WAUKEGAN, Ill. — On a sunny but brisk November afternoon inside Robert Abbott Middle School, six eighth grade girls quickly filed into a small but colorful classroom and seated themselves in a circle.

Yuli Paez-Naranjo, a Working on Womanhood counselor, sported a purple WOW T-shirt as she led the group in a discussion about how values can inform decisions.

“Do you ever feel like two little angels are sitting on each of your shoulders, one whispering good things to you, the other whispering bad things?” Paez-Naranjo asked the girls. The students nodded and giggled.

At the 50-minute WOW circle, girls have a chance to set aside the pressures of the school day, laugh with and listen to one another, and work through personal problems. The weekly meeting is the centerpiece of individual and group therapy that WOW offers throughout the school year to Black and Hispanic girls, and to students of all races who identify as female or nonbinary, in grades 6 to 12.

Created in 2011 by Black and Hispanic social workers at the nonprofit organization Youth Guidance, WOW’s goal is to build a healthy sense of self-awareness, confidence and resilience in a population that is often underserved by mental health programs.

Youth Guidance offers WOW to about 350 students in Waukegan Community Unit School District 60, which serves an industrial town of about 88,000 located about 30 miles north of Chicago. Just over 93 percent of the district’s 13,600 students are Black or Hispanic, and about 67 percent come from families classified as low income.

The program also serves students in Chicago, Boston, Kansas City and Dallas. WOW counselors work with school-based behavioral health teams, administrators and teachers to identify students with high stress levels who might benefit from the program.

Recent research shows that WOW works: At a time when teen girls’ mental health is in crisis, a 2023 University of Chicago Education Lab randomized control trial found that WOW reduced PTSD symptoms among Chicago Public Schools participants by 22 percent and decreased their anxiety and depression.

Multiple hurdles, including funding, counselor burnout and distrust of mental health programs stand in the way of getting WOW to more students. But one way the program overcomes impediments is by bringing the program to the place students spend most of their time — school.

Paez-Naranjo, who is so well-liked among Abbott students that even kids who aren’t in the program seek her out, posed a question to the group.

“Let’s talk about positive and negative consequences of certain decisions. How about fighting?” she asked.

“The only positive outcome is you may find out how strong you are,” said Deanna Palacio, one of the girls.

“Why fight when you can talk it out?” asked another student, Ka’Neya Lehn.

“Right? What’s the point?” said a third girl, Ana Ortiz.

Related: A surprising remedy for teens in mental health crises

Nacole Milbrook, Youth Guidance chief program officer, said WOW was developed to address often overlooked needs among Hispanic and Black girls. “Girls have been left out [of mental health support initiatives], mainly because they are not making trouble,” she said.

A baseline study of over 2,000 girls in Chicago’s public schools, conducted by the University of Chicago Education Lab team, found “staggeringly high” rates of trauma exposure: Nearly one third of the participating young women had witnessed someone being violently assaulted or killed, and almost half lost someone close to them through violent or sudden death. Some 38 percent of girls in this group showed signs of PTSD, double the rate of service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Paez-Naranjo and fellow WOW counselor Te’Ericka Kimbrough, who works at Waukegan Alternative/Optional Educational Center, have supported students who have suffered sexual assault. Some participants in their circles are teen parents. Others are trying to resist negative peer pressure. Still others are in families that are struggling financially.

Compared to other students, Black and Hispanic students have a harder time getting mental health support in school. In-school mental health support targeted to girls, especially evidence-based, sustained programs like WOW, is scarce or nonexistent in many public schools.

Even scarcer is mental health support from providers who can give culturally responsive care. Only 5 percent of U.S. mental health providers are Hispanic. Just 4 percent are Black.

Sally Nuamah, associate professor of urban politics in human development and social policy at Northwestern University, said the tendency of adults to view Black youth as more adult-like than their white peers can shroud the mental health needs of Black children. In addition, the girls’ own positive behavior can mask their needs: In a study of the WOW program, participants were found to have strong school attendance and at least a B average, even as more than a third showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“They are perceived as resilient and possessing grit,” Nuamah said. “This obscures the real mental health needs of students of color and perpetuates institutionally racist policies because these students are not perceived as needing the same resources.”

Serving students where they are physically present nearly 200 days per year is one way to fill the too-often unmet need for support, Nuamah said.

“WOW is the only [school-based] organization that does what it does to the extent that it does,” she said. “Most [mental health] services are offered out of school.”

“Before I came here, I was not finding myself at all.”

Ana Ortiz, student, Robert Abbott Middle School

Laurel Crown, Youth Guidance senior research and evaluation manager, said the nonprofit is working to figure out just what parts of the program work best. End-of-school-year participant surveys, which use measures similar to those used in the Education Lab study, suggest that the relationships developed between WOW counselors and participants are a key reason the program is effective.

“Our theory of change is that WOW works because … [students] are attending this incredibly powerful support group every week and this support person is there every day in the school for them,” Crown said.

WOW counselors are “systemically engaged” in the schools where they are based, said Fabiola Rosiles-Duran, WOW program supervisor for Waukegan. They stay informed about whole-school dynamics by being part of behavioral health team and all-staff meetings.

Counselors Kimbrough and Paez-Naranjo added that daily access to teachers and staff provides wraparound support for their students. The counselors’ presence also helps them respond to acute situations immediately and follow up on student progress each school day.

“If I need extra support with a student, I can lean on the school behavioral health team,” Kimbrough said. She added that if she has a student in crisis, being able to see that student
regularly helps her know if their interventions are working.

RELATED: Another tool to improve student mental health? Kids talking to kids

Providing intensive support to students every school day can be emotionally taxing for WOW counselors. Youth Guidance provides group training and individual support to help counselors maintain their own emotional health.

During their first year on the job, counselors participate in three hours of curriculum training each month plus three days of refresher courses. Many training activities mirror those the counselors will later use with their students.

WOW leaders also check in every weekday to offer support to the counselors. Those new to WOW also attend a two-day, three-night retreat that “helps counselors and staff figure out what’s happening within ourselves,” said Ngozi Harris, Youth Guidance director of program and staff development, “so we have the fuel to do this work.”

A baseline study of over 2,000 girls in the Chicago school district, which is served by WOW, found that 38 percent of girls in grades 9 to 11 exhibited signs of PTSD.

One study found that the multiple layers of support WOW offers students and staff, at a cost of about $2,300 per participant, are cost-effective. Still, that can amount to a significant portion of a district’s or school’s annual budget.

But Jason Nault, Waukegan CUSD 60’s associate superintendent of equity, innovation and accountability, said WOW is well worth the cost. Earlier this year, the district’s Board of Education approved a two-year extension of its contract with WOW and its counterpart for male students, Becoming a Man, at a cost of $4.2 million.

Nault said data Youth Guidance collects at the end of each school year shows WOW students are less depressed and anxious, more self-confident and have less post-traumatic stress.

Yet multiple implementation challenges exist for WOW and other school-based student support programs. One is that the work of counselors is isolating and can lead to psychological burnout, said Inger Burnett-Zeigler, associate professor of psychology at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

“There is significant and chronic and traumatic stress the WOW counselors experience,” she said. Burnett-Zeigler is working with WOW to develop and test an evidence-based mindfulness intervention to support counselors.

“Counselor well-being is important in and of itself,” said Burnett-Zeigler. It also can support youth outcomes, she said.

Another barrier experienced by programs like WOW is that, according to research, Hispanic and Black families are more reluctant to seek out mental health support and treatment than other ethnic and racial groups. The WOW program works to build trust not only with the students, but
with their parents and family members.

“You feel heard and understood here.”

Deanna Palacio, student, Robert Abbott Middle School

“Families of color have a tendency to not name mental health issues as mental health issues,” said Milbrook, the chief program officer for the organization that oversees WOW. “Seeking treatment still has a stigma, even for children.”

Milbrook said the school-based setting is key for destigmatizing both mental health conditions and treatment.

“Being in school and participating in the groups with other students, understanding that you’re not the only person dealing with these same problems, and talking about them in ways that don’t feel like their idea of traditional therapy” all help, she said.

Also essential, Milbrook added, is fostering a sense of belonging. “We give the participants WOW T-shirts, and now they can walk around the school identifying as Working on Womanhood girls,” she said. “All of a sudden, nobody is ashamed to be in this group.”

Deanna, the Abbott eighth grader, added that the sense of belonging WOW fosters has helped her feel less lonely.

“You feel heard and understood here,” she said.

RELATED: Nation’s skeletal school mental health program will be severely tested

Although the school setting presents advantages for WOW, it can also involve implementation challenges. Youth Guidance’s Harris said that both WOW staff and school staff want positive outcomes for WOW students, but WOW’s healing-centered approach might conflict with a school’s discipline policy. So, school staff might initially be wary of program staff and counselors.

Schools also sometimes underestimate the expertise of the counselors, and sometimes even ask them to take on tasks like cafeteria monitoring that are not their responsibility.

“It takes a year of building relationships, really being intentional about how to collaborate with the school,” said Harris. “Until that trust is built, you are an outsider.”

Paying for the program is another challenge. Although Waukegan CUSD 60 covers all program costs, most districts do not. Youth Guidance relies primarily on philanthropic support to pay for its programs.

