School Closures Triggered “Child Mental Health Crisis”?

Harvard professor’s warning “more school closures could exacerbate ‘full-on child mental health crisis comes on the heels of WSJ article on how schools are having to “confront a wave of student misbehavior, driven by months of remote learning. And some teachers unions want to shut down what again?

“We knew it was going to be a problem with kids transitioning back from virtual, because they haven’t been in school for a couple of years, one Louisiana principal told the newspaper after a brawl broke out in a hallway between classes. “You have 8th-graders that are now 10th-graders … and no time to really acclimate.” In Dallas, disruptive classroom incidents have tripled this year compared to pre-pandemic levels. The National Assn of School Resource Officers said it has seen a rise in gun-related incidents.

In the New York Times, Harvard’s associate professor wrote, a return to virtual learning in the midst of the omicron variant now dominating the news would “simply be repeating past mistakes. While Covid illness “consistently shows low hospitalization rates for children, “the harm to kids from being out of school … are severe … they are accumulating. And they could last for decades.” All students’ grades “tanked in key areas last year,” he noted, but disadvantaged kids fair the worst. “We have a full-on child mental health crisis on our hands” as the “proportion of pediatric hospital visits for mental health reasons increased significantly in 2020 as the pandemic hit & school closed, and the trend only worsened” as the year wore on.

Davd Soul