For schools, the COVID-19 pandemic has meant not only an increase in academic struggles for students, but more emotional and behavioral issues too. In response, some schools are increasing social, emotional and academic services for students. In the State College Area, the district is offering more counseling and mental health support, coordinating social support for families and increasing academic options for students to catch up. WPSU's Anne Danahy spoke with Jeanne Knouse, director of student services, and Seria Chatters, director of equity and inclusivity, in the State College Area School District.
Here is their conversation.
Anne Danahy
Jeanne Knouse and Seria Chatters, thank you both so much for talking with us.
Jeanne Knouse
Thank you happy to be here.
Seria Chatters
Thanks for having us.
Anne Danahy
The State College Area School District has kids learning in person now and has for much of the pandemic, but there have also been periods of remote learning. When did both of you start to really see the potential long term effects of the pandemic and some of this back and forth on young people? Jeanne, maybe we'll start with you.
Jeanne Knouse
Yeah, I think we actually started seeing it right away, like in the March of '20 and April. That was probably the scariest time of not really having a system in place and not having eyes on kids that we felt was a good system. And then the absence of kids who weren't coming in to the virtual setting. And where are they? And how do we find them? And how do we know that they're okay. Not to mention the kids who don't have an adult figure or someone in their home that's going to make sure that they're engaged in education. So I think it started early. That's always been a concern for us. As far as eyes on kids and reaching out, knowing that every kid's okay.
Anne Danahy
And was that your experience too, Seria, that you started seeing it right away?
Seria Chatters
We did. So one of the other things that I do, in addition to working as the director of equity, is I also work with interns at Penn State in the Clinical Mental Health Program. I do supervision of them. So one of the things that also impacted that process, but helped us in the school district is a lot of our interns, their internship sites shut down. And basically said, "Your internship is done, we can't provide anything for you." So that semester, March and April, I probably got about five additional interns that had been pushed out of their internship sites. And basically, it was going to impact their graduation. So really quickly, we were kind of like, "what's going on here, what is the need?" We have a need to check in on families, we have a need to make sure that everything you know is going okay, and this switch to virtual learning is going smooth for them. So we actually put the clinical mental health interns on making phone calls to families. Just cold calls. Like "How are you doing? How is...you know, have you been able to get connected to the virtual platform?" And that is when we really started to notice that — what we'll say, "the kids were not all right," you know, kind of a situation. Because as they were doing those cold calls, it was good that they were counselors, you know, that were making those calls. We started to notice that parents were struggling. Families were struggling, students were struggling, you know, more than we probably even knew.
Anne Danahy
And is that continuing even now, as we move into the third year of the pandemic? What are you seeing now? What are the challenges with kids now?
Seria Chatters
We are seeing, you know, Jeanne will speak to as well, later on, the kids that have had mental health concerns, those are even more severe. And then we are also seeing kids that have not had mental health concerns before having low lying, mental health concerns that we're needing to treat and support.
Anne Danahy
What does that mean "low lying"?
Seria Chatters
So I was say severe would be like severe depression, right. So a kid who is struggling usually, you see that in attendance issues. You see that in grades. You see that even in a child's appearance, right. And being able to keep up with the daily routine. A low lying is a kid that just says, "Yeah, you know, I am worrying a little bit more than I did in the past is not necessarily something that's impacting me academically, but it is something I'm concerned about, and I want someone to talk to." So it's a difference for a kid that has crippling anxiety that's causing them to not do well on tests, not do well. Versus they're doing okay, but not as well as they would like.
Anne Danahy
Jeanne, can you talk about that? What types of emotional and behavioral issues that the school district is seeing and some examples of what you're facing?
