Children’s distress lingers from COVID
Last week, at several schools across HISD, the school district hosted turkey giveaways and fall festivals and coordinated meal deliveries to families with the help of community partners including the Houston Food Bank.
More than a bit of feel-good holiday cheer, these events are part of a critical approach to education that envisions schools as community hubs, where parents can come for everything from health care to school supplies. Such “wraparound” supports have been around for years thanks to a campusby-campus system that relies in large part on community organizations. Get a dental checkup here, backpacks stuffed with school essentials there.
These sorts of supports are essential as we enter a “post-pandemic” world where, for many, the toll of the pandemic is still very much present. As resilient as children are, they have been through countless stressors and, with reports of rising mental health crises and increasing needs across campuses, it's clear: The kids are not all right.
State legislators have said they are prioritizing mental health next session and with a sizable surplus in hand, they will have ample opportunity to make good on that promise.
A series of new reports on student needs from the Kinder Institute for Urban Research's Houston Education Research Consortium, released this month, found that students, staff and parents all expressed a need for more mental health support. Children as young as third grade said they struggled with negative emotions and worried about friends, family and school. At some campuses, the share of young students struggling with mental stressors was as high as 85 percent, according to the report.
In collaboration with the Houston Independent School District, the research group had done a similar survey in 2019 asking a range of questions about non-academic challenges.
“This time around mental health really stood out as the basic challenge,” said Kori Stroub, associate director of HISD research and co-author of the reports along with Camila Cigarroa Kennedy, a research analyst with HERC.
This data underscores what alarmed many since the early days of the pandemic, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found a nationwide spike in emergency room visits among children seeking mental health care. With Texas ranking at the absolute bottom of state per capita spending on mental health care, children have largely been left to bear the burdens of unprecedented strain with few supports.
Though the HERC surveys were conducted over several months during the 2021-2022 school year, the need appears to be far from over.
Just this month, the Chronicle reported on “surging emergency room visits” at Texas Children's Hospital where “for the first time, there were more referrals to behavioral health care services than any other subspeciality.”
The surveys also asked about physical health needs and basic needs, including food, clothes and home and hygiene supplies. Just under a fifth of students in third through sixth grade said they often or always did not have enough food. Roughly a fifth of parents, meanwhile, reported having trouble paying the rent or mortgage, affording transportation and buying food. All of these needs are interconnected and addressing them together can have exponential benefits.
For several years, the district's wraparound services department has tried to bring critical services, including food, clothing and dental and vision checkups, to schools. The department benefited from pandemic-era funding. The campus-based wraparound services fund was allotted almost $9.5 million in elementary and secondary school relief for the current school year.
But, as anyone familiar with the budget shortfall facing the district knows, those are just temporary resources and many of the wraparound services rely on philanthropy from partner organizations and collaboration with nonprofits such as Communities in the Schools. And though the pandemic most definitely exacerbated the need for such wraparound services, that need existed prior and will likely persist after the funds run out, especially as families across Houston face a similar dwindling of federally funded pandemic assistance for rent and other needs that kept so many afloat.
The state meanwhile, promised to redouble its rather dismal mental health spending after the Uvalde massacre. But so far, there's no particular number behind that pledge. Gov. Greg Abbott approved a measly $10 million immediately after the shooting for telehealth and treatment for at-risk kids, according to the Texas Tribune, but, in the shadow of his $4.4 billionand-growing Operation Lone Star, it's clear he puts a priority on political grandstanding along the border.
Let's hope legislators take the crisis facing Texas children more seriously, as Republican House Speaker Dade Phelan seemed to when he proposed $100 million in new mental health funding for children this summer in a letter to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick ahead of the school year. Though that proposal was in response to the deadly shooting, the trauma of the pandemic should also be considered an urgent crisis by the state.
There are few signs left of the pandemic. One of the last visible ones here in Houston can be seen on the south side of the four-lane Quitman bridge over I-45 that connects the Heights to the Near Northside. There, the COVID-19 Memorial Fence features a small collection of yellow signs, hearts and ribbons clinging to the chain-link metal, the downtown skyline in the distance. The losses so many of us experienced throughout the pandemic are far from over. While some have eased, others have persisted. More than 25,600 Texas children lost a caregiver due to the pandemic, according to estimates from Children's Defense Fund Texas.
In January when the next Legislature meets, they should make clear where their priorities are and, for the sake of our children, those must be in the classroom.
Legislature should fund services at schools to address surge.