The Pandemic’s Lasting Effects on Student Learning, Mental Health
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Visit landmark.edu slash certificate to learn more. From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. How are the kids doing? The average American student is less than halfway to a full academic recovery from the effects of the COVID pandemic. Other studies show that stay-at-home orders and the isolation of virtual schooling took a toll on kids' mental health.

And like other COVID impacts, these challenges often hit students of color the hardest. In the first of our series of shows examining the effects of the pandemic as we reach five years since lockdown, we'll look at whether the kids are all right. That's all coming up next, right after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.

There is no single date on which the pandemic began, but roughly five years ago, the virus was spreading rapidly across the world and everything was about to change. And when I say everything, I really do mean everything. It's almost impossible to put yourself back in those days, the thick uncertainty in the air, and soon all the children of the country at home.

Things that had seemed solid and sure turned out to be mere social agreements. No, not everybody had to go into work. Yes, the government could just send people money to keep the economy afloat. Yes, you had to wear a mask. And no, kids did not have to go to school. It seems to me that our society never really healed and reset from this break.

Instead, we learned how to walk with all these broken bones. That is to say, problems that began at the height of the pandemic have not really been addressed, and nowhere is that more apparent than with young people. The pandemic was really, really bad for kids' performance in school and on their mental health in general. Today, we're going to talk about what happened, efforts to repair some of the harms, and get your insights into the children in your own life and how they were affected and have recovered.

We're joined by Robin Lake, Executive Director on the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Welcome, Robin. Thank you. It's great to join you. We're also joined by Petra Steinbushel, Medical Director, Mental Health and Child Development at Benioff Children's Hospital in Oakland. Welcome, Petra.

Thank you. Nice to meet you. Nice to have you. And we have Emily Zavala, who is a subject area coordinator in mental health and wellness at Eastside Union High School District in San Jose and a licensed clinical social worker. Welcome, Emily. Thank you. Happy to be here. Let's start with you, Emily. I mean, at the time, you were a social worker at Silver Creek High School in San Jose. I mean, what do you remember of those early weeks?

I remember that it was a really crazy time and traumatic for all of us, right? So it was almost unreal, the fact that we were going to stay home. And very quickly as a clinical team, we huddled up and said, this is really, really bad for kids. Like we were highly concerned about the impact of isolation on our teenagers in our high schools. Yeah.

Patriot, how about you? Were you having that same kind of intuition at the beginning that this could have a really serious mental, emotional health impact on kids? Absolutely. And my role as director of what's now called the California Child and Adolescent Mental Health Access Portal, which is a consultation program for primary care providers and pediatrics serving youth age 0 to 25.

We're seeing a really significant increase in the complexity, acuity, and also just the rates of presentations within pediatrics, within primary care for increased anxiety, increased rates of depression, also eating disorders and concerns for feeling hopeless and suicidal thinking.

And was that counter trend in the pandemic or was it sort of accelerating trends that were already kind of in the air?

It was definitely something that was, you know, was present well before the pandemic and the pandemic certainly accelerated or, um, heightened, you know, feelings of anxiety and depression really across the lifespan for all ages. And, um, and then it had a really disproportionate effect on young people, especially teens and young adults. Mm-hmm.

And were you able to kind of disaggregate the different effects of the pandemic and the different responses that were taken? Or was it just kind of like this disruption as a whole knocked kids into a different kind of mental health?

To some extent, we've been able to disaggregate the impact across different ages and stages of development. And in young kids in particular, things that really changed were the overall levels of stress that their parents might have been feeling and in particular, concerns about maybe financial stability, especially for parents who were not able to work remotely. And

And who may be facing a lot of other challenges also in having multiple kids at home at the same time. And then the kind of across the board, being able to socialize and kind of figure out your identity and figure out your social skills and your ways of regulating your emotions and managing frustration. That's a normal part of everyday life.