Jeanne Knouse
Yeah, sure. So I think in comparison and what I would say we do have 11 interns that we work with, and we have created this really awesome form that triages these kids on Fridays. And then the students who rise to a higher level need we integrate through our integrated mental health team, which meets every two weeks and has been doing that for probably over 20 years now. And with this team, we used to be able to triage cases rather quickly and move on our system. And so parents, teachers, and counselors come into the meeting, and they present their cases. And then we talk about what systems of support, we can provide them. And they're usually outside providers that are doing this. What we found now is that the cases are so heavy, and everyone's full. And so it's really hard to identify a systems of support for a student, when there's no capacity one, and when the services the kid, the students need outweighs the services available, right. And so we struggle with these and saying, "OK, this is more than outpatient." And I think that's kind of what we were talking about about the data, right. Our data is saying, we still have the same number of the kids struggling, it's just the struggles are more intense. And so you know, they've gone without eyes on them, have gone into this space of being able to hide their emotions, or hide their struggles for so long that it's too much now. And so how can we help them.
And so I think, in describing that, I mean, we've had behavioral outbursts in elementaries, that have been really hard to manage and identify how to address those concerns. We've had in a normal year, about 100 to 150, Safe To Say calls. This year we're well over 500.
Anne Danahy
That's the call-in line that's set up statewide for kids, concerned adults to call?
Jeanne Knouse
Correct, correct. And so the good thing is people are using that. Students are using that. Families are using that. So it's being used, and it's a good way for us to monitor things that we're not aware of, and things that happen outside of the school hours. But you know, to see the suicide, the feeling threatened, the bullying that they're reporting on there. The increases... a lot, it's overwhelming.
Anne Danahy
And I imagine that that impacts the teachers and staff directly too. Who's maybe it doesn't fall within their job duties to work with the students and to reach out to the students in that way. But I mean, they can't help it affect the just the day to day operations in the schools.
Jeanne Knouse
Exactly. It's a barrier for the child to be successful in school. And it's a barrier for the teacher to be able to provide instruction in a smooth systemic way. Right. And so, yeah, so that's when the teachers are struggling on top of this. So it just added layers of just difficulty. And no one's exempt from the pandemic, right? You know, so even as you're in this call, we're all dealing with a level of, of not having control of something in our lives that we normally would. And so it brings in another angst in the midst of everything else. So we're carrying the angst for a lot. And then we're also bearing the burden of what we do with these kids who are struggling. And then also, what do we do with the other kids in the class who, you know, have the option and the right to learn? But yeah, there's these barriers in the way.
Anne Danahy
Right, that's a really good point that so some children might not be struggling in the same way. They for whatever reason, their personality, they're able to kind of push through it and and get by and you don't want this to have a negative effect on what they're experiencing in the classrooms. How do you work with the teachers? Or Seria, how do you work with the students on that so they can be able to continue with their education and their socializing?
Seria Chatters
Yeah, so you know, I think that's something that's really important because in the mental health field, we have a term it's called "lack of insight." And what that means is that a person could be diagnosed, for example with major depressive disorder, lack of insight. Meaning that they're experiencing all of the symptoms, that they don't recognize that is what it is, right? So what I want to be really careful about because when you have something like a pandemic, that is global, happening across the nation, you have some individuals that could be, and that's students as well, be being impacted by feelings and things that they're experiencing. But because they've not experienced this before, they're not aware of it, right. They're not aware that we have people that have been, let's say, have people in their family that have experienced mental health issues in the past, or have some knowledge of that or have been experiencing it prior to the pandemic. So they have knowledge of the system of mental health conditions of different things like that. The vast majority of our population does it. And then there's also a stigma with mental health, right. So I want to be careful to say that I think Jeanne mentioned, all of us have been touched in some way by this pandemic. Not all of us have risen to the level to where we may need mental health services.
