistance, I was there to provide support and understand his issue better. Eventually, he revealed that the teacher had asked him to read; when I asked if he knew how to read, he dropped his head while a tear rolled down his face. His admission made me emotional, but I quickly gathered myself and told him if he gave me the opportunity, I would help him learn how to read.
I could only imagine what it felt like for a 13-year-old boy to be in the eighth grade and unable to read. His behavior became an outlet for his anger but all he needed was someone to listen and acknowledge his pain. This ended up being the beginning of a beautiful relationship. For years, Eric had seen people quit and move him along without any care for his needs. I was the change and hope he needed, but I would soon learn there were so many more like him.
Unrealistic Expectations
I remember being so excited about my role as a teacher — the creativity I possessed, the influence I knew I would have, and the sheer joy I gained knowing that one day, I would be a change agent. By the end of my fifth year of teaching, though, that excitement had changed. I became inundated with demanding and unrealistic expectations and realized that one of the key ingredients to supporting my students was supportive leadership, and we didn't have that at my school.
In fact, most of the administrators I worked with daily did not know the challenges students would come into the classroom with, much less what took place in the classroom. Most administrators were more concerned with meeting academic standards and metrics than offering holistic support to students who couldn’t meet these standards because of their personal challenges.
In my current role as a school and community engagement manager, I work with students and families facing a range of challenges — often very serious situations such as experiencing homelessness or community violence. It’s not uncommon for the trauma to follow my students into school. This kind of work makes it hard to disconnect, and the weight of my students’ personal hardships regularly follows me home at night.
Even though I knew I would have to endure classroom challenges without the support of administrators, I refused to give up despite the negative impact it had on my mental health and well-being. I know I am a capable teacher who can speak out against administrative issues and advocate for students who experience marginalization that impacts their academic performance. After all, I’ve always been a rebel, and I follow in the footsteps of my mother, who retired from teaching because she refused to conform.
I was committed to meeting my students where they were. I chose to stay and fight for them, but compassion has a cost that almost always falls to the teacher.
Staying in the Fight
To sustain in this field, you must possess a level of mental toughness and tenacity to endure. It is hard, and I, along with so many others, question whether our compassion for our students is enough to fix the state of our education system and keep us in the profession.
While I want to save my students, I know that there is only so much I can do before the weight of it all bears down on me. I was and still am in the trenches, fighting for what I believe my students and their families deserve – but this work isn’t for the faint of heart.
Celina Pierrottet remembers 2016 as the year when she and her colleagues at the middle school where they taught noted a pointed change among their students.
“We were just like, ‘Is it just me, or are kids really nervous?’” Pierrottet recalls. “That year we had a lot of kids who were displaying some sort of school avoidance and other behaviors that we hadn't quite seen as much. I remember my colleagues and I looking at each other like, ‘It's more this year’ — and then fast forward to the pandemic.”
The rise in mental health needs among students following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed the U.S. Surgeon General to declare a youth mental health crisis, and the federal government has rolled out billions of dollars since then to help schools respond.
But Pierrottet, who now works as associate director of student wellness at the National Association of State Boards of Education, noted in a policy brief a major hurdle in getting students the help they need: an inadequate supply of mental health professionals, specifically those credentialed to work in schools.
Here’s what she found is standing in the way — and how states are finding solutions.
Slim Pickings
One issue is that growing the number of mental health professionals in schools takes time. Investments made into increasing the pipeline now won’t see results — in the form of hireable mental health workers — for several years.
During Pierrottet’s research, she found that officials on Nevada’s State Board of Education noted in April of last year that the state’s prep programs for mental health professionals only graduate 12 people each year. At the time, the state had a shortage of 2,863 school mental health professionals.
“It continues to be a challenge because it’s a profession that requires advanced coursework,” Pierrottet says. “No one’s saying they need to change those requirements, but it’s a slow investment.”
There’s also the need to ensure that school mental health professionals — be they school psychologists, social workers or counselors — reflect the demographics of the students they serve, she adds. One of the challenges is that, like their classroom teacher colleagues, mental health professionals-in-training have to complete hundreds of unpaid practicum hours.
Pierrottet points to Virginia and Ohio as examples of states that have responded to that hurdle by creating programs that pay graduate students studying mental health care to work in schools. The 2019 program in Virginia “placed graduate students in school district positions and provided 200 trainees with financial incentives to work in schools,” according to her report, and Ohio has a similar, decades-old program for school psychologist interns.
“Slow and steady wins the race here in making sure that schools are attracting candidates that are diverse, that meet the diverse needs of their students,” Pierrottet says.
Managing the Workload
But the immediate mental health needs have created crushing workloads for counselors.
Pierrottet writes in her policy paper that national trade organizations recommend student-to-professional ratios of 1:250 for school social workers, 1:250 for school counselors and 1:500 for school psychologists.
There’s a long way to go to ease workloads for all three types of positions. No states meet the recommended ratio for social workers, while Pierrottet found only New Hampshire and Vermont have better caseloads than the recommendations for counselors. For school psychologists, only Idaho and Washington D.C. do better than the recommended ratio.
Some states have gotten creative to increase the availability of mental health professionals in their schools, like turning to telehealth for counseling services.
It’s not just school staff anymore who are alerting counselors that students need mental health support. One of the forces driving the increased demand for services is simply that students are asking for them, she notes, as evidenced by the federal School Pulse Panel. The most recent results show that 69 percent of schools report an increase in students looking for mental health support since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
“Schools are saying there's actually just a growing demand for more mental health services in schools from students themselves who are just expressing more anxiety in schools,” Pierrottet says. “Sometimes it can be an issue if students are saying, ‘I need this,’ but they can't get that connection in the school or maybe even outside of the school.”
Footing the Bill
A win for increasing staff levels is that states have gotten funding for school mental health services from massive federal cash infusions, Pierrottet says, like $188 million from the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. The U.S. Department of Education projects that one of its grants will lead to more than 14,000 more mental health professionals in schools, according to the policy paper, and new federal guidelines are making it easier for schools to bill mental health services to Medicaid rather than pulling money from their own budgets.