That was really impaired developmentally across all ages. And, you know, we were seeing kids who were coming into middle school when folks finally went back to school that, you know, really were presenting, according to their teachers, more like fourth graders in terms of their social and emotional health and similarly, you know, going into high school.

and college and graduate school and kind of going out into the workforce that a lot of folks were, you know, a year or two behind in those areas. We're talking about the lasting effects of the pandemic on young people, five years roughly to the start of kind of lockdowns, kind of first in a series of shows that we're doing on the impact of the pandemic. We would really love to hear from you, you know, in conversation.

and conversations that I've had with parents and teachers over the years, people have all made their own observations about the changes that they've seen in kids, their own kids or other people's. You can give us a call with those. The number is 866-733-7333.

That's 866-733-6786. The email is forum at kqed.org. You can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, et cetera. We're KQED Forum. And of course, there's the Discord. Robin, I wanted to come to you on the sort of quantitative number side of this, of how these changes in kids' lives and schooling have showed up in the achievement numbers.

Yeah. It's well, the bottom line is we're not back to pre-pandemic achievement. So that's that's the basic. And researchers at Harvard and Stanford have been documenting this very, very carefully and are showing that we're the average student in the country is less than halfway to recovery levels.

Let me just put it in a little bit of context and magnitude for you because that statistic on its own is not great, but it might help to understand that only three states have recovered in reading and only one state has fully recovered in math in the country.

A couple of other points. There's a recent national achievement of educational progress called the NAEP that's showing that the math scores in the country right now are equivalent to what they were in 1990. And that the lowest achieving students, so the lowest quartile of students or so, is back to 1978 levels.

So this is pretty sobering stuff. It's, you know, this is something that we've been documenting, you know, since the very beginning of the pandemic, sort of worrying about how this would affect kids differentially. And we're seeing it play out in the numbers. Unfortunately, we're not there yet. And I'm afraid the story is not over. Emily Savelle, what have you seen in your schools in San Jose?

We really saw that anxiety and depression were exacerbated by the isolation of staying at home. Also fundamental to the teenage stage of development, right? Which all of our students are high school students. Is that connection with peers and is that community? Also kiddos did not have access to their sports they were playing, right? Physical activity. So sort of all those markers for anxiety

good mental health were really impacted and kids are still recovering. So we did finally see our numbers overall programmatically coming down for referrals for mental health. So that's a good sign that we're on the road to recovery in terms of just sheer numbers of kiddos accessing services.

But this was a huge impact. And in the life of a 15-year-old, a year and a half, right, is a long time. So this was, quite frankly, a trauma for all of us collectively. And kids are still recovering. Yeah.

You know, Petra, when I talk with parents, there seems to be a lot of kind of folk theories about, you know, kids who were three had the worst impact or kids who were 12 or kids who were eight. Do you think there is a lot to that, that there were particular ages where, you know, if your kid was six when the pandemic began, that was like the hardest thing or anything like that?

Thanks for the question. I think it's a little bit more nuanced than that. I think, you know, in general, we as human beings are resilient and have a lot of strengths and are able to get through really difficult circumstances in a number of ways. And, and this was a

worldwide collective trauma as lasting impact. And some of us have been, you know, disproportionately affected by that. And that can be for, you know, multiple reasons, including kind of a biological predisposition maybe, or a lot of kind of socioeconomic and cultural factors and all of the stressors that, you know, different communities experience. And, and,

In the moment when we were going through more of the quarantine and social isolation, young kids were feeling more so they take their cues from their parents, from their caregivers and those around them. And so if the family or the caregivers are able to provide immediate safety and security, then that's really the biggest mitigating factor that can really help

As kids develop and get older, they are much more aware of the world around them and are able to engage in more abstract thinking. And that's where the concerns for isolation and that loneliness that we already talked about is really playing a big role. And then also, I think in terms of this creating a feeling of uncertainty,

and worry about the future, both from a health standpoint, what if this happens again, what if I get sick? And then also- - And just in general, right? Everything destabilized. - Yeah. We're talking about the lasting effects of the pandemic on young people, joined by Petra Steinbushel, also joined by Robin Lake from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and Emily Savala from Eastside Union High School District in San Jose. I'm Alexis Matich, we'll be back with more right after the break.

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Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We're talking about the lasting effects of the pandemic on young people five years after lockdown. We would love to hear from you what you've noticed about your kid post-pandemic or through the pandemic.