But I believe that all of us have risen to a level that I would suggest parents listening to this, that you should be checking in with your kid to just see, "How are you doing? Are you OK?" It's because for some kids, even the level of stress they were able to tolerate pre-pandemic is not the same now. Because the pandemic has impacted playdates, and socialization ,and birthday parties and coming together for kids. And so we want to be careful of that. And how we've been helpful. Teachers as even prior to the pandemic, we had something that we have been working with in SCASD, called trauma-informed care. And for trauma informed care, it really works on helping teachers in general. Like our, you know, our teachers in the general education classrooms. All classrooms across our district. To be able to recognize the signs and symptoms of trauma within students. But also the other piece is how can we create classrooms that are responsive to students who may be experiencing, let's say, the symptoms of trauma. So a good example of that is a calm down corner in an elementary classroom, right. Now a kid does not have to be diagnosed with anxiety or depression or had had a traumatic experience for a calm down corner to be effective for them. All of us have times when we may be emotionally elevated and need to calm down. So we've been working with our teachers in that. And then Jeanne has been spearheading restorative practices across our school district. And restorative practices oftentimes people may think of that in more like the judiciary realm or even in the disciplinary realm. But restorative practices is primarily about building relationships and communities that are able to connect on and to be able to commit to one another. So that's another piece in our district that has been going on well before the pandemic hit.
Anne Danahy
Right. So this was started, some of these initiatives were started in the school district before the pandemic? Jeanne, what were you seeing before? And then are you tracking it to see what types of issues might be increasing? Or what are the new challenges that are coming up? How do you track that?
Jeanne Knouse
Right. So I will say, we do have a universal screening system. So we normally, every two years participate in the Pennsylvania Youth Survey. And that's given to all 6th, 8th, 10th and 12th graders, It was given the Fall of 2019, we just took it again in the Fall of 21. So that's an anonymous screener that all the students participate in. And that gives us a baseline. And we see where our stress and anxiety is. Thoughts of suicide, bullying, and new this year was the impact of the pandemic. So we are getting this data, we had a preliminary view of what the data looks like. But we don't have the comparative analysis to previous years. So that's one way that we look at data before and after. And one thing in a quick glance of what we noticed was that our number of students who feel sad and depressed most days has not significantly risen. But our number of students who have contemplated thoughts of suicide or feeling like life isn't worth it has increased. So trying to determine, you know, is that the same group that's experiencing feeling sad most days, that is also having those thoughts of not feeling like life is worth living?
Anne Danahy
The mental health challenges, some people are calling it a mental health crisis at the national level, it's obviously it's not something that's just happening in the State College Area School District. We've talked a little bit about some of the contributing factors as this pandemic continues. But I wonder what your thoughts are about that? What's contributing to it? What are the challenges students are facing? Is it the uncertainty or the lack of control? Is it that sometimes they're learning at home? Is it that they have to socially distance from their friends? Is it all of those things?
Jeanne Knouse
I think it's all of the above. Yeah, definitely. The peer, the lack of peer interaction, right. I mean, last year, the middle school and high school students didn't get to see half their friends. Right, depending on where they were with the alphabet, you know, and that opposite. So there's a learning that you get in interacting with your peers to that it feels as though a lot of our kids missed out on a year of growth on that peer interaction, kind of do's and don'ts and learning from your mistakes. Because we're seeing an almost an immaturity in some of our kids, that they hadn't experienced that for quite some time. So I think that that plays into it. You know, in being you know, getting life back to normal, puts us in a space where we also feel like, okay, now we can can take control of our life again. And so we're not there. And so this still feels like this spiraling out of control of not having control. You know, especially people who really function well in a controlled environment. This is, this is hard for them.
Anne Danahy
Seria is that what you're seeing too, just kind of a lot of different variables going into this is what's challenging the students?
Seria Chatters
Absolutely. She is on point. And the biggest thing that I would add to that is that when we talk about trauma, pandemics, and epidemics are in the list of traumatic events. And so I think that one of the things when this was first happening in March, a lot of mental health therapists were trying to ring the alarm and to say that, "This is a massive trauma. This is a global trauma on a day to day basis, our all of our lives have been disrupted." And when a person's life is disrupted, one of the biggest things that can be impacted is the way that they see and experience life on a day to day basis which connects right back to your mental health, right? So the thing is, is that, yes, everything has been disrupted. But as well, we are all simultaneously still living through a massive traumatic event. And so, when we think about those things on the traumatic event scale, this is a massive one. So we're experiencing that. So how we respond to it is going to be slightly different, you know, from person to person. But to see that our children who their brains are developing, they're in their developmental part of life are responding to it, you know, in ways that we may not be aware of none of us have lived through a pandemic before. So there's things that we're aware of, but there's a lot of unknown, unknown, meaning things that they're not aware of what's happening to them. And we may not be aware of it too. Because we're all in new territory.