That doesn’t mean that getting states to fund mental health services has been easy. Yet Pierrottet says that the programs she highlights in her report have benefited from states having what one analysis called an “all-time high” of financial cushion due to budget surpluses — a result of factors including COVID-19 relief funds and higher-than-expected tax revenue. States like Michigan and Texas — both of which are looking at billions in surplus dollars — this year — are putting some of those funds toward mental health spending. Michigan has hired more than 2,700 full-time licensed behavioral health providers in schools since 2019, the report highlights, while Texas has set aside $280 million for telehealth counseling in schools starting in 2024.
“I think that right now there has been more success than in previous years because of this crisis, right?” Pierrottet offers. “It would be more difficult if there wasn't a surplus right now in the budget. I think right now, the stars are aligning. There is will, there's motivation, and so at least in the last year there was some movement toward funding.”
Pierrottet added that it’s important not to think about students’ mental health needs as something that can be solved with funding alone. Rather, she described it as an issue that needs to be addressed from multiple sides. For example, some teachers are enthusiastic about getting more training about how to support student mental health, she says, and those teachers likewise need support for their own mental well-being in order to be effective in the classroom.
“It's important to think of this holistically,” she says. “When students are healthy and when they're not having these anxious feelings, they're present, they're able to learn. So it's important for state leaders to think of this as not just, ‘Oh, we need to provide more mental health staff.’ It's about the whole continuum, the comprehensive school mental health system, and looking at it through a whole child” lens.
In her memoir, “Men We Reaped”, Jesamyn Ward discusses the young men she’s lost in her life — five in the span of four years. After naming the young men and the months in which they died, she said, “That’s a brutal list that silences people. It silenced me for a long time…But my ghosts were once people, and I cannot forget that.” I, too, have a brutal list. In my thirteen years of teaching, I’ve lost more students than I can count on two hands.
It has not been possible for me to continue to teach unchanged by these losses and the structural reality that ensures they will continue. I’ve had to develop a guide for myself to teaching and loving children knowing you may lose them and grappling with the white savior beliefs and practices that made me believe I could save them.
This experience has been brutal, but I am a better person and a better teacher for shifting my priorities to honor the people my ghosts — and former students — once were, and the meaningful relationships we built while they were alive.
What follows are the steps I take to manage and process grief when I've lost another student and the ways I have changed my mindset to focus on what will always matter, even as my students keep dying.
Step 1: Feel the Loss
The shock that comes when you lose a student you love swallows you almost immediately, and doing anything but feeling it is not an option. You may find yourself numb in a way that could be familiar or frightening. You may wonder what is wrong with you and why you aren’t impacted more or less.
You are doing it right, so long as you don’t force it or run from it. Timelines aren’t useful to you now. Grief doesn’t abide by time.
If you can bear it, if there is an opportunity, show up. Find, join or create a space and time dedicated to this loss. Bear witness not just to your lost one, but to the pain of those who loved them with you. Be present, if you can. Be reminded that it was a miracle of time and chance and even more, that you were able to love each other in the first place.
If this is not your first loss, feel it all the same. Fight the numbness that creeps in when you’ve been exposed to too much harm, violence and injustice. Honor each lost student as the individual they are, not a number or a statistic.
Step 2: Create a Ritual
In “Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community”, authors Malidoma Patrice Somé detail the ways that ritual is essential to the wellness of the human spirit and how it “is not compatible with the rapid rhythm that industrialization has injected into life.”
I find that my grief is decidedly not compatible with said rhythm, and ritual creates a space where this rhythm is neither expected nor required. Frankly, ritual keeps me from losing my mind in the face of not only those students I've lost in the present but those I may lose in the future, and the terrible fact that there will inevitably be more to come. Counter to what I sometimes fear, it is letting the loss in and sitting with it that keeps me from being overcome by it.
Find the ritual that works for you. In New Orleans, we honor our dead with candlelight vigils and second lines, repasts and t-shirts bearing their images with newly added wings. These communal celebrations do something meaningful for me, but I have a more private ritual I use when I am ready.
My ritual is as follows: I light a seven-day candle and sit before it to write a commitment to carry forward what I learned from the person I’ve lost. For as long as the candle burns, I sit with it each night, reading the commitment aloud again, affixing it, I hope, to something deeper than memory.
Step 3: Realize All The (White) Savior Rhetoric You’ve Been Fed is a Lie
It is painful to realize that most of what you’d hoped was true about teaching, or about America, is a myth. I, like many other white teachers, was recruited under the guise that by simply showing up and teaching well, we could change the public education system in America, as though the problem was a lack of good teachers and not a system built upon segregation and the disparity of resources and opportunities.
I once had a former student who was one of the only kids I’ve taught who straight-up didn’t like me when we first met. He was a straightforward and determined young man whose smile lit up the room when he decided to show it. During his senior year, he was stuck with me twice a day, the second of which was a class designed to prepare him for a state test he needed to pass in order to graduate. Our relationship was a tenuous one, built slowly around this shared goal. On his graduation day in 2014, he found me after the ceremony and hugged me, thanking me for helping him get there. It was a beautiful moment in our relationship. Unfortunately, he died on Thanksgiving day two years later.
In New Orleans, there is a 25.8-year difference in the life expectancies between white neighborhoods which are often rich in access and resources, and Black neighborhoods where there is a lack of resources and opportunities. None of our systems — whether criminal, legal, medical or educational — are serving Black children.
When white teachers are recruited into school systems, like New Orleans’ segregated schools that serve predominantly Black students and children of color, it is often to appeal to white arrogance. To believe that the failures of our education system can be fixed by simply recruiting better teachers — often a dog whistle for white teachers — is a convenient way to avoid addressing the context in which our students are educated.
To say that if we teach well enough, we can save our children from the neglect, violence and inequalities of our city is a lie that at best appeals to our optimism and at worst to our egos. It simply isn’t true. We cannot teach well enough to save all our children from an unwell society. Our teaching has to be about more than this.
Step 4: Make Meaning
As my students kept dying and I realized that I could not save everyone, I had to figure out what actually mattered in my classroom. This shifted my priorities indelibly. These days, I make three commitments to my students and their families:
Treat every student with care and dignity.
Challenge every student.
Teach something relevant to every student’s current life.