Youth Guidance is less likely to tap into public funding sources like Medicaid because the public assistance program’s cumbersome processes can lead to higher program costs and even threaten the trust WOW builds with students and their families.

For example, WOW counselors often make numerous phone calls to parents, or visit them at home. It’s time well spent, Milbrook said, but it’s not financially productive. Counselors can only bill their time to Medicaid after a parent signs a consent form.

Despite some of these implementation challenges, WOW leaders and counselors consider the Waukegan WOW program a success.

“As a whole [group], I’ve seen a decrease in anger and fights,” said Paez-Naranjo, the Abbott Middle WOW counselor.

The lessons on mindfulness during WOW Circles at Abbott Middle School have helped Ana Ortiz build confidence in her emerging identity as a young woman. She, like her other classmates in the program, returned for a second year after starting WOW as seventh graders.

“Before I came here, I was not finding myself at all,” Ana said. “I wanted to know, how is it, being a woman? I wanted to know what other girls’ opinions and perspectives were.”

Paez-Naranjo said she has seen Ana’s growth since last school year.

“Ana has stepped out of her comfort zone a lot more. She feels more confident to share intimate details about her life and is willing to support anyone in need,” said Paez-Naranjo.

“And she is so much more smiley,” Paez-Naranjo added. “You can see her smile from a mile away.”

Later, on her way out of the Wednesday Abbott WOW circle, Ana turned back to offer a final take on how WOW has helped her.

“It makes me feel free in here,” she said, flashing one of those smiles. “I understand better about myself.”

This story about Working on Womanhood was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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CONCORD, Calif. – Aylah Levy had some catching up to do this fall when she started first grade.

After spending her kindergarten year at an alternative program that met exclusively outdoors, Aylah, 6, had to adjust to being inside a classroom. She knew only a handful of numbers and was not printing her letters clearly. To help her along, the teacher at her Bay Area elementary school has been showing her the right way to hold a pencil.

“It’s harder. Way, way harder,” Aylah said of the new grip.

Still, her mother, Hannah Levy, says it was the right decision to skip kindergarten. She wanted Aylah to enjoy being a kid. There is plenty of time, she reasoned, for her daughter to develop study skills.

The number of kindergartners in public school plunged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Concerned about the virus or wanting to avoid online school, hundreds of thousands of families delayed the start of school for their young children. Most have returned to schooling of some kind, but even three years after the pandemic school closures, kindergarten enrollment has continued to lag.

Some parents like Levy don’t see much value in traditional kindergarten. For others, it’s a matter of keeping children in other child care arrangements that better fit their lifestyles. And for many, kindergarten simply is no longer the assumed first step in a child’s formal education, another sign of the way the pandemic and online learning upended the U.S. school system. 

Kindergarten enrollment remained down 5.2 percent in the 2022-2023 school year compared with the 2019-2020 school year, according to an Associated Press analysis of state-level data. Public school enrollment across all grades fell 2.2 percent. 

Kindergarten is considered a crucial year for children to learn to follow directions, regulate behavior and get accustomed to learning. Missing that year of school can put kids at a disadvantage, especially those from low-income families and families whose first language is not English, said Deborah Stipek, a former dean of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Those children are sometimes behind in recognizing letters and counting to 10 even before starting school, she said.

But to some parents, that foundation seems less urgent post-pandemic. For many, kindergarten just doesn’t seem to work for their lives.

Related: We know how to help young kids cope with the trauma of the last year – but will we do it?

Students who disengaged during the pandemic school closures have been making their way back to schools. But kindergarten enrollment remained down 5.2 percent in the 2022-2023 school year compared with the 2019-2020 school year, according to an Associated Press analysis of state-level data. Public school enrollment across all grades fell 2.2 percent. 

Kindergarten means a seismic change in some families’ lifestyles. After years of all-day child care, they suddenly must manage afternoon pickups with limited and expensive options for after-school care. Some worry their child isn’t ready for the structure and behavioral expectations of a public school classroom. And many think whatever their child misses at school can be quickly learned in first grade. 

Christina Engram was set to send her daughter Nevaeh to kindergarten this fall at her neighborhood school in Oakland, until she learned her daughter would not have a spot in the after-school program there. That meant she would need to be picked up at 2:30 most afternoons.

“If I put her in public school, I would have to cut my hours, and I basically wouldn’t have a good income for me and my kids,” said Engram, a preschool teacher and a mother of two. 

Engram decided to keep Nevaeh in a child care center for another year. Engram receives a state child care subsidy that helps her pay for full-time child care or preschool until her child is 6 and must enroll in first grade.

“If I put her in public school, I would have to cut my hours, and I basically wouldn’t have a good income for me and my kids.”

Christina Engram, a preschool teacher and a mother of two

Compared with kindergarten, she believed her daughter would be more likely to receive extra attention at the child care center, which has more adult staff per child. 

“She knows her numbers. She knows her ABC’s. She knows how to spell her name,” Engram said. “But when she feels frustrated that she can’t do something, her frustration overtakes her. She needs extra attention and care. She has some shyness about her when she thinks she’s going to give the wrong answer.”

Related: Luring Covid-cautious parents back to school

In California, where kindergarten is not mandatory, enrollment for that grade fell 10.1 percent from the 2019-20 to 2021-22 school year. Enrollment seemed to rebound in the next school year, growing by over 5 percent in fall 2022, but that may have been inflated by the state’s expansion of transitional kindergarten — a grade before kindergarten that is available to older 4-year-olds. The state Department of Education has not disclosed how many children last school year were regular kindergartners as opposed to transitional students. 

Many would-be kindergartners are among the tens of thousands of families that have turned to homeschooling.

Some parents say they came to homeschooling almost accidentally. Convinced their family wasn’t ready for “school,” they kept their 5-year-old home, then found they needed more structure. They purchased some activities or a curriculum — and homeschooling stuck.

Others chose homeschooling for kindergartners after watching older children in traditional school. Jenny Almazan is homeschooling Ezra, 6, after pulling his sister Emma, 9, from a school in Chino, California. 

“She would rush home from school, eat dinner, do an hour or two of schoolwork, shower and go to bed. She wasn’t given time to be a kid,” Almazan said. Almazan also worried about school shootings and pressures her kids might face at school to act or dress a certain way.

To make it all work, Almazan quit her job as a preschool teacher. Most days, the children’s learning happens outside of the home, when they are playing at the park, visiting museums or even doing math while grocery shopping.

“She would rush home from school, eat dinner, do an hour or two of schoolwork, shower and go to bed. She wasn’t given time to be a kid.”

Jenny Almazan, who is homeschooling Ezra, 6, after pulling his sister Emma, 9, from a school in Chino, California

“My kids are not missing anything by not being in public school,” she said. “Every child has different needs. I’m not saying public school is bad. It’s not. But for us, this fits.”

Kindergarten is important for all children, but especially those who do not attend preschool or who haven’t had much exposure to math, reading and other subjects, said Steve Barnett, co-director for the National Institute for Early Education Research and a professor at Rutgers University.

“The question actually is: If you didn’t go to kindergarten, what did you do instead?” he said.

Related: Millions of kids are missing weeks of school as attendance tanks across the US

Hannah Levy chose the Berkeley Forest School to start her daughter’s education, in part because she valued how teachers infused subjects like science with lessons on nature. She pictured traditional kindergarten as a place where children sit inside at desks, do worksheets and have few play-based experiences.

“I learned about nature. We learned in a different way,” daughter Aylah said.

But the appeal of a suburban school system had brought the family from San Francisco, and when it came time for first grade, Aylah enrolled at Cornell Elementary in Albany.

Early this fall, Levy recalled Aylah coming home with a project where every first grader had a page in a book to write about who they were. Some pages had only scribbles and others had legible print. She said Aylah fell somewhere in the middle.

“It was interesting to me because it was the moment I thought, ‘What would it be like if she was in kindergarten?’” she said.

In a conference with Levy, Aylah’s teacher said she was working with the girl on her writing, but there were no other concerns. “She said anything Aylah was behind on, she has caught up to the point that she would never differentiate that Aylah didn’t go to Cornell for kindergarten as well,” Levy said.

Levy said she feels good about Aylah’s attitude toward school, though she misses knowing she was outside interacting with nature.

So does Aylah.

“I miss my friends and being outside,” she said. “I also miss my favorite teacher.”

Lurye reported from New Orleans and Stavely reported from Oakland. Daniel J. Willis of EdSource contributed from Concord.

This article was produced by The Associated Press and. EdSource is a nonprofit newsroom based in California that covers equity in education with in-depth analysis and data-driven journalism.

The Associated Press receives support from the Overdeck Family Foundation for reporting focused on early learning. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The post Fewer kids are enrolling in kindergarten as pandemic fallout lingers appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

OWENTON, Ky. — During a school-wide club fair in this northern Kentucky town, a school administrator stood watch as students signed up for a group for LGBTQ+ students and their allies.

After the club sign-up sheet had been posted, students wrote derogatory terms and mockingly signed up classmates, according to one of the club’s founders. The group eventually went to the administrator, who agreed to help.

Simply being able to post the sign-up sheet in school was a victory of sorts. For two years, the club, known as PRISM (People Respecting Individuality and Sexuality Meeting), gathered in the town’s public library, because its dozen members couldn’t find a faculty adviser to sponsor it. In fall 2022, after two teachers finally signed on, the group received permission to start the club on campus.

