Sunday, June 13, 2021 | 2 a.m.
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For students, the last day of the school year is usually a milestone met with an exhilarating combination of the relief that comes from crossing a finish line, along with the promise of summer adventures to come. However, this summer that sentiment is challenged as students, parents and educators not only get ready to leave behind a year of schooling that was unlike any other, but also struggle to make sense of the changes and negative repercussions created in its wake.
A variety of metrics, including a drastic increase in failing grades and tragic surge in student suicides, indicate a population of young people that were underprepared for the sudden transition to distance learning and are now burned out from a year of adapting to an entirely different school system.
This data also shows what we at CORE know from our work as an education-focused nonprofit: that historically under-resourced minority students are suffering the negative impacts of these changes far more than their affluent peers. We encourage educators, parents and students to recognize that this summer presents a crucial period for utilizing federal funding to mitigate the worst effects of the pandemic and get all students back on track for a bright future in the fall.
But where do we start? The focus of our community needs to shift toward a “whole child” approach that asks: What do our young people need now to show up as their best selves in the classroom and succeed academically? They need a combination of social-emotional learning (SEL) based curriculum, access to wrap-around services, and Clark County School District education that is adapted to the ongoing challenges of a post-pandemic reality.
Providing SEL-based experiences presents an opportunity to set the foundation for more efficient and effective learning in all other subjects. CCSD doesn’t have to work alone in developing a plan for integrating this approach. Education-focused organizations such as CORE, along with a wide variety of other local programming hubs such as the Las Vegas Clark County Library District and Clark County Community Centers, provide an ideal infrastructure for a collective-impact approach that allows us to come together in collaboration and to coordinate separate pre-existing services available over the summer, while planning and scaling new partnerships to address needs in the coming school year.
SEL is often defined as the process of developing the self-awareness, self-control and interpersonal skills of students, and there’s never been a more critical need for building these skill sets among our young people. Over the course of a year of learning spent in isolation, students suddenly lost both the structure of their learning environment and that of their social lives. They are craving interaction and connection with both their peers and qualified educators that can help them make sense of the changes they’ve struggled with over this past year. While educators were able to deliver academic content into students’ homes, they weren’t able to replicate the interpersonal, social learning that so often takes place on school campuses.
Trauma-informed education expert Alex Shevrin Venet has written that emphasizing SEL has been shown to “boost academic success, decrease disruptive behavior, and reduce emotional distress in the long term,” and in our population of student-scholars at CORE, we have seen practice-based evidence that it works through metrics such as their 100% graduation rate.
As we help students transition back into the classroom after a year that may have been filled with economic and health traumas at home, the need for trained counselors and social workers is an important element of ensuring student success. For students who face food, housing or other resource insecurity, academic achievement often falls below the priority of just meeting their own basic needs.
We need to recognize that any investment made in these “supplemental” services is a direct investment in the academic achievement capability of under-resourced youth. In the first semester of the 2020 school year, 41.3% of students whose family household income made them eligible for free or reduced-price lunch received a failing grade, over three points higher than the district average and a seven-point increase from the same time period in 2019. Counselors will also stand on the front lines of addressing the growing mental health crisis that has unfolded throughout the pandemic. A recent CDC study found that nationwide mental health-related emergency room visits for children increased by an alarming 44% during the pandemic. CCSD has committed to using incoming federal funds to hire more counselors and expand peer counseling programs and other mental health-focused offerings that will be central to building a healthy learning environment as students return to campuses.
As we prepare for a new school year, students aren’t the only ones in need of meaningful learning opportunities. CCSD can also make use of federal funding to provide training that prepares educators for a system that continues to incorporate distance learning. While most students are anticipated to return to in-person learning, CCSD has given families the ability to continue to opt into distance learning.
Furthermore, in the last few months of this school year, positive COVID cases have meant that hundreds of pupils have experienced ongoing distance learning and 10-day quarantine periods. The frustrations of adapting to the pandemic haven’t been felt by parents and students alone. Educators have faced a grueling “sink-or-swim” year of work in which they were expected to deliver effective lessons without the benefit of time or dedicated training for updating their lesson plans and materials. To give their best to our students, teachers need training, resources and paid time to prepare for a post-pandemic reality in which hybrid lesson-planning and unanticipated interruptions to in-person learning are likely to continue.
The constant upheaval of this past year emphasizes that learning happens in many ways and is closely intertwined with a variety of factors both in and out of the classroom. The incoming investment of federal dollars presents us with an opportunity to re-imagine a school system that prepares our students for success by looking at the whole child. Investments in SEL, comprehensive wrap-around services, and educational infrastructure for an adaptable post-pandemic district are essential tools needed to close the growing achievement gap between young people with resources and those without.
Lindsay Harper is the executive director and founder of CORE. Joe Kennedy Jr. is the organization’s communications manager.
