Student Petition Targets Mental Health

When 12th-grader Krista Miller heard a stressed friend joke about dropping out of remote school and not being able to go to college, she knew something had to change.

The Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School senior floated the idea of a petition among friends and got enough traction that she plowed ahead.

Miller’s petition calls for shortening pandemic-era school days for New Haven students. It now has 101 signatures on Change.org. The petition asks for a series of other reforms as well: a lighter or more flexible work load, a switch to optional electives, and more mental health resources.

Some of these requests, particularly for more mental health support, are already supposed to be in place across the district. However, Miller and her friends said they have not seen them at their high schools.

This student feedback on virtual schools comes at a time when New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) classes are poised to remain remote for the indefinite future.

“People are saying that they are drowning. If you think about 14 to 18 year-olds saying these things …” Miller began, then shook her head. ​“They call us children when it conveniences them and then adults for another argument.”

Miller sent a survey out to those who signed the petition from different high schools. Respondents said they are currently or have been overwhelmed with their workload. All of them said they want mental health help. All also had outside obligations that make it difficult to focus on school. They added comments about how remote school is going like, ​“Terrible. I am in agony,” and ​“I feel unmotivated, like I will fail at life if I don’t get this work done.”

Support Throughout The Day

NHPS has ramped up mental health support for students. The school system has shifted towards mediation and restorative practices, instead of expulsions, to handle students acting out in class. The approach has been credited for contributing to a drop in suspensions; some schools have managed to phase out the practice completely.

A key part of the strategy is incorporating social-emotional learning (SEL) throughout the day. By teaching students to check in with their emotions during class, or teaching them how to advocate for social justice, teachers contribute to student mental wellness in a way that many might not recognize as mental health support, NHPS Director of Student Services Typhanie Jackson said.

“We have the notion that mental health in schools equates to individual therapy. It’s broader than that,” Jackson said. ​“A lot of schools are doing a lot of good things. I think it’s just about defining terms and framing it so families understand where it lies throughout the day.”

Since the Covid-19 pandemic closed in-person classes in March, the district has invented new ways to handle student and staff stress. Principals send out mental health resources or schedule meditations during school-wide ​“Wellness Wednesdays.” Social workers have posted office hours for teachers and parents or created virtual ​“calming rooms” where students can go if they are too upset to focus on class.

And every school has instituted a class, either at the beginning of the day or with a homeroom teacher, to track attendance and work on SEL, according to Assistant Superintendent Ivelise Velazquez. (Read about an Augusta Lewis Troup School’s sixth-grade SEL class here.)

Miller said she, however, doesn’t have a homeroom class, a morning meeting class, or another class where a teacher checks in on her wellbeing. Instead, she sometimes has a test first thing after staying up all night studying.

She does have one Wellness Wednesday. She meditates regularly, but she found the timed meditation through a computer screen odd.

Jackson said that roughly half of schools have adopted Wellness Wednesdays and more often among the middle schools.

“That’s good feedback for us if that’s the case [that some do not have an SEL class]. It is in our current plan to have a social-emotional learning period that happens every day,” Jackson said.

A Lack Of Motivation

After a two-hour conversation with her stressed friend on Nov. 6, Miller posted her petition for remote learning reforms on Change.org. She shared the link on social media and the clicks proliferated from there.

Co-Op eleventh grader Jhosean Rivera was one of the signees. He agreed with the reforms Miller suggested, and he agreed with her sentiments in the petition text.

“I’ve been struggling with online school so far,” Rivera admitted.

The 16-year-old identified his biggest obstacle as finding motivation to do his work.

“There’s not that personal connection that you have with your teachers. You spend the majority of the day staring at a computer. In person, all these other kids are looking at you. It would impact you in a way,” Rivera said.

Rivera described teachers lecturing to silence during his live classes. He and his peers keep their cameras off the entire class, and they rarely respond when the teacher asks the class a question until the teacher calls on a student by name. He keeps his own camera off because he rolls out of bed right before class and doesn’t look presentable in the way he would like. Plus, his younger siblings are home too. He can often hear them arguing elsewhere in the house during his lectures.

Then teachers transition to a block of time dedicated to independent work. Rivera often finds himself on his phone during these periods, promising himself that he will finish the work later.

“Seeing the pile of assignments can get pretty depressing. It’s a mixture of being overwhelmed and kind of feeling like you’re helpless at the same time,” Rivera said. ​“You don’t want to let your teachers know about the assignments not being turned in. That guilt starts to come in as well.”

What helps him is when teachers walk him through an assignment or break it down into chunks. One of his teachers asks her students to complete assignments in pieces during the class and sets timers for each section.

“That’s pretty motivating,” Rivera said. ​“I can do this.”