Much of that happened because of one parent, Rachelle Ketron. Ketron’s daughter Meryl Ketron, who was trans and an outspoken member of the LGBTQ+ community in her small town, had talked about wanting to start a Gay-Straight Alliance when she got to high school. But in April 2020, during her freshman year, Meryl died by suicide after facing years of harassment over her identity. 

Following Meryl’s death, Ketron decided to continue her daughter’s advocacy. She gathered Meryl’s friends and talked about what it might mean to start a Gay-Straight Alliance, a student-run group that could serve as a safe space for queer youth on campus. After trying, and failing, to get the school to sign off on the idea, the group decided to gather monthly at the public library, where its members discussed mental health, sex education and experiences of being queer in rural areas. Ketron, a coordinator of development at a community mental health center just across the border in Indiana, also founded doit4Meryl, a nonprofit that advocates for mental health education and suicide prevention, specifically for LGBTQ+ youth in rural communities like hers.

Around the country, LGBTQ+ students and the campus groups founded to support them have become a growing target in the culture wars. In 2023 alone, 542 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced by state legislatures or in Congress, according to an LGBTQ-legislation tracker, with many of them focused on young people. Supporters of the bills say schools inappropriately expose students to discussions about gender identity and sexuality, and parents deserve greater control over what their kids are taught. Critics say the laws are endangering already vulnerable students. 

Kentucky’s law, passed in March, is one of the nation’s most sweeping anti-LGBTQ+ laws, prohibiting school districts from compelling teachers to address trans students by their pronouns and banning transgender students from using school bathrooms or changing rooms that match their gender identity. The law also limits instruction on and discussion of human sexuality and gender identity in schools. A separate section of the law bans gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth in the state.

“What started out as really a bill focused on pronouns and bathroom use morphed into this very broad anti-LGBTQIA+ piece of legislation that outlawed discussions of gender and sexuality, through all grades, and all subject matters,” said Jason Glass, the former Kentucky commissioner of education. Glass left the state in September to take a job in higher education in Michigan after his support for LGBTQ+ students drew fire from Republican politicians in Kentucky, including some who called for his ouster.

Related: In the wake of ‘Don’t Say Gay,’ LGBTQ students won’t be silenced 

Because the law’s language is sometimes ambiguous, it’s up to individual districts to interpret it, Glass said. Some have adopted more restrictive policies that advocates say risk forcing GSAs, also known as Gender and Sexuality Alliances or Gay-Straight Alliances, to change their names or shut down, and led to book bans and the cancellation of lessons over concerns that they discuss gender or sexuality. Others have interpreted the law more liberally and continue to offer services and accommodations to transgender or nonbinary students, if parents approve.

Across the country, the number of GSAs is at a 20-year low, according to GLSEN, an LGBTQ+ education advocacy nonprofit. GLSEN researchers say there may be two somewhat contradictory forces at work. Fewer students may feel the need for such clubs, thanks to school curricula and textbooks that have become more inclusive of LGBTQ+ individuals and thanks to an increase in the number of school policies that explicitly prohibit anti-gay bullying. Conversely, the recent surge in anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, as well as the halt to extracurricular activities during the pandemic, may also be fueling the drop, the researchers said.

Willie Carver, a former high school teacher and Kentucky’s Teacher of the Year in 2022, left teaching this year because of threats he faced as an openly gay man. Laws like the one in Kentucky legitimize and legalize harassment against LGBTQ+ kids, he said, and may even encourage it. “We’ve ripped all of the school support away from the students, so they’re consistently miserable and hopeless,” he said.

Owenton is a picturesque farming community with rolling green hills and winding roads located halfway between Cincinnati and Louisville. Its population of about 1,682 is predominantly white and politically conservative: The surrounding county has voted overwhelmingly Republican in every presidential election since 2000.

Ketron moved here from Cincinnati in 2014 with her then-husband, seeking to live on a farm within driving distance of large cities. Shortly after the move, she recalled, a city official visited the property to give Ketron a rundown of expectations in the community — and a warning.

“It was basically ‘You better watch what you do and don’t get on the bad side of people because one person might be the only person that does that job in this whole county.’ Do you understand what I mean?’ ‘Yup,’” Ketron recalled saying, “‘I understand what you mean.’”

A few years later, she met her now-wife, Marsha Newell, and the two began raising their blended family of eight children on the farm. They also started fostering LGBTQ+ kids. Ketron said her family is one the few in the county to accept queer kids. Their children were often met with hostility, Ketron said; other students made fun of them for having two moms and told them that Ketron and her wife were sinners who were “going to hell.”

Ketron said the couple thought about moving, but beyond the financial and logistical obstacles, she worried about abandoning LGBTQ+ young people in the town. “Just because I’m uncomfortable or this is a foreign place for a queer kid to be doesn’t mean there aren’t queer kids born here every day,” she said.

Related: Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right education policies

After Meryl came out to family and friends in fifth grade, the bullying at school intensified, Ketron and Gwenn, Meryl’s younger sister, recalled. Few adults in Meryl’s schools took action to stop it, they said. When Meryl complained, school staff didn’t take her seriously and told her to “toughen up and move on,” Ketron said. (In an email, the high school’s new principal, Renee Boots, wrote that administrators did not receive reports of bullying from Meryl. Ketron said by the time Meryl reached high school, she’d given up on reporting such incidents.)

That said, as she got older, Meryl became more outspoken. As a ninth grader, in 2019, she clashed with students who wanted to fly the Confederate flag at school; Meryl and her friends wanted to fly a rainbow flag. The school decided to ban both flags, Ketron said. After that, Meryl brought small rainbow flags and placed them around campus. (According to Boots, students were wearing various flags as “capes” and were advised not to do so as it was against school dress code.)

Ketron said she generally supported her daughter’s advocacy, but sometimes wished she’d take a less combative approach. “You might need to dial it back a little bit,” Ketron recalled telling Meryl once, when her daughter was in eighth grade.

Ketron recalled seeing Meryl’s disappointment; she said it was the only time she felt that she let her daughter down.

For years, the most effective wedge issue between conservatives and progressives was marriage equality. But when the Supreme Court in 2015 recognized the legal right of same-sex couples to marry, opponents of gay rights pivoted to focus on trans individuals, particularly trans youth. After early success with legislation banning trans kids from playing sports, conservative legislators began to expand their efforts to other school policies pertaining to LGBTQ+ youth.

The ripple effects of these laws on young people are becoming more apparent, said Michael Rady, senior education programs manager for GLSEN. Forty-one percent of LGBTQ youth have seriously considered suicide in the past year, according to a 2023 survey by The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ+ suicide prevention nonprofit. Nearly 2 in 3 LGBTQ+ youth said that learning about potential legislation banning discussions of LGBTQ+ people in schools negatively affected their mental health.

Konrad Bresin, an assistant professor in the department of psychology and brain sciences at the University of Louisville whose research focuses on LGBTQ+ mental health, said that for LGBTQ+ individuals just seeing advertising that promotes legislation against them has negative effects. “Even if something doesn’t pass, but there’s a big public debate about it, that is kind of increasing the day-to-day stress that people are experiencing,” he said.

Bresin said that student participation in GSAs can help blunt the effect of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, since the clubs provide students a sense of belonging.

Supporters of Kentucky’s new law argue that the legislation creates necessary guardrails to protect students. Martin Cothran, spokesperson for The Family Foundation, the Kentucky-based conservative policy organization that advocated for the legislation, said the law is designed to keep students from being exposed to “gender ideology.”

Cothran said that nothing in the law impedes student speech, nor does it entirely prohibit traditional sex education. “It just says that you can’t indoctrinate,” he said. “Schools are for learning, not indoctrination.”

Related: College wars on campus start to affect students’ choices of college

When the law, known as SB 150, went into effect last spring, Glass, the former education commissioner, said school districts were forced to scramble to update their curricula to comply with the bill’s restrictions. In some cases, that meant removing any information on sexuality or sexual maturation from elementary school health curricula, and also revising health, psychology and certain A.P. courses in middle school and high school, he said.

Some families have sued. In September, four Lexington families with trans or nonbinary kids filed a lawsuit against the Fayette County Board of Education and the state’s Republican attorney general, Daniel Cameron, alleging that SB 150’s education provisions violate students’ educational, privacy and free speech rights under state and federal law. The families say that since the law passed, their kids have been intentionally misgendered or outed, barred access to bathrooms that match their gender identity and had their privacy disregarded when school staff accessed their birth certificates in order to enforce the law’s provisions.

School districts that don’t comply fully with the law could face discipline from the state’s attorney general, said Chris Hartman, executive director of the Fairness Campaign, a Kentucky-based LGBTQ+ advocacy group.

“Teachers who before this were willing to speak out and advocate are, as a general rule, unwilling to speak publicly about what’s happening.”

Willie Carver, Kentucky Teacher of the Year, 2022

Meanwhile, LGBTQ+ and student rights advocates fear that GSAs in the state will close or change their names because of the law. Teachers from across the state have also shared stories about their schools removing pride flags and safe space stickers, banning educators from using trans students’ pronouns and names, and removing access to bathrooms for trans kids, according to Carver, the former Teacher of the Year, who is collecting that information as part of his work with the nonprofit Campaign for Our Shared Future. The law’s broad language has not only affected teaching about gender and sexuality, he said: Educators have complained of schools banning references to the Holocaust in image or film, removing books with LGBTQ+ characters, and nixing discussion of scenes in Shakespeare’s plays because of images that may depict nudity, sex or language that talks about sexuality and gender.