Jeanne Knouse
Yeah. And kind of they keep getting hit with little things like even, "Oh, my gosh, now I'm COVID positive and I can't wrestle." Right or "The COVID is not allowing me to sing because we have to be physically distanced." And it's just other little hits that keep a minor setbacks, right. Like even with Omicron, hitting and taking away that that advantage of being with families over the weekend or something like that. So it's just uppercuts that just keep happening in addition to the big blows.
Anne Danahy
If you're just joining us, this is Take Note on WPSU. I'm Anne Danahy. We're talking with Seria Chatters and Jeanne Knouse with the State College Area School District about the increase in academic, emotional and behavioral challenges among students and how the school district is addressing that. The districts added more counselors and social services. There's a counselor in every school, how does that work? Can any student see them? Seria, do you just, if a student is, seems like a red flag is going up can any students see them? Or how does that work?
Seria Chatters
So there's a school counselor in every school. And the high school and the middle school actually both have — middle schools, excuse me, have multiple school counselors. The mental health system kind of works in a little bit of a different way. Because of course there's several factors that we have to look at when we look at mental health care and services for students. So it's unfortunately not a process where a parent...a student could just for example, walk in and get a clinical mental health service. Because there's with school counseling, any kid can get school counseling, mental health counseling. Especially if the kid is under the age of 14, we need to make sure that parents are aware and are okay with their child getting clinical mental health services. There's like an intake process that has to happen. So the process within the school district is more I will say, with what I'm supervising our clinical services, right? So that means just like a school psychologist could see a kid and just see, you know, say, "Hello, how are you doing? How are things going?" But to evaluate a kid, the school psychologist has to get permission from the parents. We have to get permission to see a kid unless they are 14 and older. But even when they're 14 and older, because in the state of Pennsylvania, they're considered an adult when they're 14 or older, as far as their access to mental health care. Not not really anything else besides that, so I want to be clear about that. But still, even if they're 14 and older, we will work with the kid.
But we also work to ensure that we connect parents. So one of the things is that every school in our district has access to our clinical services. They have to, a school counselor will put in a request for services for a student through our student mental health supports form. And then every Friday, our internal mental health team, which includes myself, the coordinator of the SCASD-Herr partnership, as well as our clinician, that's here at the high school, Jeanne, as well as a support from the Penn State psychological clinic. We look through those requests, and we "staff them" is what we call. So what we do is we say, "OK, is this a kid that needs immediate services right now? Is this a kid that we can contact and talk to and try to get connected to the community? Is this the kid that the services could be waitlisted?" Because we're on a waitlist right now, too. So basically, I think everyone gets it — we just figure out where those kids are going to go and who's going to see them.
Anne Danahy
Yeah, that makes sense. On the academic side, what are you seeing there? Are the kids grades suffering, too?
Jeanne Knouse
For the most part, yes, they are. There are other factors that play into that. Also, there are several, I mean, two particular subjects that I think suffered through the pandemic virtual online dual kind of teaching were language and math. Because you really have to be at an endpoint to be an a new starting point. And a lot of those kids weren't there. Right. So it seems like those two classes have been really difficult. We have another program internally that we look at all of our failures and we put students in what we call this ACE program. And in ACE, we also are looking to provide a mental health support system in there also. And so these are any students who are failing who don't receive special education, in you know, outside of this in the school that don't have that extra service can go through this to get that extra support that they need academically.
Seria Chatters
And ACE is only at the high school, and it stands for Academic Center for Enrichment.
Jeanne Knouse
Yeah, I will just mention real quickly that a lot of the students that we put through our forums are also on lists outside of the district on providers. But the lists are too long. So our entire system within is to remove barriers. And that includes barriers of lists, barriers of money. You know, think that we want to make sure if a parent doesn't have...a family doesn't have the resources to actually send to the counselor, or don't have the resource to actually physically take a child to the counselor; we can bring the counselor to them. We can look in different ways of paying for those services. And so we've done contracts with various providers to make that happen.