Each day at school, my children and I have precious time to spend together learning in community. I have not given up on preparing my students for future opportunities in college or careers, but I have used these commitments to balance these aspirations with a focus on what is meaningful today, in the here and now, whether or not we will see each other again tomorrow.
My students will continue to walk an incredible variety of paths and experience many beautiful aspects of life after they leave my class — but some will continue to die. No matter what happens to my students, the relationships we are able to have when I prioritize these commitments cannot be taken away from us. The experiences we have in my classroom and the community we build are about more than preparing for a certain kind of life. They are meaningful, in and of themselves.
Death Ends Life, Not a Relationship
This past summer, my school community a young woman who was beloved by everyone she met. A rising senior, she had just become a mother — and a fantastic one at that. Certainly, many of us had lost young people in our lives before; in fact, more than half of New Orleans's young people have lost someone to homicide, but to lose her felt especially unfair.
At a candlelight vigil we held in her honor, I passed around a basket of tea lights and urged my students to make time to honor her passing in a way that felt appropriate for them. I reminded them that grief takes shape in many different ways and shared my ritual.
In our first major project of the year, my students created quilt squares depicting the face of someone they wanted to pay tribute to and artist statements detailing the impact these people had on their lives. Stitched next to Halle Bailey as Ariel, Kobe Bryant, self-portraits and Princess Tiana were several quilt squares honoring the student we lost, a person whose impact we will not forget, with whom our relationship has not ended.
When I center my teaching on challenging my students each day instead of on a final outcome of “saving” my students, on building meaningful community in the day-to-day instead of on relentlessly pursuing future outcomes, I am honoring the value that our lives and learning have without needing a successful future outcome to validate them. Every day that I get to challenge my students and be in relationship with them is a gift, and nothing, not even death, can take that away.
In remembrance of all my students who have been victims of violence in New Orleans and all the children we have lost from the deep inequality of our American education system.
Clad in a beanie, university sweatshirt and gold-rimmed glasses, a TikToker who goes by Mimi looks directly into the camera and speaks in a gentle tone as she addresses her viewers on the topics that flash in red-highlighted letters at the top of the video: “TW: Climate Anxiety & Doomism.”
The trigger warning is buttressed by a more hopeful message accentuated in green: “& TIPS on how to deal with that.”
Considering what the 24-year-old shares in the video about her experience as a climate activist and former environmental studies student in college, the need for a heads-up becomes apparent.
“As you come to the realization of how big an issue climate change is and how small it makes you feel, it really brings around this impending sense of doom,” she says. “It makes you feel super helpless, especially when you start acknowledging who gets affected.”
That is to say, people who are part of certain racial groups — likely a reference to the outsized impact climate change has on Black and Hispanic people — and low-income people. And that reality has made Mimi contemplate, “Wow, do people really think of my life as that worthless when it comes to making a buck?”
“I ended up in undergrad having to go to therapy partially because of my acceptance of what climate change is and how little and small and in-equipped it made me feel,” she says. “And ironically my therapist said, ‘I get a lot of you environmental studies majors in here,’ and she was very happy that I came to see her.”
There are plenty of factors affecting students’ mental health these days. Continuing reverberations from pandemic-era remote learning, gun violence and social media to name a few.
There appears to be yet another to add to the list.
There are signs that soaring temperatures, monster storms and aggressive floods are taking a mental toll on students. An international “climate anxiety” survey of 10,000 teens and young adults found that more than 45 percent of those who responded said “their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning.”
Climate anxiety isn’t a wholly new concept. Google saw a 565 percent increase in searches for the phrase a couple years ago.
Since then, researchers have taken closer looks at what role climate anxiety — also called climate doomism or eco-anxiety — plays in the overall mental health pressures that young people are facing.
Taking Action
Mimi is far from alone in her experiences with climate anxiety, if the myriad videos by other TikTokers on the platform talking about dealing with negative effects of the environment are any sign.
A study from the Yale School of Public Health found that climate anxiety is distinct from other mental health conditions like general anxiety disorder or major depressive disorder.
“Responses demonstrated how climate change anxiety can pose a barrier to engaging with goals typically salient in emerging adulthood such as education, career, and family-related goals, which may contribute to a loss of meaning or purpose,” researchers explain in the paper. “This may be of particular concern in the context of an emerging adult population that is already more vulnerable to mental health distress.
Yale researcher and clinical psychologist Sarah Lowe said in an Q&A earlier this year that climate anxiety tends to impact people who are already experiencing symptoms of general anxiety. Overall, Lowe explained, the number of college students who say they’re experiencing climate anxiety is fairly low.
“Our students were in the range of ‘rarely anxious’ to ‘sometimes anxious,’ and that to us was a bit surprising given what we’ve heard from students,” she said in the interview. “But it’s also important to note that the whole range of scale scores was represented in the survey results, so we did have some students who reported frequent or extreme anxiety about climate change.”
One potential source of relief for climate anxiety among youth might be doing something about climate change.
That can come in many forms. A Pew Research Center poll from 2021 found that adults in Generation Z were more likely than Americans belonging to older generations to have donated money, contacted an elected official, volunteered or attended a rally to try to help address climate change in the prior year.
The Yale survey of more than 300 undergrad and graduate students ages 18 to 35 found that students who participate in “collective action” — like involvement in advocacy groups or educating others about climate change — report lower levels of climate anxiety than those who only take part in individual actions like recycling or saving energy.
One notable recent example of youth taking collective action occurred last month, when 16 plaintiffs, ranging in age from 5 to 22, successfully won their court case claiming that state agencies in Montana were violating their constitutional right to a clean environment by allowing fossil fuel development. NPR called it “a first-of-its- kind trial in the U.S.” and one that “established a government duty to protect citizens from climate change.”
For her part, TikToker Mimi encourages her followers to remember that the answer to climate change does not rest on any one person. Rather, people who want to get involved can think about how their unique talents and skills can be put to use.
“How can I make the most ripples and the most effective change in the communities I reside within?” Mimi invites them to contemplate. “And no, it may not be this huge movement or this huge thing that I’m doing, but I am contributing. And I’m holding those who are part of the problem to the utmost accountability. Do what you can with what you can.”