Educators and school staff are fearful, said Carver. “It’s nearly impossible to know what’s happening because the law gets to be interpreted at the local level. So, the district itself gets to decide what the law’s interpretation will look like,” he said. “And teachers who before this were willing to speak out and advocate are, as a general rule, unwilling to speak publicly about what’s happening.”

For supporters of the law, that may be the point. GLSEN’s Rady said the bills are often written in intentionally vague ways to intimidate educators and school district leaders into removing any content that might land them in trouble. This year, his group is focused on providing educators, students and families information about their rights to free speech and expression in schools, including their right to run GSAs, Rady said.

In March 2020, when the pandemic hit and schools went remote, Meryl, then a high school freshman, posted a video diary on social media. In it, she strums her ukulele, and shares a message to her friends. “Some of you guys don’t have social media, some of you guys don’t like being at home,” Meryl said in the video. “I won’t get to see you guys for a whole month which is awful because you guys make me have a 10 times better life, you guys make mountains feel like literally bumps and steep cliffs just feel like a little bit of walking down the stairs.”

The video ends with her saying she’ll see her peers in school on April 30, when schools were scheduled to reopen. On the morning of April 18, Meryl died.

Ketron, Meryl’s mother, had thought remote school would be a relief for her daughter after years of bullying in school buildings. But it was difficult to be separated from her friends, she said, and Meryl also knew some of them were struggling in homes where they did not feel accepted.

“Suicide is never one thing,” Ketron said. “A lot of times people talk about death by a thousand paper cuts. As sad as it sounds, for me to have that come out of my mouth, I feel like that really speaks to Meryl’s life. She had wonderful things, but it was just like thousands of paper cuts.”

For months after Meryl’s death, Ketron would read text messages on Meryl’s phone from her friends sharing stories about how she’d stood up for them in school and in the community. Ketron said she made a promise to herself — and to Meryl — that she was going to be loud like her daughter and “make it better.” In the spring of 2020, she started doit4Meryl.

“I don’t ever want this to happen again, ever, to anyone,” she said. “I never want someone to be in that place and pieces of it that got them there was hate and ignorance from another human being.”

In 2021, the anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-critical race theory book bans movement reached the Owenton community after a teacher in the district taught “The 57 Bus,” a nonfiction book that features a vocabulary guide explaining gender identities and characters who are LGBTQ+.

The book created an uproar in the town, with parents calling for its removal and for the educator to be disciplined. After that, Ketron said the few teachers who had seemed open to sponsoring the GSA no longer felt comfortable.

Related: Teachers, deputized to fight the culture wars, are often reluctant to serve

In mid-2021, Ketron decided to start the club herself, at the public library. Each month, a dozen or so kids gathered in one of the building’s study rooms, talking about what it means to be queer in rural Kentucky, and what they hoped to accomplish through their GSA. Some of them were Meryl’s friends, others were new to Ketron.

In July 2022, the group held a Color Run, a 5K to bring together various advocacy groups from around the county and state to uplift people after the isolation of Covid. Later that year, they invited Carver to speak about his experiences as an openly gay man growing up in rural Kentucky. The students worked with Ketron and doit4Meryl to create a “Be Kind” campaign: They printed signs with phrases like “You’re never alone” and “Don’t give up,” along with information on mental health resources, and placed them in yards around town.

In the fall of 2022, after two teachers agreed to serve as advisors for the GSA, the school principal allowed the club on campus. While Ketron checks in with the students occasionally, the club is now student-led, she said. The past school year would have been Meryl’s senior year, and the club’s students were excited about finally being welcomed onto campus, Ketron said.

Then Kentucky’s 2023 legislative session began with the onslaught of bills targeting LGBTQ+ youth that eventually merged to become SB 150.

Around the same time, tragedy entered Ketron’s life again: She lost one of her foster children, who was trans, to suicide. The loss of her daughters prompted her to spend countless hours in the state capitol, attending committee meetings and hearings and signing up to testify against the anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ bills on the senate floor. She watched, devastated, as legislators quickly voted on and passed SB 150.

“All I could think about was Meryl,” she said. “They’re just starting and this world is supposed to love them through this hard part. When you’re shaping yourself and instead we’re going to tell you that we don’t want you to exist.”

In Owenton, the district follows SB 150 as per law, said Reggie Taylor, superintendent of Owen County Schools. Little has changed as a result of the legislation, he said: “It’s been business as usual.” Trans and nonbinary students have long had a separate bathroom they could use and that hasn’t changed, he said, and the district offers a tip line for students to anonymously report bullying, as well as access to school counselors.

Ketron, though, sees fallout. Fearful of bullying and other harms, she said that she and the other parents with trans kids in the school system are trying to get their children support by applying for help through Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. While 504 plans are typically for students with disabilities, they are sometimes used to help secure LGBTQ+ students services and accommodations, such as protection from bullying, mental health counseling and access to bathrooms that match their gender identity.

SB 150 has also had a chilling effect on the work of the school’s GSA, according to Ketron. During the summer, after the law went into effect, PRISM members discussed changing the club’s name and direction to focus on mental health.

Related: How do we teach Black history in polarized times?

Across the state, students and educators are grappling with what their schools will look like as the law takes hold. In March, Anna, a trans nonbinary student from Lexington, launched an Instagram account called TransKY Storytelling Project, anonymously documenting the impact of the new law on young people and teachers.

People shared examples of the ways the legislation affects them, such as making them afraid to go to school, erasing their identities and making the jobs of educators and librarians tougher. A middle school guidance counselor in rural Kentucky wrote that the new law makes it harder to connect with students and support them: “If we are the only ones students have, and we can’t provide them the care they desperately need and deserve, the future looks very bleak.”

Even in the state’s more progressive cities, the law has changed daily life in schools, Anna, the Instagram account’s curator said. The GSA at Anna’s Lexington high school used to announce club meetings and events on the loudspeakers and post flyers in school hallways, Anna said. But the group has since gone underground, to avoid bringing attention to its existence lest administrators force it to stop meeting.

“The school felt so much safer knowing that [a GSA] existed because there were students like you elsewhere. You could go in and say, ‘Hey, I’m trying out this set of pronouns. I’m trying to learn more about myself. Can you all like call me this for a couple of weeks?’” Anna said. “It just allowed for a place where students like me could go.”

But while the absence of a GSA is concerning, Anna fears most the impact of SB 150 on students in rural parts of Kentucky. GSA members from rural communities have shared that they no longer have supportive school staff to advocate for their clubs because of the climate of fear created by the law, Anna said.

That said, November’s election brought some hope for LGBTQ+ advocates: Cameron, the state attorney general who backed SB 150 and campaigned on anti-trans policies, lost his bid for the governorship to incumbent Andy Beshear, and several other candidates for office who advocated anti-trans policies were defeated too.

Back in Owenton, Ketron is working with Carver to plan a summit for Kentucky’s rural, queer youth. Ketron said she hopes the gathering will serve as a reminder for students that even though they may be isolated in their communities, there are people like them across the state.

But as of this fall, participating in a GSA is no longer an option for students at the Owenton high school. Boots, the school principal, wrote in an email that the club had changed its focus, to one geared toward addressing “social needs across a variety of settings.”

But according to Ketron, students said they were afraid to continue a club focused on LGBTQ+ issues in part because of SB 150. She offered to help students restart the club in the library, or at her house, she said, but members worried that would be too difficult because many of them have not come out to their families.

Ketron said she’s not giving up. “At its core,” she said, a GSA is “a protective factor and so very needed, especially in a rural community.”

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org for free, 24-hour services that can provide support, information and resources.

This story about LGBTQ+ students in schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter, and share your thoughts about this story at editor@hechingerreport.org. 

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As a former public-school teacher, I know that my students sometimes acted out when they didn’t receive the additional educational supports they needed. Too often they then faced a choice: Get your licks or go home.

 “Licks” meant an assistant principal beat their backsides with a paddle. “Go home” meant suspension. Those who chose the former would come back to class dejected, disengaged and depressed.

Many people may assume that what I saw is an outlier, but the latest Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) shows that at least 19,395 students experienced corporal punishment during the 2020-21 school year. Every time the CRDC data is released, I am reminded that corporal punishment continues in our schools today, and I am convinced it can be put to an end tomorrow.

To make this change, advocates must demand that their education leaders end this inhumane practice.

Corporal punishment has been banned in a majority of states since the mid 1990s. Nevertheless, during the 2017-18 school year, the CRDC reported, 69,492 students received corporal punishment, on top of 92,479 students in 2015-16. The most recent number is much lower mainly because in-person instruction and data reporting were disrupted during the pandemic.

Corporal punishment remains expressly legal in 16 states. Banning the practice in just 10 of those states, including the one I taught in, Alabama, along with Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas, would reduce the number of schools using corporal punishment by over 99 percent. Despite the small number of cases in the remaining six states where it is legal — Arizona, Idaho, Kentucky, South Carolina, North Carolina and Wyoming — it is still important to ban corporal punishment there to prevent individual schools from continuing the practice.