Anne Danahy
How long do you think it could take before things get back to more normal for young people who are sliding academically? Or is that even the goal?
Jeanne Knouse
Is there a new normal?
Seria Chatters
Yeah, no, that's what I was gonna say. I think that that's one of the things that is, could be the most difficult right now. And I think could be difficult for kids mental health is to think that at some point, we are going to go back to the way things were prior to the pandemic. You know, I know some folks, you know, probably are out there, probably wondering why I'm saying all of these things. Like that's my role. I'm a clinical supervisor and a licensed professional counselor. I think in counseling, one of the best things that we can do is help kids to recognize that there's the way that your life was prior to the pandemic. And then there's the way that it's going to be after the pandemic, right. So there are going to be some things that hopefully, at some point, we will get to a place where, which I believe we will, I think we all will get to a place, we're not wearing masks in school anymore. And we're not having to be as concerned about, you know, our distance from one another, and all those kinds of things. However, there's been this massive disruption in some of our kids lives. For some of our kids, their entire high school time, time in high school would have been impacted by a pandemic. What sense of loss do they feel about that? Because it's the expectation they had of high school and then what it actually was. And so that's not gonna come back. And one of the things is that with grief, for example, it's grieving what you expected. And then what actually happens, is that we recognize that something that we are not going to necessarily get that but we learned to accept. And start to move forward from there. So you know, it's one of those things, it's the new normal, not necessarily thinking that things are ever going to go back, or we're going to regain the time that we lost, you know, in the pandemic.
Anne Danahy
And in one of the memos to the school board outlining the steps being taken it lists shifting philosophically, to being less accusatory with students and supporting them in self care. So it's that same idea of like, OK, we're not just going to go back to the way things are, maybe we need to take a look at this. Do you see all of this as leading to a kind of a long term change in how schools approach problematic student behavior? Maybe we'll start with Jeanne on that one.
Jeanne Knouse
Yeah, I actually had that conversation. We had a counselor meeting today, this morning, and one of the conversations was the role of the school counselors changed. It's no longer going to be this academic, career, social, emotional. It's going to take on this mental health role. And where are the boundaries with that, right? Because there's the capacity by which it used to be in State College School District. That our counselors were inundated with academic high expectations, right. And getting these kids into colleges and writing the letters of recommendations and making sure they are the right courses. And does their transcript look good. And you know it's changed into this. I can't focus on that, because I've got five kids out here in crisis, right. And so really, what does that look like? Where are our priorities? How do they meet their timelines and deadlines with this other thing, but then also have this other big thing over here, right? So I think it is, I think it is changing. And I think it's actually going to have to change in the training process with our school counselors and what that looks like. And I do think there will be some kind of increase in mental health awareness in the curriculum. We do have a solid, I feel a good robust mental health curriculum within our health curriculum K to 12. But I think there's going to be more of a tier one approach to that. I think it'll be more of a self care tier one awareness of what we need to be aware of in ourselves and others.
Anne Danahy
And Seria, do you see that too? Kind of a philosophical shift and the approach schools and the counselors take when it comes to working with students?
Seria Chatters
Absolutely, because I think, you know, across the educational realm, there's been, I think a slow move toward understanding the role of mental health in academics. And I mean, because it's like, well, wait, is that something that we do? Or do we just refer that out, and we don't handle that. As Jeanne said, that's changed, right. I think we're going to start seeing more and more clinical services happening within schools. Because what happens is that if a teacher is unable to reach a kid because of clinical concerns that a student has. And that kid cannot afford services, or sitting on waitlist, that child's education is being disrupted. And so if there are ways for us to make, you know, create partnerships to positively impact that, I think that that's going to be something we're going to need to do. I think the philosophical shift, as well as the school being a central place in the community for multifaceted supports, is also going to change. Because at one point, we may have thought, "contact tracing, that's not a school thing...health and... that's not a school thing." And guess what we had to do that. I mean, all of a sudden, those things, we weren't able to say, "we don't do this, we don't do that we don't do the other." There are a lot of schools across the nation that typically serve families that may be more economically disadvantaged, that we're already used to that right. They already had to pull those medical services into the district and pull those mental health services in. And I think more and more schools will have to do that.