The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. You can email forum at kqed.org. You can find us on Blue Sky, on Instagram. We're kqed.org.

Joined this morning by Petra Steinbushel from UCSF Benioff, Robin Lake, Executive Director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, and Emily Zavala, who is a Subject Area Coordinator in Mental Health and Wellness at Eastside Union High School District in San Jose.

I think I want to bring in a young person that is joining us. Aria Rani Sindeldecker is 16, a junior at Mountain View High School, also an advocate and activist for mental health. Welcome to the show, Rani. Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks so much. So what grade were you in when the lockdown hit?

Seventh grade. Well, sixth to seventh grade around there. And how do you, what do you remember from those like early weeks or how it began?

So the second half of my sixth grade year, my school announced we wouldn't be returning to school until a couple weeks later. And then, of course, a couple weeks turned into a couple months, and then a couple months turned into online learning for the remainder of the school year, as well as the first half of my seventh grade year. That was the same. But instead, we were sorted into cohorts of 30 students, and during that time, I

I only really met my friends online or outside of school. You know, I would text friends, but that, that personal kind of face to face connection was really missing. Some of my friends weren't big texters and they felt really alienated. And,

And no one was super close-knit at the time. Like, everyone was just kind of drifting. And because of that, my parents really just ended up caving and giving me a phone a couple years earlier than they had planned to. I was about to say, did it suck you more into your phone? I mean, that's what it sounds like, right? That you ended up more deeply entangled with the technology than otherwise. Oh, 100%, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Do you at the time, did you notice like effects that were, you know, unanticipated? Obviously, you were 12. So you're kind of going through a lot of things for the first time. But did you did you have thoughts about like, oh, I'm not feeling good because of X or Y?

Yeah, I feel like I believe every one of us has been changed by the pandemic. You know, it made us feel more comfortable relying on our devices for social interaction. And I think it really amplified that social comparison and doom scrolling. I think if as a teen, you don't, you don't do activities with other teams, if it's like playing video games over a mic or, you know, being part of a club or playing a sport, it would be really easy to get,

lost in that online vortex. Because at a very influential time in our lives, we really relied on the digital platform for social connection. And I think in terms of academics, a lot of students fell behind in subjects like math. And I believe in this area, there are some parents who can be very tough on their kids if they aren't in the highest level classes. And I think that really also increased

the academic pressure in schools in the Bay Area. Emily Zavala, you know, what did you see in terms of sort of technology use? I mean, of course, you know, as Ronnie's saying, it was both necessary for social connection as well as academic instruction, but feels like maybe it had some other repercussions as well.

Yes, absolutely. So I would say that we really struggled with phone addiction returning from the stay-at-home orders and definitely kiddos had to log on. Our district actually, a lot of districts developed a policy where your cameras had to be on for distance learning and Eastside actually did not have that policy because of the limitations that our kiddos were facing in terms of

access to private spaces for learning, right? Being in multi-generational households and sharing rooms and really not having that ability to turn the cameras on. So we didn't even know if they were in school, right? And logged in other than a black screen. And I just think that disconnect and, yeah,

that doom spiral, the scrolling, I think that we just saw all those things increase. And then lots of hard times with connecting from the phone once we were back. So I definitely do

do agree that really that was the kind of way to connect. It was the expectation for kids to log on to be tuned in on their devices. And it wasn't the best for any of the things that Ronnie has mentioned, right? All those really important connectors in our development. Let's bring in Sarah in Santa Cruz. Welcome.

Hi, good morning. I was calling, so I work for a school district in Richmond and Vallejo, and I was calling, thinking about, you know, from being on Zoom to being back in person, and it took us about a year and a half in our schools to actually focus on academics, right? So when kids came back from the pandemic in person, I think...

and the general public thought, great, we're getting back to academics now. But we had to rebuild those structures and routines and socialization of school. So we had to totally backtrack back to like, all right, what does culture look like? How do we build classroom management? How do we retain teachers and retrain students to being back in person? And so I just wanted to add that comment to think about this academic decline and what's continued for a few years.