Additionally, explicitly prohibiting corporal punishment in states that have not yet done so (Connecticut, Kansas, Indiana, Maine, New Hampshire, and South Dakota) would protect future generations.

Related: State-sanctioned violence: Inside one of the thousands of schools that still paddles students

Corporal punishment needs to end because there is no evidence that retaining it decreases misbehavior. In other words, in the states that allow it, corporal punishment is not helping students control their behavior.

Instead, corporal punishment is associated with unintended negative consequences. These include higher rates of mental health problems, more negative parent-child relationships, lower cognitive ability, lower academic achievement, lower self-esteem and higher risk for physical abuse.

While practicing corporal punishment has never made sense, it makes even less sense now.

Ending corporal punishment is also a civil rights issue: It is disproportionately used against Black students, students with disabilities and male students. News reports have highlighted that Black students receive physical punishment at twice the rate of white students nationwide; research shows that educators’ perceptions of student behavior are based on the students’ race — rather than the actual behavior — and that these perceptions contribute to the disproportionate rates in school discipline.

While practicing corporal punishment has never made sense, it makes even less sense now that millions of students have not returned or are continuing to miss school since pandemic-based disruptions.

While states revisit their discipline policies, they should also reduce the “go home” exclusionary discipline practices (suspensions and expulsions), which can undermine children’s attachment to school. Such harsh punishments increase the chances of students dropping out and feed the school-to-prison pipeline. In addition to those punishments increasing the number of school days students miss, research shows that exclusionary discipline can decrease students’ likelihood of accumulating course credits, reduce their likelihood of graduating and lower their chances of earning a postsecondary credential.

Related: Preventing suspensions: Tackle discipline problems with empathy first

In my experience observing its impacts, corporal punishment has a similar distancing effect on students as suspensions and expulsions — making school feel like a place where they do not belong.

Schools still need to address misbehavior, of course, but there are better ways to do this. They can replace corporal punishment with evidence-based practices that help create safe and inclusive learning environments for all students. Such practices — including advisory systems, in which students meet regularly with a staff member about academic challenges, and “looping,” in which students have the same teacher for multiple years — build positive school-student relationships. These positive relationships can help prevent physical violence and bullying.

Restorative practices, also backed by research, typically foster dialogue in “circles” or “conferences” in which educators help students listen to each other and to teachers in order to resolve conflict and build community. For me, this often meant chatting with students in a hallway about why they acted out, giving them a chance to share their side of the story, regroup and refocus on school.

Recent research shows that investing in student supports, including social and emotional learning and mental health, is a better way to make schools truly safe, along with professional development for teachers and school staff. States should act quickly to make these alternatives more widely available and make schools less like prisons and more like everywhere else.

Corporal punishment is prohibited in almost every facet of life in the U.S. except schools. It is banned in military training centers, child care centers and juvenile detention facilities, and cannot be carried out as a sentence for a juvenile crime. The vast majority of children (76 percent) across the globe are protected by law from corporal punishment. Let’s use this current round of CRDC data to spur action to give our students better choices than the one my students faced.

Stephen Kostyo is an Impact Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists. Before working in education policy, Kostyo taught middle and high school math and science — and was recognized as a high school Teacher of the Year by his peers in 2015.

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Growing numbers of students need special education services. Yet there are fewer qualified clinicians who are willing and able to work in school buildings full time.

There is a new solution that exists, one that many other sectors have embraced: A hybrid, more flexible workforce.

The number of students deemed to need special education services increased by nearly a million students over the last decade, and it now makes up 15 percent of all public school enrollments.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates a 19 percent growth in demand for speech language pathologists and a 12 percent growth in demand for occupational therapists over the next decade.

Since the start of the pandemic, more than two-thirds of public schools have reported increases in students seeking mental health services.

The effects of these strains on resources are far-reaching. Students and families are left waiting for critical services, while staffers are faced with ever-growing caseloads that lead to burnout and, in some cases, departure from the profession.

Students in low-income areas are already the least likely to have access to special education and early intervention services — a challenge exacerbated by staffing shortages.

Teletherapy services, provided online via live videoconferencing, were commonly used during the pandemic months when schools were shuttered and students needed connection with their therapists.

Related: Teletherapy has been powering virtual special education for years

Once clinicians learned how to work online, many embraced teletherapy, finding that it brought focus to their time with children and offered exciting new ways to engage in their sessions. A significant number of U.S. public school districts relied on it to provide critical special education services including psychological evaluations, speech therapy and occupational therapy to their students.

But when schools reopened, many prioritized a return to fully in-person services. Even though clinicians were ready to change how and where they worked, most schools were not. In discussions I’ve had with school leaders, many regarded teletherapy as an emergency stopgap, and in my view, that was a mistake.

Returning to the old ways of doing things just hasn’t worked. Many schools that dug in on resuming in-person services with no exceptions have been unable to fill vacancies across their special education teams.

And, for example, annual data from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association shows that despite growing student needs, the percentage of certified speech language pathologists working in schools has been declining steadily for over a decade.

With staff shortages in critical areas, backlogs and compensatory time (to make up for services not provided) have been building up, signaling a need for a better solution.

Some districts are now turning to teletherapy services for special education as more than a temporary pandemic-era solution.

Some districts are now turning to teletherapy services for special education as more than a temporary pandemic-era solution, and are creating true hybrid service models, in which schools strategically utilize their in-person staff for emergent issues or high-need students, while virtual therapists provide support for ongoing special education service needs.

Data from my organization, Presence, a provider of teletherapy solutions, shows that some of the nation’s largest districts, and at least 10,000 forward-thinking schools, have adopted a hybrid model to ensure support for students, clinicians and school and district leaders.

With the capability to deliver a portion of services online, districts can offer services and stability for students regardless of their zip code. The hybrid model also enables school administrators to increase capacity and balance workloads by retaining great therapists while adding more diversity and deeper specialties to the talent pool.

For example, Newberg-Dundee Public Schools in Oregon embraced teletherapy to assess and address the needs of their students faster and have since seen positive results. Teachers in the district told us that many students appear to be more eager to attend their teletherapy sessions. They said that students often seem more focused in the dedicated virtual setting and less distracted.

District officials say parents are now requesting teletherapy services for their children because they’ve seen such great progress.

Related: These parents want more virtual learning. New Jersey says they’re on their own

In addition to supporting students and school administrators, teletherapy serves the providers themselves. The model embraces working remotely from home, with flexible hours, including part-time.

Many of those drawn to teletherapy are working mothers seeking to reduce time outside the home and retirees who want to continue the work they love in a reduced capacity.

The thousands of clinicians who have embraced teletherapy find that when they remove themselves from day-to-day burdens inside the school building, they are better able to focus on their clinical work and target their students’ specific needs.

A hybrid staffing model alone isn’t a cure-all to address students’ increasing needs or to reverse widespread school staff shortages. But as schools search for solutions to address these issues, embracing a combination of in-person staff and remote specialists offers promise.

Kate Eberle Walker is CEO of Presence, the leading provider of teletherapy solutions for children with diverse needs.

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Immediately following the Saturday, Oct. 7, attack on Israeli communities by Hamas and Israel’s resulting declaration of war, teachers began reaching out to the San Diego County Office of Education seeking guidance on how to address the war on Monday morning with their students.

Julie Goldman, the office’s director of equity curriculum and instruction, and her team spent that weekend compiling a detailed guide for educators and parents on how to discuss the events happening overseas. The guide, released Oct. 9, contains resources on how to have civil discourse on contested issues; historical information and current news on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; material on discussing war and violence in age-appropriate ways, and information on combating antisemitism and Islamophobia in schools.

Goldman said the office, which serves the county’s 42 school districts, 129 charter schools and five community college districts, has many Palestinian American, Israeli American, Jewish and Muslim students.

“We want to make sure that every child feels seen and heard and loved and valued in our classrooms,” Goldman said. “None of us can learn if we don’t feel safe, and so it’s really about creating those safe spaces for dialogue.”

The work Goldman’s office did to provide these educational guides is exactly how education leaders should respond to important social issues, according to Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

“Their job is to help students understand the world, to help them wrestle with a world which is complex and sometimes overwhelming,” said Hess.

Related link: How do we teach Black history in polarized times? Here’s what it looks like in 3 cities

Hess and Jal Mehta, a professor of education at Harvard University, routinely debate big issues in education, often from opposing viewpoints, on their blog, “Straight Talk with Rick and Jal.” The goal, according to the two, is to offer educators a model for promoting constructive dialogue among students, where two people may disagree but can still learn from one another.

Mehta said teachers and principals may be tempted to stay out of teaching about the Israel-Hamas war because it’s so politicized. But even younger students are aware of what’s happening in the world – in particular Jewish and Palestinian students who may be deeply affected by the events.

“What schools can do is broaden students’ understanding and help them see kind of the multiple truths that are there in this situation,” Mehta said.

These conversations can be conducted in age-appropriate ways beginning in first grade, Hess added. While elementary students may be too young to understand the emotional, historical and moral debates surrounding Israel and Palestine, he said, they can build a basic understanding of the region’s geography, the history of how and why Israel was created, and why Palestinians feel like they have been “trapped in ghettos.”

“None of us can learn if we don’t feel safe, and so it’s really about creating those safe spaces for dialogue.”