Designing for Climate Education
Architects designed a rainwater collection system for Springdale Park Elementary School in Atlanta, where it is used as a teaching tool for the students. Photo courtesy of Perkins&Will.
Just because children and teens are taking action doesn’t mean they think grown-ups should be absolved of responsibility. The climate anxiety international survey found that “a perceived failure by governments to respond to the climate crisis is associated with increased distress” among youth.
Getting governments to change is a big task (although not impossible, as those young Montanans learned.) So what can adults whose work is closer to the daily experiences of children do to? For example, as educators and architects grapple with the challenge of adapting school buildings to design with climate resilience in mind, can they affect students’ climate change worries as well?
That answer is yes, according to one expert.
Shivani Langer, a senior project architect and senior regenerative design adviser at the firm Perkins&Will Austin, echoes other experts who say children are more vulnerable to climate change than adults. She previously spoke to EdSurge about how architects are making school buildings more resilient to rising temperatures and other effects of climate change.
That vulnerability includes their physical development and characteristics — young children literally inhale more air pollution because they breathe faster — to the interruptions to their education from more frequent natural disasters like wildfires and hurricanes.
Langer is also an expert on how buildings can impact their inhabitants’ health and well-being — having earned the rather aptly named credential of WELL accredited professional — and believes that architects can educate students and even assuage worries about climate change through their designs.
“Kids are seeing that things are happening, right? Whether it was a freeze here, or a hurricane somewhere, or a tornado somewhere,” she says. “Kids are the biggest proponent of sustainability. They understand that they will go through it because of our bad decisions over the years.”
Langer says colleagues at her company’s Atlanta firm designed a school’s rainwater collection system that is used to teach students about sustainability and gardening. Additionally, sustainability-minded architects encourage schools to include in their designs dashboard displays that show students how much energy or water is used in the building. The dashboard could be a screen near the entrance visible to students and visitors alike, she explains, or the usage data could be accessed via iPad as part of science lessons.
“We have even done competitions between different wings of schools to say, ‘Hey, how much electricity did you use?’ So in that way, they get excited about being better stewards of the environment,” Langer says. “And if we make these schools resilient and sustainable, informing and teaching through that actually helps relieve their stress, too, because they understand that there is something being done.”
Since the pandemic, mental health strains on youth have been put in the spotlight.
Pandemic closures provided some students with a chance to notice how stressed they are at school, says Jayne Demsky, founder of School Avoidance Alliance, an advocacy group that provides professional training to schools.
The time away from physical classrooms gave children and teens an experience with which to contrast the regular anxiety of being at school. Now that in-person school is back in session, Demsky argues, schools now have to coax these students back into the building.
“Just like [adults] rethought our work-life balance, and our employers had to treat us kindly and reengage us and to show us why we should work for them — kids are the same,” Demsky says.
Many students are missing school completely, and the number of chronically absent students — defined as those who miss 10 percent or more of the school year — has increased. Since the pandemic, roughly 13.6 million students are chronically absent.
Some share of students missing from school are suffering from school avoidance, sometimes also called school refusal, which is when children experience severe emotional or physical distress about going to school.
These kids might be hiding in the corner crying under their covers, tantruming and glued to their beds, or holding onto a wall, so their parents can’t drive them to class.
— Jayne Demsky
Rather than just a distaste for school, refusal can be visceral.
“These kids might be hiding in the corner crying under their covers, tantruming and glued to their beds, or holding onto a wall, so their parents can’t drive them to class,” Demsky says.
Avoidance has become a crisis in recent years, one that schools aren’t prepared to handle, according to mental health experts. Long term, it can leave students unprepared for life. It can knock students off the traditional developmental path and leave them without crucial social and emotional skills, says Anne Marie Albano, a clinical psychologist with experience in school avoidance. Often, other psychologists who spoke with EdSurge noted, there are underlying conditions that can exacerbate anxiety around school as well.
The strain of mental health woes has ratcheted up pressure on schools to provide support. But schools are stretched thin for mental health staff, with as many as 100,000 more mental health professionals needed around the country.
Some districts have gotten creative. A school district in Virginia even constructed a middle school building with extra glass in the hopes that more natural light will serve as a palliative. But a more common approach has been to ink contracts with telehealth companies.
Still, for families and teachers trying to tackle school avoidance, it can mean that there are few resources for the specialized interventions students need.
There are no clinical diagnostic criteria for avoidance, which takes a different form for each child. But generally, it's marked by sustained absence, which gets harder to correct the longer the student is out of the classroom, Albano says. Unlike some other forms of absence, it won’t go away on its own but requires intervention that’s tailored to the student and can account for the deeper reasons a student is avoiding school, she adds. Those reasons tend to be highly specific to the individual students, she specifies.
But it’s hard to solve a problem you don’t know about.
Desperate Measures
Many parents have never heard of school avoidance, and educators aren’t comprehensively trained on it, according to activists and health care professionals. Not all clinicians even know how to treat school avoidance. For parents, “It’s scary,” says Demsky of School Avoidance Alliance.
Schools can conflate avoidance with truancy or other forms of absenteeism that fail to consider the anxiety causing it, Demsky says. (Demsky started her organization after her experiences with her own son’s school avoidance, which led the police to her doorstep and left her “on the verge of an emotional breakdown.”)
The nuance can get lost in efforts to get students back in physical classrooms.
Post-pandemic, legislatures have looked to increase penalties for students missing school. Penalties can range from fines to threats of jail time if the parents are found to have failed to get their kids to school. In Texas, for instance, lawmakers proposed hiking up the fines for truancy to cut down on absences earlier this year. It was controversial with family groups for penalizing missed school rather than remedying the root causes.
But treating refusal like truancy makes it harder to solve the problem, according to activists like Demsky. “I’ve spoken to families and they said, ‘hey, if I could pay $500 and go to jail for a week and have my kid get better and go to school, I would do it.’ So that just shows you how desperate families are,” she says.
Instead, Demsky calls for schools to recognize when refusal is occurring, and to follow evidence-based paths. That means psychological evaluations, finding out whether there’s an undiagnosed learning disability that’s making school acutely uncomfortable for the student, and other measures such as exposure therapy, she says.