Can you also, could you tell me a little bit about like kind of the specifics of what you mean? Like the retraining of kids that just mean like they just walk out of the classroom and...

Or, like, what are the kind of specifics you're thinking? Yeah. And even, like, being, like... Right. You do something in your classroom called a turn and talk, say, right? And so you turn to your neighbor and you share your thoughts on whatever the teacher is saying. Like, reteaching them to, like, look at your partner and share a comment when you haven't been next to a kid in forever. And then back out at recess, like, thinking about how to use the recess equipment, right? And so...

Just like those simple things, walking in the hallway, getting your, like, going to the cafeteria and getting lunch. Like, everything had to be retaught in a way, especially to our super young kids, because they had been out of the context of school for so long. Man, so interesting. I mean, Robin, like, talk to me about what the research said. Thank you, Sarah. Great call. Thank you so much for that.

Yeah, I mean, the research really reinforces that comment that when kids came back, there was, you know, there was a big learning curve to just get back to schooling. You know, the pandemic sort of left an indelible mark in a lot of ways. And

So we're still seeing that. That's one thing I'd add to the comment is little kids who are coming into the system now into kindergarten and first grade are the COVID babies who didn't have the same access to preschool and basic socialization skills as other babies did.

and toddlers did. And so, you know, when I said earlier, we're not out of this, this is going to be a long haul. That's what I mean. Those little kids who are coming in are still grappling with those issues. And so that's real. Also true that for certain populations, English learners, multilingual learners, kids who had disabilities,

They also had, you know, really unique challenges when they came back to school. They hadn't received the kinds of services that they were entitled to yet.

And so, you know, all of this really added up to a pretty overwhelming situation for educators, for schools, for school districts, and they're still feeling that overwhelm. And I think my frustration is we just didn't help that enough. We really probably could have done more to pull in community services for states to provide

tutoring services and other things so that we didn't have to make as many sort of dichotomous choices as we had to make in the beginning because every parent knows mental health you know just like overall overall well-being of kids had to come first and we had to kind of slow down and not get academics to some but I think we could have done a lot better there.

You know, this listener comments, kind of heartbreaking here. Patrick writes, "My child was 12 years old when the pandemic started. We prided ourselves on being a low screen usage family. When lockdown happened and Zoom school ensued, we lost any sense of control over our child's screen usage. Within a year, our child had debilitating anxiety and depression and subsequently went on antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds. Today, our 17-year-old is still highly anxious, still on medication, and is highly addicted to screens.

While we've made progress, I feel like COVID destroyed our healthy parenting pathways, particularly in relation to social media and screen addiction and related anxiety. Petra, do you want to just talk about that experience and how it does or doesn't reflect what you're seeing? Sure. I mean, I can relate to it just as a parent myself, somebody who was really

really low screen utilization. And then, you know, ultimately that being necessary for school and also, you know, the only way to connect with peers. And, and I think that, you know, it's really changed the way that we operate in the world. I mean, all of us, you know, we're much more likely to connect virtually. And, you know, having that kind of decreased, you

human to human live interaction really doesn't allow us to have necessarily the same level of kind of depth of connection. There's a lot of, you know, talked about the term scrolling and, you know, just kind of superficially reading things and those types of kind of lighter touch superficial interactions, whether it's, you know, just

with a screen or with, you know, a person that you may not be able to get to as much depth as you would through that human-human interaction. And I think also the total loss of routines and schedules and rhythms and expectations, you know,

for a significant period of time has kind of disrupted people's, you know, commitment to, you know, to sticking with something and being able to persist for longer and also realize that, you know, through persistence and through maybe through failure, through tolerating frustration that you can actually come out on the other side and develop competence and with that confidence to

that those opportunities have been reduced, if not missed, for a large number of youth. We're talking about the lasting effects of the pandemic on young people five years after the pandemic really got going here. We'd love to hear from you and what you've seen in the children and young adults around you. You can give us a call. Number is 866-733-7333.

That's 866-733-6786. The email is [email protected]. Let's get to another call here. Krista in San Francisco, welcome. Hi, thank you. How are you? Doing well. Thanks for calling.