Julie Goldman, San Diego County Office of Education’s director of equity curriculum and instruction

It’s okay for teachers to acknowledge with students that they aren’t experts on the topic, Mehta added. “In terms of this conflict, I wouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” he said. Educators can share that they are learning alongside their students, he said.

Goldman said teachers trust her office’s resource guides because of the process that goes into to creating them. Starting in 2020, the office began putting together educator guides out of “a real and immediate need” to address political events, school shootings, hate crimes and various heritage months, as topics within the classroom, she said. Her staff reaches out to community groups and others for their input.

Goldman said a resource guide that includes vetted primary sources from different perspectives can give students and educators a way into difficult discussions without shutting anyone out. The guide on the Israel-Palestine conflict includes links to lessons and curricula from the education nonprofit Facing History and Ourselves and the Judaism-focused Institute for Curriculum Services, as well as sources from the Anti-Defamation League and AllSides, a company designed to combat media bias.

“We will have had this meaningful scholarly discussion that’s based in history and primary sources,” she said.

While the Israel-Palestine conflict has always been a difficult subject for educators, the recent adoption of policies in some states that limit conversations on topics such as race has added to teachers’ fears about discussing such contested issues, said Deborah Menkart, co-director of the Zinn Education Project, a collaboration between progressive nonprofits Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

“Their job is to help students understand the world, to help them wrestle with a world which is complex and sometimes overwhelming.”

Rick Hess, director of education policy studies, American Enterprise Institute

The Zinn Education Project recently released a list of resources and lesson plans for educators that include both Palestinian and Israeli voices, but Menkart said the focus is on providing perspectives often left out of mainstream media or textbooks. Many of the resources on their list include Palestinian and Arab authors and lessons from nonprofits such as Teach Palestine.

That has led to some criticism of her group’s list of resources, acknowledged Mimi Eisen, program manager at the Zinn Education Project. But she said it’s important that educators both share resources that aren’t one-sided and uplift the voices of those who’ve been “oppressed and stifled.” 

Classroom discussions, especially in middle school, should explain the differences between Judaism and Zionism, and Palestinian people and groups like Hamas, she said. 

Eisen said she has heard from teachers who said that even if they aren’t able to dedicate full class periods to talk about what’s happening in Gaza, they leave time at the start or end of each class to ask students to share how they are feeling, what they are hearing and learning about the issue, and to allow some discussion that’s student-led.

In San Diego, Goldman said teachers have found the resource guide to be helpful for starting conversations on Israel and Palestine.

“The main point is, are we preparing teachers not to step away but to find these age-appropriate ways to have meaningful conversations,” Goldman said. “The essence is how am I creating an inclusive space, so that all of my children feel seen and valued and they know that they can bring all parts of their languages and cultures to the classroom.”

This story on teaching about Israel-Palestine was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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In Newton, the liberal suburb of Boston where I live, parents of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim children gather weekly to discuss our concerns about how schools are responding to events in Israel/Palestine. We come together to find community and safety amid escalating hostility toward us because of a crisis we did not create and do not condone.

Schools should support the well-being of all students equally. They should help children develop a healthy sense of identity and belonging, encourage curiosity about divergent perspectives and teach the skills needed to constructively address conflict. Unfortunately, we feel that Newton schools, like others throughout the United States, not only fall short, but are complicit in perpetuating divisive anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment — and their complicity is not new.

When 9/11 happened, my oldest daughter was in school in Newton. The principal took great pains to tell the children that they and their families were safe. But it felt like she was only considering the white kids, oblivious to how others, especially Muslims, would increasingly be subject to suspicion. My daughter, just 5 at the time, got the message at school that being a Muslim Arab was something “different” and to be ashamed of.

Schools should support the well-being of all students. They should help children develop a healthy sense of identity and belonging, encourage curiosity about divergent perspectives and teach the skills needed to constructively address conflict.

Seeing the writing on the wall, our mixed American Jewish-Palestinian Muslim family relocated to Jerusalem so the kids could find pride in their culture. When we returned to Newton 13 years later, our youngest daughter found friends here, most of whom were Jewish. But the kids worried they would be ostracized if they spoke about Palestine at school, and when my daughter raised concerns about censorship with school staff, they dismissed it as a simple misunderstanding. She decided to leave the district and graduate from a school where kids from marginalized backgrounds were believed when they talked about their own life experiences.

Related: OPINION: Palestinian American educators deserve support from their peers

One year later, during the 2021 Israeli attack on Gaza, a teacher was dismissed from that same Newton school for writing a pro-Palestinian (not anti-Israel or anti-Jewish) statement on a white board. While we do not know enough about what happened in the classroom to determine if the termination was justified, the principal’s explanation to the community was definitely not appropriate. He wrote that “our students” had been put in an emotionally vulnerable position – but he certainly wasn’t talking about the district’s Palestinian students. My daughter read the letter and said it felt like being told that “others need to heal from your existence.”      

Now, in 2023, everything is exponentially worse.

In the last three weeks in Newton, as in other cities, the superintendent, school principals, PTO groups and a local antiracism group issued statements about the current violence. A few expressed compassion for all those affected by events in the Middle East. But those messages were quickly walked back under pressure and revised to clarify solidarity only with Israelis. To us, it felt as if our city was condoning the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians.

If teachers and students are too frightened to learn about Arabs and Muslims and too uncomfortable to discuss the role the U.S. plays in international affairs, how can schools help kids become informed, global citizens?

References to the historical context, including 75 years of Israeli expulsion, colonization and occupation of Palestine, were absent. Uninformed people were left to misunderstand that the deplorable violence against Israeli civilians on October 7th was motivated solely by some kind of innate or religious hatred of Jews.

False accusations of antisemitism make Arabs and Muslims targets, threatening their children’s safety, both inside and outside of schools. A six-year-old Palestinian boy was murdered, and his mother seriously injured, by their Chicago landlord who was motivated by anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim hate, fueled in part by media bias that relies on inflammatory words like “brutal” “and “violent” in relation to Palestinians. In Newton, a Palestinian American mother, who was fearful that flyers of Israeli hostages posted around the city would increase division between Muslims and Jews, removed them with the approval of city hall. She was subsequently doxxed, lost her job and now has police protection because of threats against her family.

Related: COLUMN: No son, war is not necessary

I understand why educators are scared to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. A few years ago, the Newton school district and several individuals were sued by the pro-Israel group Americans for Peace and Tolerance, which falsely asserted that the district’s instruction on Islam, the Middle East and Palestinians was antisemitic. Teaching accurate, nuanced history and providing unbiased context about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis has become dangerous for educators, not unlike the dangers they face from anti-critical race theory forces who seek to limit learning about the role of colonialism and slavery in U.S. history.

Unfortunately, that fear has led schools to avoid teaching about Palestinian experiences and narratives. To us, this censorship feels very much like blatant anti-Palestinian racism.

But it is not only Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students who suffer when fear and anti-Palestinian racism are normalized. All students do. If teachers and students are too frightened to learn about Arabs and Muslims and too uncomfortable to discuss the role the U.S. plays in international affairs, how can schools help kids become informed, global citizens?

The consequences of having an uninformed citizenry are dire. Without quality, unbiased information and antiracist education, U.S. citizens are less likely to support rational, humane policies and more likely to acquiesce to violent ones. As I write right now, Palestinian children are being killed in Gaza and Israeli hostages remain captive.

For all these reasons, Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and allied parents will continue to meet to support one another and the rights of all children. We will continue the important but often exhausting work of advocating for the recognition of Palestinian humanity in our schools and in Gaza and the West Bank. Only when U.S. educators stand bravely to uplift everyone – including Palestinians – can our schools ethically and credibly teach the next generation how to pursue justice and peace.

Nora Lester Murad is the author of “Ida in the Middle,” which won the 2023 Arab American Book Award in the young adult category and the Skipping Stones Honor Award, as well as “I Found Myself in Palestine: Stories of Love and Renewal from Around the Globe” (2020) and “Rest in My Shade: A Poem About Roots” (2018). While living in Palestine, Nora co-founded the community foundation Dalia Association and the group Aid Watch Palestine. From a Jewish family, Nora lives with her husband in Massachusetts and blogs at www.NoraLesterMurad.com.

This story about Palestinian American students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post OPINION: Uplifting Palestinian American students makes everyone safer     appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This story was produced by The 19th and republished with permission.

When Job Mayhue was a first-year student at the University of Michigan, both his girlfriend and best friend revealed within two weeks of each other that they had been sexually assaulted.

“I obviously knew that rape and sexual violence was an issue but had not had such clear proximity to it,” he said. “It hurts you different when it’s somebody that you know and love. I just was thinking, ‘I don’t want this to ever happen to anybody else.’”

Mayhue got involved with organizations that focus on sexual violence prevention, ultimately becoming a leader with It’s On Us, a national nonprofit program that works to support survivors and end college sexual assault. Having recently served as chair of It’s On Us’ male-identifying student athletes caucus, Mayhue — who graduated in the spring — found that men on college campuses simply are not adequately informed about sexual violence and consent.

“The trainings that we get — sometimes they aren’t even trainings — they’re just not enough,” Mayhue said. “They’re much more about checking the box rather than actually changing minds and hearts about issues. Obviously, that’s not effective.” 

“Engaging Men Part 2: Measuring Attitudes and Behaviors” is a study of 1,152 college men across the nation conducted in partnership with the market research firm YouGov. The report is a follow-up to a survey completed last year.

