Prioritizing Student Mental Health in a Post-Pandemic World

By Keva Rale

It is time to address mental health in our schools.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused anxiety and depression rates to skyrocket -- specifically among children and young adults who have been isolated from their classrooms and peer support groups for over a year. Many students will be arriving back to school laden with significant trauma and stress, and will require increased support from counselors and teachers to readjust to in person learning. I count myself among these students. I, like many of my college classmates, already suffered from intense anxiety before the pandemic and found my condition exacerbated by many months spent in quarantine. As I struggle to re-learn coping mechanisms and stress reduction strategies that I relied on in a pre-pandemic world, everything now feels much more frightening and unknown. 

This is a universal experience. How can we expect our children to go back to school and simply “return to normal”?

Our schools must make an active and immediate push to prioritize mental health and provide students with counseling and psychological resources designed to handle traumatic situations. Unfortunately, students in California are already strapped for resources. Our state ranks 48th in the nation in counselors-per-student. That means that we are sending our vulnerable students back into classrooms without the emotional tools to function in a post-pandemic world. When our students seek out critical mental health resources, they will have to wait in line.

If we do not increase funding for our schools, our state will continue to be impacted by the effects of the pandemic for GENERATIONS to come.