Good. So, yeah, I coach in San Francisco, and I think this has been like just absolutely everybody has agreed on that. Our middle schoolers and our high schoolers are just so socially behind in maturity that we've all been trying to catch up with their behavior on the field. So when they're off the field in the teachers, you know, classrooms that they're also behaving differently.

And, you know, a more mature respect to their peers, especially, and, you know, the teachers. I mean, have things helped? Like, do you feel like you've been able to develop strategies to help kids where you see that they maybe are struggling with some of the after effects of the pandemic?

Yeah, I have to say I've been getting my U.S. soccer license, National B, and U.S. soccer talks to us about who's the player in front of you first.

Um, who is that child who's looking at you? And then you can go into approach, like how, how are we going to lay this out? And then we go through, um, four models of like their physical state, mental state, cognitive and social. And then we approach them. So I personally try to check in with the kids, um,

Every one of them, while they're in through warmup, just how's your day? How was school? I can read immediately. Like when one of my teenagers, especially has had a bad day. And so it's like, you know, that's a check-in for yourself as a coach of like, okay, let's not push him so hard. Let's, you know, have another check-in and see what, you know, what's cracking with you, bud. And, um,

I coach in Brazil, too. I have a stepson there. I've seen the same thing with that age group over in Brazil. I live back and forth during pandemic. The Brazilian kids in that

age group. Also, my son faced the same thing, but they weren't really getting school. So my son's now playing major catch up and he'll be moving to the States. And then that's too much. Oh, sorry. I think you lost you there, Krista. Thank you so much for those points though. And I, you know, Robin Lake, I also, you know, that, that,

international component to that kind of comparative aspect that sometimes I have thought, oh, this was like an American thing. But as Krista points out, like actually these effects were felt all across the world. They sure were. I was in touch with a number of folks around the globe during the pandemic and talking to them about what strategies they were pursuing. And one thing that came up then and I think is still worth thinking about now is the

Many other countries didn't close schools as long as we did.

And that's an issue. We really have to kind of go back and think about, did we do the right thing by keeping kids out of school for so long? It took us a while to close schools down and move to remote instruction. And then it took us probably far too long to open schools back up. Politics instead of science were driving a lot of decisions and

And what I heard from other countries is they really prioritized vulnerable populations, made sure that they could get back into school very, very quickly. And they protected schools from some of the politics that we failed to protect our schools from.

all the debates about masking and things that came to a head in school board meetings and all of that, that was a thing. It distracted folks from being able to focus on delivering what kids needed in the moment because of all this other noise that was going on. Let's bring in Leigh in Alameda. Welcome, Leigh. Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, thanks for joining us. I just wanted to give a slightly different perspective. I had a son who was in high school at the time, and he actually really benefited from being home. He was commuting to school. He was doing sports after school. He wasn't getting a ton of rest.

There's a lot of stress that happens during high school with academics and social emotional stuff. And for him to have the opportunity to get additional rest, to do the coursework that was a little bit more flexible online at his pace and during his time,

Also, he was able to work part time, so he got some work skills in during that time as well. So for him, I would say as a high school student, he actually really benefited from that time and flexibility during those teen years. That being said,

I do work at a high school and realize that's not the case for a lot of students that were affected during that time. But for him, I would say it was actually a benefit. Lee, that's so interesting. I think it is just so worth recognizing that, of course, we're talking about a huge group of young people. And obviously not everyone had the same experience. And it does feel to me like I have encountered some kids who did actually...

actually have a pretty good pandemic because of their personality and the variety of supports that they had around them. We're going to get back to that topic after the break. We're talking about the lasting effects of the pandemic on young people five years after lockdown. We've got Aria Rani Sindeldecker, who is a 16-year-old junior at Mountain View High School. We've got Emily Zavala, who is a Subject Area Coordinator in Mental Health and Wellness at Eastside Union High School District in San Jose.

We've got Petra Steinbushel, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, professor of psychiatry and director of the California Child and Adolescent Mental Health Access Portal, it's called CalMAP, at UCSF, as well as Robin Lake, executive director in the Center on Reinventing Public Education. And of course, we're bringing your calls and comments in as well, 866-733-6786, forum at kqed.org, or all the social media things, we're KQED Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal, stay tuned for more right after the break.