The new study found that 45 percent of respondents reported that they had not received sexual assault prevention training from their higher education institution and up to a third of those who did were ill equipped to identify and intervene in potentially violent interactions or relationships. Only 34 percent of respondents received formal training about consent in school, and just under a quarter (24 percent) of men learned about dating, sex and relationships in their K-12 education, meaning they had no baseline understanding of these issues or experience with comprehensive sex ed before starting college.

The report recommends several interventions, including a need for higher education institutions to offer comprehensive sex ed; effective trainings on campus sexual assault; prevention education that includes information on healthy relationships; bystander training; and a uniform definition of consent developed by policymakers.

Related: The latest group to get special attention from college admissions offices: men

“The vast majority of the men that we surveyed indicated that the ways that they learned about sex and relationships were from family or friends, the media, pornography or social media,” said Tracey Vitchers, executive director of It’s On Us. “You can’t guarantee that the information that they’re learning from those sources is accurate or healthy or comprehensive. In order to have effective prevention education, young men also need to have some form of comprehensive sex education prior to or in conjunction with the prevention education their colleges are providing them.”

The problem, Vitchers continued, is that most colleges do not provide comprehensive sex education based on the assumption that students already received it in grade school. But California, Oregon and Washington are the only three states that require comprehensive sex ed to be taught in all schools. 

“In order to have effective prevention education, young men also need to have some form of comprehensive sex education prior to or in conjunction with the prevention education their colleges are providing them.”

Tracey Vitchers, executive director of It’s On Us

“It sort of ties into this larger challenge that we see nationwide where the college level is the first time that there are federal mandates for institutions to provide comprehensive sexual assault prevention education under the Clery Act,” said Vitchers, referencing the federal statute requiring colleges and universities to compile campus crime data, support survivors and identify the policies they’ve adopted to make campuses safer. “Whereas sex education and healthy relationship education or sexual violence prevention education at the K-12 level is controlled by the state, and there isn’t a national mandate.”

As a result, some K-12 students might not receive any sex ed, others might receive abstinence-only instruction and a select group might receive comprehensive sexuality education. These disparities have a negative impact on young men receiving sexual violence prevention education when they get to college, Vitchers said.

“If you ask somebody to be an active bystander, but they’ve never been educated on what a scenario is where they might have to be one or they don’t know how to interpret somebody else’s body language or behavior or if they don’t know that the behavior of their friend towards their girlfriend is unhealthy, how are they supposed to know that’s the moment to step in?” Vitchers asked.

Eighth grade is the only time 23-year-old Mayhue, who is from Chicago, recalled receiving sex ed instruction before college. Sexuality education is optional in Illinois. In middle school, Mayhue said the curriculum he did get focused mostly on scare tactics. The message amounted to: “Don’t have sex; you’ll get STDs. Be abstinent.” Topics such as consent or rape did not come up, he said, making his college years the first time he seriously pondered the significance of sexual violence.

Louis DiPede, a junior at Temple University in Philadelphia, had a similar experience. He said that he never received instruction about sex ed, dating or relationships at his private high school in northern New Jersey. A political science and criminal justice major, he decided to play an active role in sexual violence prevention after taking a class on sex crimes at Temple. Since then, the 21-year-old has become an It’s On Us leader, now serving as its fraternity caucus chair.

“We want to make sure that we’re telling people that, ‘It’s OK to have sex, but here’s how to do it safely,’” DiPede said. “‘It’s OK to have sex, but you have to ask for consent, and here’s how consent works. Here’s situations where you can’t consent.’ So, I think those are so important when we talk about sex ed and how the field as a whole needs to develop a holistic approach as well as actually get into schools.”

Related: How anti-abortion centers teach sex ed inside public schools

He is president of the Phi Mu Delta fraternity chapter at Temple and said that he’s proud of the organization for raising awareness about healthy forms of masculinity and being inclusive of  LGBTQ+ experiences, including how the queer community addresses sexual violence. According to “Engaging Men Part 2,” LGBTQ+ men and men of color were more likely to accurately identify unhealthy or abusive relationship behaviors than other groups of men.

“It’s very interesting that you have students who come from historically excluded communities who are better educated on these issues, whereas potentially their white or straight or cisgender counterparts are not as well educated,” Vitchers said. “And I think that that’s just really fascinating, and it’s something that we are really thinking about digging into more.”

DiPede wants Greek letter organizations to improve how they educate members about sexual assault. The It’s On Us report found that fraternity members, along with athletes, are more likely to receive sexual violence prevention training than other groups of college men. Still, Greeks “displayed a lack of understanding of when sexual assault can occur and who can be a survivor of sexual assault,” the report found.  

Some of the college men he’s encountered hesitate to get involved in sexual violence prevention because they believe it is a cause for victims only, DiPede said. 

He tells men that they don’t need a particular backstory to become an advocate and that simply listening or supporting the work of others may be helpful, he said. Eventually, they will be ready to take part in an open and honest dialogue about sex, relationships and consent. 

“We just need to get the right people in the room and equip them with the toolbox, so they can go back and help other people,” DiPede said. 

Sometimes, it is the men themselves who need support as survivors. Last year, the University of Michigan announced that it would pay a $490 million settlement to more than 1,000 current and former male students who said that a sports doctor fondled their genitals and subjected them to unneeded prostate and hernia examinations during his nearly 40-year tenure at the school.

“If you were to go to anybody and say, ‘I am telling you this because you are potentially a violent person,’ and that person feels that fundamentally they’re not, that’s going to cause that person to get defensive and tune out. That is something that we’ve seen across all of the research that we’ve done, that the young men on college campuses find that [prevention education] is either completely ‘name, blame, shame’ or is irrelevant to them as men within their campus community.”

Tracey Vitchers, executive director of It’s On Us

Students protested the university for failing to respond to the allegations against the doctor much sooner. Mayhue invited men to discuss the controversy, but many brushed off what happened or simply didn’t feel comfortable discussing it, he said.

“Some guys didn’t know what to do with the weight of rape,” he said. When men do open up about their own experiences with sexual violence, however, it influences other men to do so, Mayhue added.

“It just creates a space where someone can say, ‘Hey, this happened to me, and if it’s happened to you, you’re safe here,’” he said.

Many colleges implement sexual assault awareness and prevention education programs that send the opposite message — that not only overlook that men can be victims of sexual violence but characterize all men as would-be perpetrators, Vitchers told The 19th.

“That immediately causes them to tune out because … that puts their guard up,” she said. “If you were to go to anybody and say, ‘I am telling you this because you are potentially a violent person,’ and that person feels that fundamentally they’re not, that’s going to cause that person to get defensive and tune out. That is something that we’ve seen across all of the research that we’ve done, that the young men on college campuses find that [prevention education] is either completely ‘name, blame, shame’ or is irrelevant to them as men within their campus community.”

The online platforms that higher education institutions have relied on since the COVID-19 pandemic shut schools down three years ago have added to the problem, according to Vitchers. They don’t reflect what most college campuses are like today and don’t give students the opportunity to ask questions or take part in role-playing discussions. They’re more like risk-management solutions than prevention education courses because they don’t include activities that “get to the heart of some of the nuances or biases or confusion that students have about some of these topics,” she said. Students pick up on the message that the schools aren’t invested in the issue and mentally and emotionally check out, too.

It doesn’t have to be this way, Vitchers said.

When It’s On Us officials have gathered college men in a room to discuss sexual assault, they have found that the students want to ask hard questions and engage in an intentional conversation. 

“We want to see a shift in the way that colleges invest in prevention education to actually being student-centered because otherwise students are going to continue to look elsewhere for this information,” Vitchers said. “And the information might not be wholly accurate or may be laden with really harmful myths about sexual violence and rape and who can or cannot be a perpetrator.”

Misinformation is one reason prevention advocates want to connect with a broad swath of college men about sexual violence. But DiPede is also motivated to cast a wide net because of how pervasive this kind of misconduct is.

“I think everyone is impacted by sexual assault,” he said. “We’re suffering at a societal level because of it.”

This story was produced by The 19th and republished with permission.

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Dora Ramos is a family child care provider in Stamford, Connecticut, where the temperature climbed above 90 degrees for a few days in July. She takes care of children in her home, which has a large backyard, and was able to adapt, still getting the children outside, even on the hottest days.

“Our parents bring the children at 7:10 a.m., so we bring them outside very early — first thing,” she said. “We have sprinklers; they use the hose to fill up pots with water and ‘cook.’”

But in Dallas, where the high hit 110 degrees on August 18, it wasn’t safe or possible to play outside for weeks-long stretches this summer, said Cori Berg, the director of Hope Day School, a preschool there. “It was cranky weather for sure,” she said. “What most people don’t really think about is what it’s like for a child in a center. They’re cooped up in one room for hours and hours and hours.”

Much research supports young children’s need for movement, outdoor play and time in nature. Regulations in many places require kids in child care facilities to have access to outdoor play space, weather permitting.

But increasingly, the weather does not permit. And leaders in the world of early childhood development are starting to call attention to the imperative to design and upgrade child care centers — and the cities where they are located — for our climate-altered world, with the needs of the youngest in mind.

“During the smoke some kids felt very sad that they couldn’t go outside. And the caregivers had to explain to them what was wrong.”

