Feb 14, 2022 —
CONTENT WARNING: this story discusses suicide. The National Suicide Prevention Hotline number is: 1-800-273-8255. NSPH is also online and have representatives available to talk through chat, at suicidepreventionlifeline.org.
Over the course of the last two years, since COVID-19 flipped life upside down, children’s mental health has suffered enormously. Schools are on the front lines of that crisis. Educators are teaching children, but they’re also doing a lot of mental health work and counseling, whether or not that’s in their job description.
Once a week, a group of educators come together for a special meeting at Sackets Harbor Central School, a K-12 school of about 400 students in Jefferson County.
Present on the day I sit in are Principal Amy Fiedler-Horack, the two teachers that run the school’s support center, Jennifer Berie and Sonya Esposito, and PIVOT counselor Kimmy Cring. Normally they’d also be joined by the school pyschologist and another counselor.
They sit down and open up a shared word document on their laptops. This is ‘The List’, a pandemic-era invention that looks like a long list of names, with notes and dates. ‘The List’ is how this group, essentially the school’s mental health team, keeps track of kids they’re concerned about. It started with a dozen names, and has ballooned to over 70 names this school year.
On this day, they discuss a group of girls in the middle school who have been fighting, a student who recently changed medication, the mercurial home life of a family with several kids in the school: “I think it’s going to get worse, the behavior, before it gets better,” says Amy Fiedler-Horack. They talk about an anxious student who’s been skipping lunch, another student with anger issues they want to get into the support center….it goes on and on.
Kids land on ‘The List’ for academic, behavioral, or mental health reasons. Often, it’s all three. They made it because the team was having trouble keeping track of all the kids they felt needed extra attention.
Sonya Esposito says she considers this her most important meeting of the week, because, “We problem solve during that meeting. We figure out ways to best to help the kids. And that has to be on a weekly basis, too, because it’s always changing.” She says that follow-up with students is crucial. “If we don’t, then they’re going to feel like they’ve been abandoned. And so it’s really important to stay on top of things and to stay on top of their emotional care.”
This is the kind of work that educators are doing right now, because so many students are struggling with their mental health.
A worldwide study in JAMA Pediatrics found that anxiety and depression had doubled in children during the pandemic. The CDC tracked suicide attempts in teenagers in 2021, and found there were 50% more than in the same period in 2019.
Here at Sackets Harbor, that second study has become all too real. Late last semester, Jennifer Berie said three kids told staff they were going to commit suicide. She says, “…it was frightening to me how well they keep it together and put on a nice smile. And when you realize what’s going on, I think that’s the scary part.”
But because those students said something, and the school had a support team to respond, it never went further than talk. Two of the students were hospitalized, all three are seeking treatment. The mental health supports at Sackets Harbor worked.
But it was a huge, and terrifying moment for everyone involved, says Berie. It didn’t feel like success; it felt like a sign that their students were buckling under the pressure of the pandemic.
Berie says anxieties started to mount between Thanksgiving and Christmas, with lots of students coming to her, anxious about rising case counts and news about the omicron variant. “The kids were really amped up about it” she says. “Like, are we closing down? Are we closing? What if we do?”
She says some students were also at a breaking point with being quarantined at home.
“I can think of one child in particular, she’s been quarantined four times. [For her, it was] awful, awful. Just awful.”
Desiree Matthews is 17. Her last ‘normal’ year was when she was a freshman.
“I know we try to keep up the morale…but I don’t know, it does make it seem like it [COVID-19] is never going to end. I think we’re all nervous. It does definitely raise a lot of anxiety in people that we might have to go back to that isolation.”
Matthews and her classmate, Tyler Green, both said that they feel bad for the youngest students in their school. He says the issue for the older students is that they are all too aware of what’s going on. “The younger kids don’t directly know, but with the older kids it’s like ‘uh, we’re stuck with this for another period of time…’”
Green says he, and other seniors, are trying to stay positive and be role models for younger students. “We’re having the pep rally this week, we’re having spirits weeks, trying to push the positive things in life that will help even the younger kids at such a young age realize there is more to life than just what COVID presents to us. So that we don’t have to end up having a celebration of life for a student that committed suicide.”
Green says his mental health is okay. Both his grandmothers died this past summer, and he says that was the worst time for him, but that it really helps him to focus on other students. But I can’t help thinking this is an awfully heavy burden for Green, and so many other students, and their teachers, to carry.
Amy Fiedler-Horack, the Sackets Harbor Principal, called me in early January. They were seeing this huge uptick in kids struggling, and felt like they should say something. She wanted to convey that this year has not been easier than the previous two.
“I think last year was a transition back, and I think everyone in education thought next year will be better! And I think this is the hardest year for everybody that we’ve been through so far with all of this.”
Three kids really contemplating suicide at their small school was NOT normal for them. She felt it was important that the public understand that schools and students are not in a good place.
“For me, it was overwhelming for the number of students here that are struggling and are still struggling. And I just think if our little school with less than 400 students are struggling with these mental health issues, then I can’t imagine what larger districts, here in the North Country or anywhere, are doing it without enough support staff.”
So, what needs to change for things to get better?
What Fiedler-Horack, and other principals and superintendents have said is that they need more resources and funding for mental health help. More counselors, more school psychologists. The US Surgeon General said this is a mental health crisis in kids. Educators are waiting for policy to reflect that.
She says they also need some return to normalcy. Quarantines are down to five days now, for exposures, but many educators have expressed the desire to get rid of quarantines altogether, unless a student is actually ill.