Rivera had just recently heard about the SEL morning meeting concept and had never experienced it or had a Wellness Wednesday. He didn’t know how to access school counselors or other mental health professionals.

“I’ve only been struggling with procrastination and depression. I would like to learn ways to not give into procrastination, or ways to motivate yourself if you’re experiencing depression,” Rivera said.

Miller’s Reforms

Miller, who focuses on creative writing at Co-Op, promoted four main reforms in her petition: shorter school days, a lighter or more flexible workload, making electives optional and access to trauma counseling or mental health accommodations.

Miller said that she spends eight hours in front of her computer every day for her classes and her homework. Most of the class time is filled with teacher lectures, without the group projects or student discussions that make school more interactive, she said.

NHPS invested in significant professional development over the summer and promised to make classes more engaging this fall with live classes that would not be all lectures.

After school, Miller works at a doctor’s office for four to five hours a time, three to four times a week. At home, she has to balance school with distractions from foster siblings her mother hosts as well as from her nieces and nephews. Miller’s siblings — all older than her — often call for her to fix a problem she doesn’t need to be involved in, or interrupt her to ask whether they left a key in her room, or whether she can cook that day.

These long, tiring days are part of why Miller is suggesting shorter school days during the pandemic. Rivera’s two cents is that the day should also start later, perhaps at 8 a.m. instead of 7:30 a.m, to give him time to wake up and get ready properly.

Miller pointed out that all of her survey respondents had outside obligations. She thinks schools could take some of the pressure off students without compromising learning by including fewer questions per assignment.

And she thinks electives should be optional during the pandemic. She only needs a few more credits to graduate but has to take a full schedule anyway.

The mental health support she wants to see would look similar to the office hours social workers and counselors are implementing in some schools. Miller said that she would like to see classes promote these resources.

“If you need help, the counselors are here to schedule a meeting,” she envisioned an advisory teacher saying.

Miller noted that she had heard complaints from other students about counselors who had responded to suicidal ideation with comments like, ​“Don’t think like that,” or called a suicide hotline. She didn’t think the professionals at her school mirrored the student body’s racial and ethnic backgrounds. (Jackson said that she didn’t think counselor diversity was an issue in New Haven but could imagine students having individual bad experiences.)

She said that her peers do not feel that they are able to learn in a remote setting. She thought more interactive classes would help.

She has noticed her own mental health decline during the pandemic. She feels frustrated that she manages to wade through a vast majority of her assignments and then gets low grades for not turning in a minority.

“I feel like I do a lot of work that doesn’t pay off,” Miller said. ​“I don’t want to wake up. It feels weird.”

In the past, she had days where she didn’t feel like waking up. This feeling is different.

“This is everyday. It doesn’t stop,” she said.

Not A Shorter But A More Varied Day

The Independent asked two members of the Board of Education’s Teaching and Learning Committee for their thoughts on the reforms.

“I support all of those things. I think the students are right on point with those recommendations,” said former principal Larry Conaway. ​“The message I got is that remote learning is doing okay but that it is not the ideal situation. It’s just because of the pandemic situation. We’re saving lives right now.”

A recent survey of 795 students conducted by the Board of Education’s student representatives found that the majority of students think remote school is okay, not great and not terrible. Student representative Lihame Arouna presented the survey to her fellow board members. She said that she pleased that 89 percent of respondents said that they had a trusted adult to go to for support in remote school.

Conaway said that his approach to improving student learning would be to break down the student body and look at the lowest performing cohorts.

“I would utilize learning hubs and bring students back as I could. I would look at it cohort by cohort and individual by individual. That’s my position as an educator,” Conaway said.

Board member Ed Joyner, a former education professor, is not convinced that shortening the school day is a good idea.

“I don’t think you have to make the school day shorter, just more varied,” Joyner argued.

He said that in his own classes, he would teach a concept and then ask his students to break into groups to think critically about its applications. He would focus their discussions on something that mattered to them, like the Black Lives Matter movement or the presidential election. This interesting and meaningful application helps students pay attention and remember what they learn.

He was also not convinced that teachers should lighten student workloads, either.

“A kid in an urban environment has to work a lot harder in the beginning of their education to build up the skills to get out of poverty,” Joyner said. ​“If you are a kid in New Haven trying to improve your life, and you are low-income, you have to work harder because the people you are competing against already have an advantage.”

He recognized that many New Haven students also have a more uphill battle to achieve mental wellness during the pandemic. He remembered growing up in the rural South and watching a Ku Klux Klan parade at age 16, and thinking that the world would be blown up by an atomic bomb.

“These kids had stressors before the pandemic. It’s like some cruel god piling on more — I’m speaking metaphorically. They had issues with food, shelter and clothing,” Joyner said. ​“These kids have daily trauma and the pandemic has amplified that.”