Jessica Sager, who runs the network All Our Kin

“They have the least responsibility for causing the climate crisis but will bear the brunt of it,” said Angie Garling, vice president for early care and education for the Low Income Investment Fund, and a member of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force, which has just issued its first set of recommendations. (Full disclosure, I’m an advisor to This Is Planet Ed, which convened the task force in collaboration with the think tank Capita.)

“One of the things we have to do is take the climate resources coming through the Inflation Reduction Act, and make sure that we prioritize young children, both in multifamily housing and early care/education,” said Garling. But while children under 5 have a developmental need to spend time outside, extreme weather — whether heat, wildfire smoke or other air pollution — is particularly dangerous for this age group. Young children breathe twice as much air per pound of body weight, Garling pointed out.

Related: OPINION: We must help our youngest learners navigate enormous risks from climate change

Ankita Chachra is a designer, architect and new mother working on the issue of climate-resilient cities for children at the think tank Capita. She recently blogged about choices made in cities around the world, from Copenhagen to her native Delhi, that can help preserve outdoor play. These can sometimes be simple adaptations. When it’s very hot, Ramos, for example, takes her children outside first thing in the morning.

“Copenhagen has parks that do flood with extreme rain,” Chachra said, but permeable surfaces, like grass, allow the water to drain away quickly. “Asphalt, rubber, and metal get extremely heated when you don’t have shade to protect those surfaces. Grass, mulch, and wood absorb heat differently. A shaded street or area is 4 degrees Celsius cooler than those that don’t have shade,” she added. And when cities make room for parks over cars, there is more equitable access to safe, cooler outdoor space.

Cori Berg, in Dallas, is grateful for her yard’s “two giant pecan trees — those giant shade structures are really expensive.”

When children just can’t go outside, early child care educators said they have to improvise. Jessica Sager, whose network All Our Kin supports in-home family child care providers in 25 states, did an informal survey at The Hechinger Report’s request to ask providers how they are coping with extreme weather.

“One of the things we have to do is take the climate resources coming through the Inflation Reduction Act, and make sure that we prioritize young children, both in multifamily housing and early care/education.”

Angie Garling, vice president for early care and education for the Low Income Investment Fund, and a member of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force

“I heard a lot of stories about the wildfires in particular,” she said — the smoke from Canadian fires affected at least 120 million Americans this summer. “Our educators had air purifiers — we had gotten them during Covid. Our coaches had already worked with educators about doing indoor gross motor play — obstacle courses, scavenger hunts. Balls, scarves, parachutes. Putting a mattress on the floor and letting kids jump up and down. A lot of song and dance activities. Or putting colored tape on the floor and pretending it’s a balance beam. ”

On a city-wide level, some have proposed bringing back free or cheap indoor playspaces, such as the McDonald’s ball pit, perhaps repurposing disused shopping malls.*

But despite all this creativity, it’s emotionally difficult for both providers and children when children can’t play outside because of severe weather and other hazards — Berg’s “cranky weather.”

“During the smoke some kids felt very sad that they couldn’t go outside,” said All Our Kin’s Sager. “And the caregivers had to explain to them what was wrong.” There’s a “real parallel to what caregivers had to do during Covid,” to make a scary reality understandable for little kids, she said.

Garling and other policymakers are conscious that they are bringing up climate threats at a time when the early childhood sector already feels besieged.

The United States government spends much less than the average of its peer countries on early child development in a good year, and supplemental funds provided during the pandemic have just fallen off a cliff, leaving the sector even more cash starved. Group child care in private homes is often parents’ most affordable solution: The National Center for Education Statistics says 1 in 5 children under 5 spend time in these settings.

Related: COLUMN: Want teachers to teach about climate change? You’ve got to train them

But these home-based programs pose a major infrastructure challenge. Garling’s organization recently released a new interactive map showing that in New York City, these centers often — 37.2 percent of the time — include basement space. And 1,638 centers, serving 22,000 children, are at risk of flooding in storms such as the one that hit the city with more than 8 inches of rain on September 29.

“At times it feels overwhelming. There’s so many things early care and education professionals have to worry about,” Garling said. But on the other hand, she argued, there are federal funds the sector can and should claim for retrofitting and upgrades now.

“I feel like there are current opportunities through [the Inflation Reduction Act] that are creating more urgency — in a good way,” she said. “This is not something I was talking about two years ago and now it is 80 percent of what I talk about all the time. “

“They have the least responsibility for causing the climate crisis but will bear the brunt of it.”

Angie Garling, vice president for early care and education for the Low Income Investment Fund, and a member of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force

In the meantime, early childhood educators are working hard to instill a love of nature in the children they care for, in all kinds of weather. Berg has been taking her teachers on nature walks, and introduced a curriculum about Texas’s many state parks. 

The Connecticut child care owner, Ramos, who grew up visiting a farm in her native Peru, sees empathy blooming in her toddlers as they encounter the natural world. “One day a one year old was walking and saw a little slug on the ground,” she recounted. “He points — ‘Oh no, oh no!’ He was so sad. The father immediately went down, picked it up and put it on the grass. It made my day.”

*Clarification: This sentence has been updated to clarify the support for indoor play spaces.

This column about outdoor play was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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In one of my recent courses, a first-year student made comments about how many spaces on campus were dehumanizing, with people walking around “like robots.”

She spoke about how her first quarter in college brought significant mental health challenges related to sleep deprivation, isolation and course withdrawals. She seriously considered dropping out.

This same student also shared that our classroom was the first place she felt she could call her own on campus — a space where she could focus on learning rather than grades, explore issues relevant to her world and have authentic human conversations about life. She credited the course with rekindling her passion for learning, fostering her confidence and helping her develop meaningful connections.

Her story offers a salient example of how campuses can not only create toxic breeding grounds for mental health struggles but also foster spaces where students thrive.

Research and a plethora of anecdotal evidence tell us that campuses do far too much of the former and not enough of the latter. If this is so, how can colleges turn the tide to become more a part of the solution than we are a part of the problem?

College students continuously deal with a wide range of stressors, from racial discrimination to immense financial insecurity. It can take a toll on their well-being, yet campuses often fail to help students navigate these challenges.

In fact, many colleges actively exacerbate them in their pursuit of fame, wealth and prestige. These unhealthy obsessions often compromise valuable benefits such as deep connections, community, spirituality and health.

Related: Inside a college counseling center struggling with the student mental health crisis

It is not surprising that students are experiencing a wide range of mental health challenges, such as paralyzing stress, anxiety and depression. In 2021-22, the national Healthy Minds Survey found that college students’ anxiety and depression were at historic levels, with 37 percent reporting some anxiety and 44 percent experiencing some depression in the two weeks prior to the survey. Moreover, approximately 83 percent reported that emotional or mental difficulties had impaired their academic performance at some time during the month prior to taking the survey.

Although some observers might try to dismiss these statistics as just a result of the pandemic, national data suggest that mental health issues were on the rise before the virus arrived. It is vital that institutions pay more attention and take more responsibility for their part in causing these trends.

Campuses can not only create toxic breeding grounds for mental health struggles but also foster spaces where students thrive.

Lindsay Pérez Huber, a professor at California State University, Long Beach, and I co-authored a report that highlights how campuses fuel mental health challenges and how they can help address them. (Disclaimer: the report was commissioned by the California Futures Foundation, among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

We note that cultivating caring, affirming and connected communities on college campuses is critical when it comes to mental health.

Networks of professors, staff and fellow students who care can become lifelines when college stressors become all consuming. And if colleges affirm student cultures, values and identities, they can boost students’ self-esteem and sense of empowerment, help them feel less isolated and promote a greater sense of belonging. Prioritizing caring connected and affirming communities helps more students thrive.

For example, research shows a boost in students’ well-being after they simply reflect on their intrinsic values within the context of their learning environments.

A curriculum that allows students to simultaneously deepen their connections to their community’s cultural values and their learning environment can help them feel like they belong to both. Research also shows that culturally relevant learning experiences improve academic success.

Ethnic Studies programs provide a strong model for creating such learning environments. Unfortunately, they typically are undervalued and under political attack. In such contexts, they should not be asked to bear the brunt of responsibility for cultivating these culturally relevant learning spaces on their campuses.

Instead, campuses should provide mental health services that are culturally responsive, via professionals who understand diverse student backgrounds and experiences. Offering counseling services, support groups and outreach programs designed for diverse communities can help students feel understood and supported.

However, students have to know about these services and be able to easily access them.

This requires campuses to provide clear and accessible support, rather than leaving it up to students to find their own way through their institutions’ ever-increasingly complex bureaucracies.

Related: STUDENT VOICE: After confronting mental health struggles in college, I’m now helping others

Many of us who care about the holistic well-being of our students are watching mental health problems proliferate on our campuses and have been disappointed by the neglect of this growing crisis.

We need to stop pretending we have had no role in creating this mental health pandemic.

Any institution that preoccupies itself with chasing money and prestige while expecting students to sacrifice their health for a degree cannot call itself successful.

For colleges to effectively address the current mental health crisis and effectively fulfill their social responsibility, we must accept that we are part of the problem. We should actively work to address it.

Samuel D. Museus is professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is a nationally recognized expert on issues of equity and student thriving, and he co-authored the report “Degrees of Distress.”

This story about the student mental health crisis was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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