In the schools she works with, that requires finding “a champion,” someone who has a connection with the student to help draw them back into the school, she says. In that, it’s similar to addressing chronic absenteeism in general, which Hedy Chang, executive director of the nonprofit Attendance Works, says boils down to meaningful relationships.
For beleaguered educators, it’s yet another hat they’re being asked to wear. But for some students, it may be crucial, activists say.
“Schools have to step in and take the place of those missing mental health professionals. And they really have to step up and become the support structure for these families,” Demsky says.
There are likely droves of educators who find themselves wishing they could take a peek inside their students’ minds to find out, “What the heck are you thinking?”
Some of those answers were made available last month when the Boys & Girls Clubs of America released its annual survey of kids and teens ages 9 to 18. The organization says that more than 130,000 young people at nearly 3,500 clubs around the country took part in the survey.
While there are generally some limitations when it comes to asking people to rate their own strengths and weaknesses — i.e. the temptation to pick the “right” answer — the survey reveals how kids view themselves and their desires for the future. They were asked to agree or disagree with statements about college and career plans, how they’re faring in school and with their mental health, among other topics.
Life After High School
Educators, employers, policymakers and others have been fretting over enrollment declines at colleges and whether students see the same value in a university diploma as their predecessors. In one recent example, thousands of high school students received a community college admission letter without ever applying in a bid by the State University of New York to attract potential freshmen.
Among the Boys & Girls Clubs of America kids, survey participants overwhelmingly had college aspirations, with 75 percent expecting to continue their education beyond high school.
Thirty percent said they want a bachelor’s degree, and another 26 percent plan to pursue a master’s or other advanced degrees. Amongst the high school seniors, most reported having applied to trade school, community college or a university along with federal financial aid.
The survey also took measure of kids’ interests in science, technology, education and math. Students by and large said they were excited by and successful in math and science, with 47 percent of reporting they agreed or strongly agreed they wanted a STEM career and 52 percent saying they know the “steps a student needs to take if they want to be in a science-related career.”
They also appear to be confident in their knowledge of how to reach their career goals and the accompanying price tag. Among high school juniors and seniors, more than 90 percent said they know what kind of education or vocational training they will need for the jobs they want and how much those plans will cost.
It’s an impressive stat considering the well-documented stressors that grads older than these youngsters who are yoked with student loan debt are facing, like worries about repayment or buying homes.
Despite the positive outlook, only 51 percent of participants in fifth through 12th grade said they were on track to graduate. Twenty-one percent said they were “on track with some risk,” while the remaining 28 percent said they were not on track to graduate from high school.
Are the Kids Alright?
It’s undoubtedly been a stressful few years for kids, and they’re still in the midst of what experts called a national youth mental health crisis. Schools and community groups alike are trying to figure out how to meet the demand for more mental health support among students, and crisis lines have reported an uptick in teens reaching out for help.
But the survey participants generally saw themselves as mentally strong.
About a two-thirds of the kids said it was either “very true” or “sort of true” that they can stay calm when stressed, and nearly half said they know how to calm themselves down.
Around 60 percent of students said it was “very true” that they can identify the emotions they feel and how their feelings influence their actions. Sixty-four percent believe it’s “very true” that they can accomplish most things if they try their best, and about the same amount said they don’t give up on something when they have trouble with a task.
They were also positive when it came to making mistakes. Just over 90 percent said it was either “very true” or “sort of true” that they try to figure out how to do better next time when something important in their lives goes wrong.
However, their responses revealed something more concerning when statements were phrased more negatively.
Forty percent said it was “very true” — and 30 percent said it was “sort of true” — that, “when something goes wrong in my life, I just can’t stop worrying about it.”
Another 38 percent said it was “very true” — 29 percent said it was “sort of true” — that they try to keep people from finding out when something goes wrong in their life.
Cool to Be Kind
Kids reported a fairly sunny outlook on their relationships and communities, responding positively to questions about how they treat others and their feelings about their community.
More than 90 percent said they try to help when they see someone in need or help when “I see someone having a problem.” Another 85 percent said they try to think about how others will be impacted by their decisions, and about the same percentage said they are good at making friends.
More than 80 percent of kids say they believe they can make a difference in their communities.
But on the receiving end of others’ behavior, 40 percent of kids said they had been bullied at school during the past year (62 percent of those students also said they told an adult). Another 18 percent said they had been “electronically bullied,” and those kids were less likely to tell an adult — 45 percent said they did.
When Gorgette Green-Hodnett wrapped up her 23-year career in K-12 education a couple years ago, her family members celebrated. Not only with well wishes for her new job coordinating an academic support program at a university in Maryland, but also with relief that she would no longer be working around the clock.
Her family had been glad each time she’d had a non-teaching role throughout her career, but this time her husband was excited at the prospect of finally taking a vacation outside the summer months.
“What I was told by my family is, ‘Thank God, because you come home and you grade papers. We have to go to your school and help you,’” she says. “I didn’t even realize the impact the work was having on my immediate family. Consciously or unconsciously, I allowed my work to manage and almost overtake areas of my life.”
That’s the kind of realization that teachers were coming to during the pandemic, Green-Hodnett says, when they were stretched to their limits juggling remote learning, their families, health concerns, and every other stressor brought on by the spread of COVID-19. While the country didn’t see the sudden mass exodus of teachers that some feared, the toll appeared clear — teachers reported experiencing depression at three times the rate of other adults.
And there was significant turnover in the workforce. A recent analysis by Chalkbeat found that, between the 2021 and 2022 school years, eight states — Hawaii, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Washington — faced their highest teacher turnover rates in the past five years. Hawaii experienced a spike in retirements during the 2020-21 school year. And a recent Louisiana Educator Workforce Snapshot revealed that 26 percent of teachers who left their jobs in the 2020-2021 academic year had 21 or more years of experience.
Teacher quitting was at a 10-year high in 2021, consulting firm McKinsey & Company reports, and increased again in 2022. Quitting accounted for 61 percent of job “separations” among teachers in 2021, according to the data, and jumped to 64 percent in 2022.
Losing any teacher has ripple effects throughout a school, from eroding the sense of community to a potential knock on students’ academic progress.