And then the last thing is that I'm hoping that we get to a place where we stop thinking of behavior as being an isolated thing. And what I mean by that is that your behavior is controlled by your brain, right? So your behavior is typically a symptom. It's what we can see of what's going on mentally with you, right. So I'm hoping that we start to make more connections in that and move away from the philosophy of we're just treating the behavior to saying that mental health is a key piece in helping to reduce behavior concerns in students. And to stop seeing the mental health therapist for example, and behaviors as being two separate things. I hope that that's a philosophy that we get to at some point in education.
Anne Danahy
Well, Seria Chatters and Jeanne Knouse, thank you so much for talking with us.
Jeanne Knouse
You're welcome. Thank you.
Seria Chatters
Absolutely. Thanks for the invite.
Anne Danahy
We've been talking with Jeanne Knouse, director of student services, and Seria Chatters, director of equity and inclusivity with the State College Area School District. We also talked about how the school district has handled mental health services after the recent death of a high school student. To listen to that part of the conversation and the rest of the interview along with other episodes of Take Note, go to wpsu.org/takenote. I'm Anne Danahy, WPSU.
Anne Danahy
I know there was a student in the school district who recently passed away after battling depression. And that's something that a lot of the families in the area are grappling with, how do you respond or support students when there is a death in the school or there is a suicide in the school?
Seria Chatters
There's a multi-faceted approach that we implement. And I think it's really important, you know, that when our, when any of our schools are impacted by tragic events, and that could be, you know, with most recently, the loss of a student and, and or the loss of a teacher, we have a really comprehensive way that we respond. And one of the first things is wanting to make sure that we are communicating the facts that we know to the State High community. Because we know, and many times that rumors can also be tragic and traumatic when it comes to those situations. Especially for the family as well, for misinformation to be being circulated. The second thing that's really important is for us to mobilize mental health supports. And I will say over this last two weeks, we have been tremendously fortunate. We have had over 20 mental health providers that have been circulating in and out of our schools, in addition to our school counseling team, in addition to the 11 interns that we already have working in the school district. And this has been individuals who typically would not be involved, for example, in direct services like our Her clinic director, who is over the direct, the SCASD-Herr Clinic partnership, providing direct services. The owner of some practices, providing direct services. So we have been really lucky in that way. The additional piece is running groups. For students within the school, we've had a therapy dog on site as well to support. Because for some students, animal connection is a really important part to help them to open up and to talk. We have a grief and loss group that will be starting this coming Thursday at 4 o'clock after school for students. And then in addition to the students that have been, let's say were the most connected to the student that passed last week, we have also been providing specialized services for those students. So meaning that those students are already now seeing someone even every single day last week in the morning in a group for support. And then moving forward and supporting them and their families. And then lastly, on top of that, one of the most important things is we know that we're really lucky as a school district because of our location and have so many connections to resources and support. So even prior to the student loss, we had a mental health system in place. So it's important to recognize that the other thing that we did is we are lucky enough to have identify some students already in the school that we know have significant issues. And that this could trigger the concerns that they already had. So the other thing that we were doing in the background is checking in with those kids that we have already identified who are either receiving services or we know are on waitlist in the community, or within our internal system, to make sure that there is not anything that may have risen them their level of severity that would cause them to need to be treated now, right so.
Jeanne Knouse
I'll add to that just a little bit. Because in addition to impacting students, our staff are grieving a loss also. And so the Jana Marie Foundation and Tides have arranged to do a grief and loss group with some of our staff. And that's voluntarily. We just sent that out today. In addition, we're going to do a self care group offering for our group for our staff, just because with faculty and staff. So anyone working within the district that really needs that. So we often forget that, you know, they're frontline people, they're grieving a loss also in addition to our students.
