London Roxy Love Murphy-Hammer, a student at Las Vegas Academy of the Arts. High School, works on an illustration for her visual arts class, Wed. December 15, 2021.
Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2022 | 2 a.m.
London Roxy Love Murphy-Hammer, like many students throughout Las Vegas, arrived for the first day of her sophomore year of high school in August to an unfamiliar setting.
The Las Vegas Academy of the Arts hallways buzzed with other students also starting their first day in-person since March 2020, when virtual learning replaced in-person schooling because of the pandemic.
The switchback was more difficult than she anticipated — even with medicine prescribed for her attention-deficit disorder — and her near-perfect grades started to tumble, she said. She started missing assignments and by the time midterms exams rolled around in December, Murphy-Hammer felt as if she was barely getting by.
Her first semester back, she said, was difficult.
“I would say, each day, it’s a good five or six hours of homework,” Murphy-Hammer said. "I’m just stuck in a hard spot as of right now in trying to get my work done and my stuff turned in.”
Around the United States and in Nevada, Murphy-Hammer wasn’t alone in her experience.
A prepandemic portrait of youth mental health in the Unites States showed approximately 1 in 5 children ages 3 to 17 in the U.S. had a mental, emotional, developmental or behavioral disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The pandemic displayed even more intensely the role schools can play in a student’s wellbeing — through the environments they create, the safety and services they provide, and the academic opportunities embedded in their systems.
Being out of school — and without the built-in safety and services they provide — hit Clark County School District students hard. District officials reported 18 student suicides over nine months of closure. That was double the nine the district had the entire previous year.
In response, the district’s Crisis Response Team rolled out various mechanisms to help students, including launching a 24-hour anonymous reporting mechanism, SafeVoice. The program allows students, staff, parents and community members to report concerns regarding safety, including if a student is having suicidal thoughts.
SafeVoice sends reports to schools’ individual response teams and law enforcement or other first responders.
CCSD also offers a call-in line during school breaks where students can speak with a school therapist. It additionally revised its suicide risk assessments to align with the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale, a questionnaire used to determine suicide risk, that gave a common ground to the school district’s risk assessment, said Joe Roberts, the crisis team director.
The COVID-19 pandemic illuminated the mental health needs of many CCSD students, Roberts said, and the school district hopes its focus on both academic and social-emotional success of students can address those needs.
“There was a little bit of a learning curve there, just like it was for classroom teachers and teaching basic academics virtually,” Roberts said. “We see the benefit of all those different systems that we’ve put into place, and we should continue — even if the pandemic goes away and everything returns to whatever our new normal is, without the threat of a pandemic over our heads — (with) these systems that we put into place ... and continue to support our youth.”
Some worried parents have turned their kids toward counseling and other mental health resources outside of CCSD to ease the pressure.
Sheldon Jacobs, a licensed marriage and family therapist in the Las Vegas Valley, said he had seen an increase in clients since the start of the pandemic. Kids were separated from the classroom’s familiar setting for so long, he said, that when they returned somewhat abruptly, their anxiety erupted.
Finding support from teachers or parents can be tricky for children, Jacobs said. Adults are also grappling with uncertainties during the pandemic, and sometimes this leaves kids’ needs unattended. Guardians should check in with their kids and be attentive of their behavioral changes, like slipping grades, to see if and what kind of intervention is needed, he said.
“One of the primary complaints from a lot of my clients is just that is that they don’t feel like they’re heard,” he said. “If you’re not that connected or that in-tune with them, you’re going to miss things.”
Kim, a Las Vegas-based mother, and her sixth-grader Layla — both of whom preferred to go by their first names for privacy reasons — said the return to in-person classes was taxing on Layla, who would typically feel sick before going to school. This was not because of physical illness; her anxiety of returning in-person had boiled over, her mom said.
“We’re doing our best to try to navigate it and not put too much pressure on her, obviously, with her schoolwork, but she tries hard and wants to do well,” Kim said. “It’s important to her, but yeah, it’s definitely been tough.”
The pressure of doing well in advanced classes during the first year in middle school, mixed with her diagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder, spurred Layla’s anxiety to nauseating levels. The child now sees a therapist.
School staffers like Sarah Garcia, a social worker at Valley High School, worked internally to tackle these issues. At Valley, students received wellness checks throughout online schooling. The school also utilized GoGuardian, a software that tracked students’ searches on school computers and pinged social workers when students Googled troubling topics relating to violence, suicide or scandal, Garcia said.
The school saw a high level of alerts when away from the classroom, Garcia said.
Now back in person, the school offers several weekly support groups and a full-time, and completely booked, therapist, she said.
“We’re seeing a lot of anxiety, a lot of panic attacks, more than I have ever seen before,” Garcia said. “Post-pandemic, every student completely isolated, so we knew that we had to run some groups to make them feel less alone, to build community and to make them feel comfortable on campus, especially if we have 10th-graders who never really stepped on school grounds.”
Students themselves are also engaging their peers in discussions about mental health issues, including suicide prevention. Delina Ahferom, a senior at Nevada State High School, a charter school, is a volunteer member for Hope Means Nevada’s teen committee, a subgroup of the campaign that focuses on eliminating teen suicide in Nevada. Hope Means Nevada is supported by the nonprofit Nevada Medical Center.
Ahferom said the committee met monthly to navigate outreach plans at the teens’ individual schools. They connect their peers to mental health resources like the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and chat about how to approach a conversation with a struggling friend.
Ahferom’s experience with the shift to virtual classes, then a partial return to the classroom — and a five-day pause this month with spiking cases thinning the educator workforce — was defined by a lack of focus and fleeting social interactions. She found the hours spent in front of her computer arduous and incomparable to her in-person schoolwork, when she could frequent classes alongside friends and concentrate more easily.
The added pressure of achieving high grades is something Ahferom said she worked to counterbalance with mindfulness, or the therapeutic act of making herself aware of her stress and ease it down. Ahferom said she had also considered seeking therapy, stigmas around which she thinks kids her age are contesting by speaking about it openly.
“Going online kind of made me focus less, and it was kind of hard to adjust back into the setting of in-person school to be honest,” she said. “Once you work to be in a better mindset, you’re able to produce so much better work and better-quality work.”
Roberts said that suicide education was also dispersed in the district’s health classes, which are required for eighth- and ninth-graders. Over 32,000 students learned about suicide prevention through their health class during the pandemic, with over 18,000 students having received it this past fall.
Senate Bill 204, passed into law in 2019 by the Nevada Legislature, requires public, private and charter schools to expand that instruction to seventh- through 12th-graders by July 1 of this year, something Roberts said would be beneficial to students.
“The district has purchased that curriculum for all those different grade levels,” he said. “It’s planned to be built into health class.”
In December 2021, the Legislature also approved more than $660,000 from the state’s American Rescue Plan allocation to the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services’ Division of Child and Family Services. The funds will support the Children’s Mobile Crisis Response Team, a 24-hour hotline that assists kids under 18 whose actions indicate behavioral or mental health issues.
The hotline saw a 68% increase in use since the start of the pandemic, according to a statement from the office of Gov. Steve Sisolak. During this same time frame, mobile teams responded to 22% more calls.
“This funding will help our teams by adding more boots on the ground to help meet the urgent mental health needs of children and adolescents in Nevada,” Sisolak said in a statement.