But what happens, more specifically, when veteran teachers burn out and decide it’s time to say goodbye, walking out the door with all of their hard-earned experience? And what can schools change to get them to stay?
‘Ripple Effects’
When it comes to years of teaching experience, federal data divides U.S. teachers into four buckets. In the 2020-21 school year:
12.4 percent of teachers had three or less years
24.5 percent of teachers had four to nine years
16.6 percent had 10 to 14 years
46.5 percent had 15 or more years
That breakdown is similar to what it was three years earlier in the 2017-18 school year.
Data visualization by Nadia Tamez-Robledo. Source: National Center for Education Statistics
But for some teachers who have been in the profession for a long time, it feels like there has been a shift.
Around the time she moved on to higher education, Green-Hodnett was running the Real Talk, Real Time Educators Forum with fellow educator Chandra Joseph-Lacet, who is a new teacher instructional coach for Boston Public Schools. The Facebook group and podcast were sounding boards for teachers looking for a community amidst the hair-pulling stress of remote learning.
Struggling with mental health is nothing new for teachers, Green-Hodnett says, but the pandemic made it — and many crumbling edges and simmering inequities of the education system — visible to the outside public in a new way.
In Joseph-Lacet’s view, the praise heaped upon teachers in the early days of the pandemic hasn't translated into meaningful plans to help them manage the stress and pressure of the job. That’s partly why the duo created their podcast and forum — they were both in roles that supported teachers but they didn’t see a larger conversation about their mental health emerge.
“Everybody’s talking about teachers, but nobody’s talking to teachers,” Joseph-Lacet recalls thinking. “What are we going to do to protect and to heal ourselves? In a profession, and quite frankly, in a world that never really has valued teachers in the way that they really should have.”
For some experienced teachers, the answer was simple: Leave.
Data visualization by Nadia Tamez-Robledo. Source: Louisiana Department of Education
Teachers who have seen it all can bring a steady assurance to a staff team. Without them, schools can feel less stable.
“What happens when you don’t have folks with those years of expertise, someone who can help with, ‘I don’t understand this lesson, can you help me?’” Joseph-Lacet explains, “you see this withering of the environment in ways that you didn’t see before. This constant feeling of turnover because there’s no holding of the guard by the people who used to be there.”
Other experienced teachers don’t walk away, but hang on despite suffering from burnout. That, too, can have a negative ripple effect on their colleagues’ morale.
“A 10-year teacher is like the kingpin, because people are not staying in the profession like when we were younger,” Green-Hodnett says. “The veteran teachers are juggling all kinds of things because they also want good work. It’s this triangulation of trying to maintain themselves, manage classrooms that are not properly balanced in terms of what students need, and manage children who are not prepared emotionally” to follow directions.
While the pandemic exacerbated the external pain points, there’s also another culprit to the stress veteran teachers experience. There’s a certain self-sacrificing attitude that teachers have had for a long time now, Joseph-Lacet says, that comes from the expectations of their peers, administrators, all the way back to their training days in college. It’s the idea that, from the time that school starts in the fall to the final bell in summer, their lives revolve totally around work.
“I was guilty of saying, ‘Tell your friends you’ll see them in June,’” Joseph-Lacet says of conversations she used to have with new teachers.
She thinks of that attitude now as modeling bad behavior — total lack of self-care or work-life balance, in this case — something that veteran teachers are still at risk of doing as they deal with mental strain.
It all adds up to a sense that a lasting career in education is a tenuous prospect — or one that requires teachers who stick it out to give, and give, and give until there’s nothing left.
After all, Joseph-Lacet says that what earns teachers the reputation of being a “veteran” has changed during her career, from someone with 20 years of experience to someone who’s been in the profession for just three years.
Who Takes Care of Experienced Teachers?
A study of the impact of COVID-19 and its stressors on New Orleans teachers found that, when asked what the most helpful support during pandemic teaching had been, 42 percent of responders said “support from coworkers.”
We have to take care of the human being who is holding it together — or it’s all gonna crash.
— Danna Thomas
One teacher, for example, told researchers that “working with a group of coworkers that really cares” was key to feeling supported.
It’s an example of a trend that Danna Thomas observed while she was still a teacher in Baltimore. Thomas founded the teacher self-care organization Happy Teacher Revolution, which hosts gatherings in 21 states where educators talk and support each other through difficult times in the profession. She found that experienced teachers tend to shoulder an additional emotional toll as their peers lean on them for support, particularly new teachers who are finding their footing.
She believes schools are missing opportunities to invest in veteran teachers as leaders who can help to improve well-being for other staff members.
“There are people in leadership who support teachers with academics, but their phone calls or Zoom are [reserved for] just new teachers crying their eyes out with how overwhelmed they are,” Thomas says. “Teaching, it shouldn’t be getting harder as the years go on. If you have 10, 20 years under your belt, it should be less overwhelming. We have to take care of the human being who is holding it together — or it’s all gonna crash.”
In the absence of more school-based support for long-time teachers, groups like Happy Teacher Revolution try to fill the gap. One common topic of conversation among members is the power of resetting professional boundaries that crumbled during the remote leaning days of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a place where they can celebrate big wins like taking a sick day, actually eating lunch during their lunch breaks, and making it home from school before dark.
“I really want folks to feel it’s sustainable that they can do this for years and years,” Thomas says of her goal. “There’s nothing better than a happy veteran teacher who’s able to teach siblings, or those kids’ kids — it’s so cool. There’s been so much conversation about individual care, and we need community care. Who is making sure that the village collective is well?”
Green-Hodnett has also seen experienced teachers start to think more about what they want their lives to look like outside of work. She recalls one woman who was part of the Real Talk forum saying that one of the biggest regrets of her 40-year teaching career was all of the missed recitals and events that involved her daughter, sacrificed so she could keep up with school work.
Green-Hodnett also recalls a former colleague, who left the school district for a new job, had more than 200 hours of unused leave.
“Teachers have to be mindful of what their capacity is, use their voice, use their leave,” Green-Hodnett says. “Chandra’s talked about how we would wait and do all our doctor's appointments in the summer, or do all our doctor's appointments on spring break. No, you need to take [leave]. If you don't take care of those things, then you retire, and then you're not able to do what you wanna do in your retirement.”