Alexis Madrigal here. We're talking about the lasting effects of the pandemic on young people five years after lockdown. Joined by the Center on Reinventing Public Education's Robin Lake, UCSF's Petra Steinbushel, Emily Zavala from Eastside Union High School District in San Jose, and Arya Rani Sindeldecker, who is a junior at Mountain View High. Let's bring in Tatiana in Berkeley. Welcome.

Hi, thank you so much. So for me, I run a tutoring center in Berkeley with my best friend. And what we were seeing during the pandemic and then directly after was a lot of parents who were able to identify learning differences and learning challenges that they

than they were requesting assessments for, for special education and 504 plans. And the impact this has had on the, you know, staffing at, um,

Well, I've seen it in Berkeley and the North Van Oakland because I do a lot of advocacy work around there. And it's been also interesting because as a result of parents identifying things like ADHD and dyslexia and other processing issues, they've also started to.

identify their own learning differences, you know, like tree apples. And so it's just been a really interesting journey for me

Our families and for our school districts. And I'm also seeing the impacts on admin just in terms of the staffing and having to find people who understand how to scaffold kids with learning differences in the classroom. Yeah. Tatiana, thank you. All very interesting points. Emily, do you want to respond what you've seen?

I just want to add to that, at least in my district, 50% of our families are socially disadvantaged, economically disadvantaged. And so the impact of the pandemic and stay-at-home orders had a different impact, right? So I'm hearing that, you know, for some people, privilege played a, you know,

Definitely had an impact on how kiddos, how resilient they were and how they responded overarching. And so for families that were stretched thin already and then were not having income and maybe had grandparents in the home that were sick, we had high numbers of

Our, you know, older generation and within the families, multi-generational families in our district that were sick at home. So these impacts were huge. And so I think for a lot of our parents, the capacity to really lean in and pay attention to the learning of their students just wasn't there.

Right. Given the multitude of issues they were already facing as families. So I think also it's really important to bring that to the conversation, that privilege and kind of where you sat in society had a lot to do with how this all impacted you within your home. Well, and Robin Lake, I mean, my understanding is that shows up very strongly in the data that, you know, socioeconomic indicators were very,

you know, a very important analytical way to understand what happened during the pandemic in education. Yes, that's right. It was very, very, the pandemic hit students of color, low-income students, students with disabilities, English learners,

A lot harder than other kids. They fell back more than others, recovered more slowly, missed critical services. So, yeah, inequalities showed up in force. They always, it's worth noting, as Emily knows herself, that inequalities are part of public education. It's been a long-term problem.

reality for us, but the pandemic really exacerbated those, whether it was access to technology, access to services,

just the backgrounds of kids and how they were coping with the traumas that they were experiencing. So yeah, it was, it's a hard time for all, very unequal time, unfortunately. And we're seeing that play out in the data where the numbers just aren't coming back up for lower income kids.

students of color. And so when we think about solutions, we really have to sort of zoom in on those more vulnerable populations and think about how to get them services and solutions right away, because many of them have already left the system. It's not too late. We can do more for the kids who are still in the system. Let's bring in Heather in San Jose. Welcome, Heather.

Hi, welcome. Thank you. Just wanted two quick comments. I have two children, so it's crazy. It's been four years now that we're back in full-time school. And just want to compliment and say kudos to my school district. This year, we really enforced a no-phone policy during school hours.

And I think it's been a game changer. I think my students are more academically focused during the school hours. And my understanding from the principals, the teachers are so much happier because they can actually see kids socializing again, being kids again, especially at the middle school. The kids are actually playing and talking with each other and not sitting during break time on their phones.

just kudos to the administration, even though, and also just wanted to say, like, I think we're finding back at our full-time strong academic focus. It definitely did take a year and a half before the kids really went back into academics. I think the one...

one of your experts online. I think she hit it on the head. I even saw it from a parent's perspective. We definitely thought about our mental health that first year and a half, and now we're back into the swing of being academic at our school. Thank you. Hey, Heather, I appreciate that. You know, the question of

technology and the pandemic keeps coming up in a lot of different comments. You know, one listener on Discord writes, I've been dismayed by the continued reliance on computers since going back to school in our district, West Contra Costa. Today, kids age five and up carry their school-issued laptops back and forth from home to school. Does anyone really think young students learn better with computers at their desks? I'm worried that learning is being incredibly hampered by kids having these addictive devices sitting next to them.

