A few years into district-wide remote learning spurred by the coronavirus pandemic, Principal Darren A. Cole-Ochoa has watched Truan Junior High students readjust to in-person education on a spectrum.
“When we entered the classroom, the students were shy. They didn't want to work in groups. They had a wall,” Cole-Ochoa says of the students in the small town of Elsa, Texas. “(Now) some of them have flourished, some of them have outgrown that. But we still have some that want to be on their phone, they want to be on their Chromebook here at school, so they isolate themselves.”
Cole-Ochoa is among educators across the country who are trying new approaches to social-emotional learning in hopes of helping students deal with the ongoing mental health struggles that took shape or worsened during the isolation of remote learning that started in 2020.
Districts have taken a wide range of approaches, such as documented by Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, a nonprofit organization that studies how government policies impact low-income families. Some approaches include “advocacy centers” where students receive training through strong emotions with activities such as yoga, breathing exercises or relaxing music. Others apply more broadly, such as mentoring programs or culturally responsive curricula.
Culture change
When Cole-Ochoa was assigned to the high school campus more than two years ago, it was with a directive to change his academic performance. Cole-Ochoa, a former police detective, says his approach was to focus on creating a welcoming culture before cracking down with punishments.
“Why are you going to write to a child because he didn't bring a pencil? Do you know what happened?” he says. “We don't know what happens when a child leaves here. Many of our children come with difficult stories where they don't have heat, they don't have electricity or running water, and mom and dad have “They have to work all the time. So, as seventh and eighth graders, they are babysitters, they help put food on the table for their family and that takes a toll on them.”
Taken together, Cole-Ochoa says the efforts are aimed at reinforcing positive behavior and ensuring students know they have where to turn for help, before any negative behavior is punished. Students have access to both a male and female counselor and social worker. Counselors visit classrooms to give talks on topics such as how to do homework well and the negative effects of vaping. Any student who is seen doing a good deed, such as picking up trash in the hallway, receives a “Stinger Buck” that can be spent on prizes.
On the opposite end of the Lone Star State, in the Dallas suburb of Irving, Principal Anabel Ibarra also developed a plan for cultural change at Bowie High School. When she arrived on campus three years ago, she did so with the goal of “strategizing to capture the hearts of kids.”
“I always think it's from Maslow. You have to take care of the needs of the students first,” she explains. “You have to make sure they feel taken care of before we can even address academic issues or other things of that nature.”
Like Cole-Ochoa's approach, her school has fun initiatives like glow dance parties for students who achieve their academic improvement goals. Students can continue to improve their test scores even after the party starts for a chance to join in at the last hour.
But Ibarra has also revamped the classroom with an initiative she calls Cub Connection, named after the school's tiger cub mascot, where students have a teacher who monitors their progress in all subjects. This year, students are grouped by their math proficiency, although Cub Connection teachers focus on homework help for a different subject each day of the week.
“Our advisory teacher is supposed to be the only person who makes sure you get the right tutoring for all subjects,” Ibarra says. “Whenever we have parent-teacher conferences, it is the responsibility of the Cub Connection teacher to communicate that information to the parents. I feel like that is the core of what we do, because there has to be at least one guaranteed adult checking on the student.”
'Two important battles'
Kelli Frazier, now a counselor at Bowie Middle School and a colleague of Ibarra, was doing her counseling internship during the COVID-19 shutdown. When students returned to campus, she saw students struggling with anxiety, depression, and launching suicidal protests.
“I know that the isolation of being at home and on the computer all the time was really detrimental for a lot of kids,” Frazier recalls. “And I really saw firsthand how much kids need to just be out of the house and socialize, because a lot of kids don't have adults at home to talk to or compassionate adults at home.”
Ibarra says high school administrators worked closely with counselors to find ways to not only punish dangerous behavior but also prevent it from happening again. I mean, he says there was an increase in assaults and cannabis vaping.
“Those have been our two main battles on the disciplinary front that go along with counseling,” Ibarra explained. “After Covid, we saw an increase in aggression. It was not a confrontation, there was no mutual fight. It was: you were upset about something that happened at some point, you didn't have the processing skills to deal with it, and then you lashed out.”
When it comes to the use of vaping with cannabis variants Like delta 8 and delta 9, Ibarra says students are self-medicating to deal with the problems Frazier mentioned: anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts. Since students face harsh consequences if they are caught, Ibarra says the school is focused on ensuring the substance never reaches campus.
Part of that includes creating group counseling for any students previously cited for vaping cannabis during the previous school year.
“We have our dean of students check on them weekly, just to see how they're doing,” Ibarra says. “It's just to make sure that they are using appropriate coping strategies and that they have returned from drug or alcohol use.”
The Ibarra campus has something else in common with Cole-Ochoa High School: Both schools piloted their districts' use of an artificial intelligence mental health app intended to give students an outlet available at any time. Cole-Ochoa says that when students interact with the app's chatbot on their phones, the idea is that it helps them think about the problem that's bothering them or suggests ways to deal with it.
“If something is serious, like if they make a suicidal scream, then my two counselors and I automatically get an alert,” explains Cole-Ochoa, “and that's when we locate the student, review their schedule, and then take them to talk to the counselor to make sure everything is okay.”
Cole-Ochoa says the goal is not to replace the role of a counselor for students, “but a lot of times, on the weekend or at night, when they're alone, or after hours, that's when they need support.”
He and school counselors have responded to five cases this school year of a student making a suicidal scream on the app, prompting a counselor to intervene.
“These students were temporarily okay, and then when they got here, that's when we were able to say, 'Okay, what's going on?' How can I help you?'” Cole-Ochoa says. “And that's when counselors do what they do best, which is talk to students and assess the situation. And so it's about working with parents, working with students to see what we can do to get help for students.”
It's not just a feeling that makes Cole-Ochoa believe the culture of caring is working at her school: the numbers back it up. The high school had 1,200 student disciplinary referrals during the 2019-2020 school year, Cole-Ochoa says, which was halted in March due to COVID-19 closures.
For the past two years, Cole-Ochoa says the school has had about 200 disciplinary referrals per year, a whopping 1,000 drop in referrals to the office.
Truan Junior High is now a place where teachers greet students at the door before each class, and students can tap one of four emojis posted by the door as they enter: a face for happy, sad, mediocre, and angry . If a child indicates that he is having a bad day, Cole-Ochoa says it is an opportunity for the teacher to find out what is happening and if he or a counselor can help.
“After coming out of Covid, they are still a little shy,” he says. “By making these fun things for our students, by rewarding perfect attendance, by rewarding being a good citizen by giving them a Stinger Buck, that gives them a good feeling of saying, 'Hey, this school cares about me.' They noticed how I'm doing academically, socially and emotionally.'”