Data visualization by Nadia Tamez-Robledo. Source: Hawaii State Department of Education
Revolving Door
Yet these support circles and changing attitudes may not be enough to make sure that today’s teachers hang in there to serve as tomorrow’s veterans.
Joseph-Lacet has seen a new trend among teachers that she fears will have negative consequences on the profession. Unlike the norm from earlier in her career, she says experienced teachers now are openly mulling, “How quickly can I retire?” Not necessarily to stop working completely, but to transition to another field.
“They're like, ‘I need to bounce from this profession because it has just gotten to be too much,’” she says, “‘because it has just gotten to the point where it is breaking me mentally and or physically.’ There’s so much more of that, as opposed to people riding into retirement, having these wonderful retirement parties like they did back in the day.”
Among teachers who are retiring after long careers, she adds, some are sharing advice to younger teachers that sums up to, “Y’all don't do like I did. Don't stay here for 20 years. You can make a change. Make that change right now.”
“If younger teachers do that, again, we’re adding to this newness and this revolving door that's happening, and your veteran teachers are going to be three- and five-year folk,” Joseph-Lacet says. “That is never going to be beneficial for anyone in the school environment, and most notably the children.”
Even so, and despite her own long career as a teacher and now a teacher coach, Joseph-Lacet says that she can’t find it in herself to be excited that her own daughter is in college studying elementary education.
“On social media there’s jokes of teachers being stressed because it’s August,” she says, “but under that, there’s depression, there’s anxiety, overwhelming dread of walking into the new school year.”
Imagine not only waking up to a pandemic, forced into an isolated space without the physical and emotional support you need for learning, but also discovering that the place you call home has been deemed unlivable. This was the reality for many of the students and their families at Luther J. Price Middle School (LJPMS) families after the city of Atlanta condemned property in the Forest Cove neighborhood in 2021.
There were over 300 families that resided in Forest Cove, and many of the children from these households attended our school. Even worse, we were still in the midst of a pandemic; not only did we have to create innovative ways to teach and reach our children virtually, but we also had to ensure that our children and families were physically safe, nourished and mentally and emotionally sound to cope with the trauma they just experienced.
The irony here was not poor property management that condemned the properties in this community – the homes had been unlivable for many years prior. If anything, the issue shed light on the lack of investment in the local communities where our students live and exposed the gap in mental health resources for students and their families.
As a school, we knew that if our students and families didn’t have the support they needed, student learning and engagement would be severely impacted. Over the last two years, I worked with fellow educators and administrators at LPJMS to strategize ways to put social-emotional learning at the forefront of our curriculum and student and family engagement plan. What started as a daunting task became a mission to reignite the passion and engagement of our students while strengthening our local community.
Developing a Framework for Student Engagement
As the School and Community Engagement Manager and Parent Liaison, I worked with a team of LJPMS teachers and administrators to adopt a framework to re-engage students and families and restore a sense of love and belonging within the surrounding community. We decided that implementing a framework incorporating social-emotional learning (SEL) would help our students and families cope and heal from the inside out. SEL is defined as the process of developing self-awareness, self-control, and interpersonal skills that are vital for school, work, and life success. When individuals are equipped with these skills, they can better cope with everyday challenges and positively improve all aspects of their lives, and given the situation that we were in, there was no better time than the present.
Once our school identified the need for SEL, we were able to re-channel our energy and focus on the inputs that would get our students back on track. Our educational spaces transformed into sessions and platforms where students and their leaders could authentically be themselves and thrive in safe and supportive spaces. Specifically, every classroom included spaces where students could decompress, take a break, or meditate to be productive in the classroom setting. Those spaces included things such as therapeutic herbal diffusers, earphones to listen to calming sounds, books and journals to write their thoughts. Students appreciated these spaces and were able to utilize them to self-regulate their emotions, find healthy ways to process trauma and become more productive and present learners in the classroom setting.
After we reached the pandemic's peak and students could return to the classroom, we also knew it would be important to help them identify the significance of their place in the community. We wanted them to identify positive attributes about themselves and then leverage these attributes to build personal, social and academic goals. Teachers began building lessons centered on identity formation, and soon after, students began to embrace their identity and individuality which transformed our classroom and community culture. One of the most impactful ways our students exhibited their newfound confidence was by advocating for a new nutrition program in the school. Over the span of a few months, students captured pictures, videos and feedback from fellow students to build their case. When students presented their findings to our district leaders, the data revealed that over 70 percent of the students within the school were not eating breakfast and lunch. Students made the connection between healthy eating habits and student performance and identified choices district leaders and teachers could make to build a better nutrition program for students.
This presentation resulted in the district adopting a new food program for our district that was culturally appropriate, appealing, and good for students. When students saw the results of the work they had done, this affirmed how identity, advocacy and doing the work yields positive results.
For me, it was heartwarming to see students find their confidence after such a tragic event and I’m glad I took advantage of the opportunity to make connections and build trust with students so that we could grow into the community we sought.
Family Engagement and Support
Just as we knew we could not instruct from a one-size-fits-all mentality, we also had to apply that same philosophy to student families. Our parents yearned to build upon their knowledge to support their children's learning journey. Witnessing firsthand the stressors many of our families experienced allowed our teachers and leaders in the learning community to understand how we could better support our children and the families we serve.
This was the beginning of my transition from the classroom to a role as a family engagement liaison. I asked to be a conduit to engage with our families to re-establish trust, ensure families feel welcomed and build a stronger connection between our school community and families in the Forest Cove neighborhood.
First, I started by establishing Parent University, a place where parents could come and access resources to create better conditions for themselves and their children. Parents can access resources such as GED coursework, resume writing, financial literacy and individual and family therapy. During this time, I also leveraged our in-house partnership relationship with Communities in Schools who provided a team of liaisons in LJPMS that could work with students and families one-on-one to understand basic needs and help them secure housing, medical assistance and meals.