Another listener writes, I was teaching during the pandemic. My biggest concern was how down everyone was, especially the high school kids. It was hard to get anyone to laugh or participate in online games or challenges. All the boys took to gaming for hours late into the night, and there's so much violence in those games, so many brain pathways being made in such a negative way. I was constantly upset by it, but others just didn't care. Let's bring in Moshe in Berkeley, who very much does. Welcome.

Hi. So I am a resource teacher, a mild-mod special education teacher. I have three children of my own, starting with my own children. First-person shooters were not something that was allowed in my house. Those type of video games were not something that was allowed. I have a conscientious objector father. It was important to me. During the pandemic, all of a sudden, that was the only way, particularly for my oldest, to be able to have ongoing contact with friends.

particularly his best friend. And so we dialed that back.

Now my house is out of control with Fortnite as the center, and we know that this is something that we can't just pull away on. I'm also getting more and more involved in the particular lawsuit that's being pushed on Fortnite for video game addiction. That's the one half. The other half is with my students, I was a K-8 teacher during that time, and I can pretty clearly say that my K-5, K-4, K-5 students

may have even benefited from the one-on-one, one-to-two type attention they got from me, whereas they would have been in small to medium groups as, you know, mild-mod type teacher. So they got all this one-to-one attention through Zoom from me, and they got a lot of benefit, whereas my middle schoolers, my K-8 teachers,

would just not show up, regardless of how much I spoke to parents, regardless of how much I pushed with their general education teachers. Those students lost countless hours of special education. Good thing I'm not saying the name of the school right now because you can't put that in writing. Lawsuits can happen fast.

compensatory hours are a real thing, which I think they should have. But, you know, as special education teachers, we have to watch what we say. Now at the school I work in currently, as students come in one by year by year, we say, oh, that was their pandemic year. Oh, wait, wait, no, they didn't have work on subtraction with regrouping or they didn't have work on division. And we can see this whole large hole each year. And our student with our students were,

It's not just about special ed. It's about a whole grade who, except for the few, have these specific holes. And this wasn't what I planned to say, but I'll go back to what I say yearly and what I said at the time. Why didn't we go back?

and redo a year, particularly our most socioeconomically impacted kids and those with the least support at home, barely did. And that was my opinion as a relatively new teacher coming out then. I don't want to say it's too late, but it feels like it's too late. Man, Moshe, so many, gosh, so many good points. Let's take, Patriot, do you want to take the video game question first? Because it does seem interesting

My perception of the academic literature is that there's sort of a spread of views on video games. But when I talk to parents, there's not really a spread of views. People are like, this is a problem for my child. Yeah.

I think, you know, this is an evolving area and it seems like with, you know, in general social media and screen time, it used to be that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended no more than two hours per day up until age 18. Of course, now that is kind of out the window, but I think in terms of, you know, how much use is needed

is enough or too much. There's really not a super hard and fast rule with this. However, we know that just online only and video games, when they get in the way of things like

socializing in the way of activities like school and, you know, whatever other activities a youth might do outside of school and, or sometimes even in the way of sleeping and eating, then that's obviously interfering with, you know, your daily life and the things that are going to help you grow and thrive. And, um,

And then, you know, being able to connect and play with friends. I mean, that's helpful up to a point, but it shouldn't be in replacement of other types of socializing and in-person. Yeah.

You know, another question for you, you know, Tanya writes, "My sister is an elementary school teacher in the Bay Area and has been for 25 years. All the teachers at her school have noticed huge behavioral problems with the first graders this year. Not just standard misbehavior, but throwing chairs, fighting, just running out of the classroom. One child tried to choke a teacher. They think that these children who were toddlers during the pandemic didn't have the brain development that's normal for children at that age because of isolation, lack of socialization, building skills.

And the reason I want to stay with this picture is like it's one kind of one thing if, you know, subtraction with regrouping is a gap in somebody's sort of academic portfolio. But there's social and emotional learning, which we all know is really important. Are there identifiable gaps there that we could say that are as specific as, you know, this regrouping with subtraction with regrouping? It's a really good question. And I

I'd like to try and tie in some of the earlier comments also in terms of any potential silver linings that we experienced during the pandemic. I think, if anything, it has called more attention to and helped to decrease stigma around mental health concerns and recognizing and trying to address them. And I think with young children, you can't separate their experiences

their development and their emotional wellbeing from their caregivers. So, um, you know, the really good news is that very young children do learn quickly and, you know, can, um, can catch up on some of these milestones that may be delayed. Um, I think there's also a risk of, you know, potentially, um,

uh, sometimes what's called fragilizing or, you know, kind of overcompensating for the impact of a significant trauma and wanting to kind of make things okay in the moment and allowing a young person to step, uh, to, you know, experience kind of normal frustration and, and learn to self-manage and self-soothe as a result of that. So, uh,

And I think all of that's really important to look at. And how is that happening both in school and outside of school? You know, Ronnie, I was just wondering, like as a as a peer, what do you think your friends and, you know, the people that you've kind of done mental health activism with, what do they say has really helped them?

I think it's so important that as peers, we unify to support one another. I think when we unify, our resiliency is amplified and we can unify really by having conversations about how we're feeling because we have so many shared experiences with, you know, the pandemic that we can relate on those terms of isolation and anxiety and depression that, that may have come out of the pandemic. So I think it's so important that we unify.

I really think having that empathy with one another, that's one of the biggest things coming out of the pandemic that peers have used to really cope with that. I love that. Robin, like, you know, one, we've done an entire show on this. So if people want to hear more about chronic absenteeism in school, they should even go check that out.

One of the reasons we did that and one of my sort of areas of interest here is that it almost seems like it is kind of the index statistic, like it's the thing that you can look at and say, well, people are no longer going to school in the way that they were before, like the numbers totally changed during the pandemic and haven't really reverted back to their pre-pandemic trend.

And it seems to be for a lot of different reasons. So what are the things that have been most effective in bringing chronic absenteeism down? Yes, you're right. The rates really skyrocketed. Just to put a fine point on it, the chronic absenteeism doubled during the pandemic and in some places doubled.

went even higher. I think in San Francisco Unified, it's about 20% absenteeism, one in five kids missing significant amounts of school on a regular basis. So we have a new normal about what it means to come to school, whether school is optional or not.

It's a really important question about what works. We're still trying to figure that out. Researchers are doing a lot of studies right now on that. What we hear from the field is that, you know, direct outreach really matters, getting in touch with students and their families, having conversations. But that takes a lot of time, and educators are already overwhelmed. School districts have a lot going on. And so there are a number of sort of –

Programs at the school level that are doing outreach, working with community partners has been really apparently effective. So community partners who already have strong relationships and connections to students and families can be a great leverage point.

I think some schools are also just thinking hard about why it is that students don't want to be there. And back to the question of, you know, what did students like when they were out of school and how can we bring more of that back into the schooling experience is something that I think some of the more kind of overthinking school systems are thinking about.

So there's a lot on the table. And, you know, I guess a final point is getting back to high expectations. It was right to attend to students' well-being, overall well-being and their mental health.

immediately upon return. But we also have to reinstill kind of expectations. That they show up, they do the work. Yeah, show up, do the work and be there and that we expect that they will succeed in life. We've been talking about the lasting effects of the pandemic on young people five years after the pandemic began. We've been joined by Robin Lake, Executive Director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Thank you, Robin. Thank you, Robin.

Thank you. Also been joined by UCSF's Petra Steinbushel. Thank you so much. Thank you. Emily Savala joined us from Eastside Union High School school district in San Jose. Thank you so much, Emily. Thank you for the opportunity to be here. And Aria Roni Sindeldecker from Mountain View High School. Thank you, Roni, for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. I'm Alexis Madrigal. I appreciate all your calls and comments. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Meena Kim.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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