We also made it a point to improve our relationship with our external community partners including COR, a non-profit organization that I worked with to provide programming and support to trauma-impacted students and families who are marginalized by poverty and race-based educational inequities. Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation has been a viable resource to our families displaced by the demolition of Forest Cove, in addition to families who are dealing with landlord/legal issues, or those who are survivors of intimate partner violence. Last but not least, Chris 180 – one of the premier mental health, child welfare and family organizations in the Southeast – has been readily available on-site to meet the mental and emotional needs of our students and staff.
A Community That Heals Together Stays Together
Through this process, we learned to relinquish what power we thought we had in this space and become vulnerable. We depended on one another, loved on one another, and supported each other at a time when so much was uncertain for us all.
This community exemplified resilience at a time when most would have given up. We tapped into our creativity and learned to work outside of the box. We became foot soldiers and fought for the social-emotional learning of our students and the well-being of our families. If they would not come to us, then we came to them. While we celebrate the impact of the work we have done, we know must continue to heal and build our community to keep our students and families engaged.
Of course, things will never be what they once were, but we are building a better school and community – more importantly, we are building leaders. Shifting from a role as an instructional leader to a school and community engagement leader was a blessing. In this role, I am able to do work that creates a bridge from the classroom to students’ homes and communities. While the displacement of our students and families tested our resolve, I am grateful to work with colleagues and peers who care about improving our students’ circumstances just as much as I do.
How would you react if you learned that one of your students felt that you don’t treat them like a full person, with a life and responsibilities beyond the classroom?
This is a real scenario we encountered during a focus group last school year with a group of high school students in Florida who were asked to provide feedback on their teachers. My colleagues at the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) were there to gather data on how teachers can help students thrive by focusing on the learning conditions they have the power to create within their classrooms.
One student candidly shared that he felt like his teachers weren’t invested in him as a human being, because the amount of homework that he was assigned didn't take into account his commitments outside the classroom and other barriers to studying.
But through the practices of social-emotional learning — specifically, SEL for adults — this challenge became an opportunity, and the teachers at this school leaned into a process of reflection, collaboration and ongoing feedback from students that supported a shift in their approach. They began to view assignments and learning holistically, and started taking into account the students' lives and external challenges.
We’ve seen time and time again that when we provide educators the support and tools they need ... they’re able to convert that into better outcomes for their students.
This may seem like a small change, but we’ve seen time and time again that when we provide educators the support and tools they need to form stronger relationships and build empathy, they’re able to convert that into better outcomes for their students.
The value of the implementation of SEL practices for children has become widely discussed and recognized. But if our goal is to help students reach their full potential, we must prioritize the health and well-being of our educators too. James Baldwin once aptly said, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” During this back-to-school season, this quote serves as an important reminder. After all, teachers are the adults with whom children spend the most time outside of their homes. Building a comprehensive support system for adults in schools will require us to change how we think about and value educators. This year, let’s make progress on this front by implementing more SEL for adults to create a positive learning experience for students and educators alike.
So, what steps can we take to prioritize the well-being of our educators and put adult SEL into practice?
Building Community
One way is to invest time in building a strong and supportive community among teachers.
In recent years, many teachers have felt a sense of hopelessness and cynicism as they return to schools with limited resources to address the increased social, emotional and academic needs of students. Creating opportunities for educators to connect, build community and learn together during staff meetings or smaller group collaboratives can alleviate feelings of isolation and provide much-needed mutual support. Professional development can be about much more than just individual growth — it can also elevate our common humanity and celebrate our basic human need for connection, mentorship and accountability.
Even the simple practice of building in a welcome or opening activity in a meeting could go a long way. That kind of exercise allows time and space for a quick check-in among colleagues prior to jumping into the business of the day, which can strengthen the reality that we are human beings first, even before we are educators.
Practicing Mindfulness
Exercises to improve educator mindfulness can also be a game-changer, as they reduce job stress and burnout while promoting positive interactions with students. When educators can prioritize their well-being, they become even more effective at supporting their students' growth.
Educators can yield positive results by adding in opportunities for intentional reflection. Even just taking a few minutes at the beginning and end of each day to set intentions and consider what went well and what can be adjusted can help prevent emotional exhaustion. In addition, school and district leaders can incorporate mindfulness practices into professional development sessions to support a culture of well-being in educational environments. By dedicating time and effort to practices that center educators, they prioritize opportunities that enhance their quality of life and positively influence the overall classroom atmosphere.
Increasing Access to Resources
Although individual practices such as mindfulness can make a difference, to truly improve educators’ day-to-day experience, we need to build comprehensive networks of support, including access to resources.
Schools continue to struggle with chronic understaffing while educators are left to manage overwhelming workloads, burnout, low pay and unrealistic demands. These are problems that no educator can solve on their own, which is why it is crucial to prioritize time and space for open conversations between staff and leadership. By offering resources such as counseling and mental health support to staff, schools can create healthier environments for both students and teachers.
Picture this: a classroom filled with engaged students who feel seen, valued and supported to achieve their highest potential. What would it take to get there?
For one thing, it requires an educator with the knowledge of and access to tools to help students thrive, an educator whose passion for teaching is nurtured — not extinguished. It requires knowing each student's strengths, fears and dreams to better tailor instructional approaches and connect with them more deeply. It means having the emotional bandwidth and skillset to understand students on a more personal level, to model social-emotional competencies and equip students with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed.
This is the positive learning environment we can create if we introduce adults to SEL and help them implement it in their lives. And it isn’t confined by classroom walls. Adults can more easily foster effective learning environments for their students by integrating SEL practices into their routines and understanding their own social and emotional development as an ongoing journey.
Investments in adult SEL are investments in the heart of education — the educators themselves.
Adult SEL helps educators develop professionally, collaborate effectively with colleagues, and form authentic partnerships with caregivers and students, creating stronger communities. When we take action to improve the emotional well-being of educators, we support their personal growth, reaffirm their sense of self-worth and empower them to explore their identity to find deeper satisfaction in their profession, reinforcing their commitment to stay and continue to enrich the lives of their students. Investments in adult SEL are investments in the heart of education — the educators themselves — and create a brighter, more empathetic and fulfilling learning journey for everyone involved.
So this back-to-school season and beyond, let’s prioritize SEL — not just for our children, but for their educators and caregivers, too — and change how we think about and approach the well-being of our teachers and students.
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