A new initiative from the University of Vermont hopes to address the shortage of mental health professionals available to support the state’s youth.

Known as the Catamount Counseling Collaborative for Rural Schools, the program plans to train and place 52 school counselors, social workers and mental health clinicians in rural schools throughout Vermont for the next five years.

Recent surveys from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found rising levels of depression and anxiety among Vermont middle and high school students. 

Despite this, Vermont lacks an adequate number of mental health professionals. In 2023, the state’s Workforce Development Board estimated a need for 230 more providers to meet growing demand. 

The new Catamount Counseling Collaborative for Rural Schools aims to address the gap. 

Through the program — funded by a $3.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education — University of Vermont graduate students are expected to contribute at least 25,000 clinical hours annually to support rural communities.

“Vermont mental health needs are pervasive and complex and they’re currently underserved and this is a way to reach them,” said Anna Elliott, associate professor of counseling.

Elliott, the principal investigator for the grant, has experience running a similar initiative in Montana, where she spent five years developing a program to support rural communities with mental health professionals. 

A key part of the program, Elliot said, is to encourage graduates to continue working in rural schools or mental health facilities after completing their training. She said she tailored the program to Vermont’s unique needs. This included analyzing various statistics from community needs assessments on issues such as suicide rates, substance use disorder and the stigma associated with seeking mental health services, ensuring the program aligns closely with the landscape of Vermont’s mental health needs.

“One of our primary goals in setting up the training program was attending to students’ reports that they often didn’t feel prepared to go and work in a rural environment,” she said. “Having an intensive and intentional training program that sets them up to really understand what they’re walking into and how to be prepared and how to ask for support incentivized students to stay, so we’re hoping to replicate that here.”

The program offers a stipend to those who remain in their assigned schools for at least one year, helping to ease potential barriers like securing a full-time job or finding affordable housing.

In Montana, Elliott said she noticed some graduate students couldn’t stay in rural schools due to limited funding for permanent positions. Other challenges, including housing and job security, also made it difficult for them to remain in these high-need areas.

“I’m taking the model that I did in Montana and integrating that in with the community schools model to not just say, ‘here’s a couple graduate students that will be here for a year’ but let’s actually take a systemic look at what’s happening in the school — what are the needs, resources, barriers and strength,” Elliott said.

To address these challenges, the program focuses on recruiting graduate students who already come from rural areas. By offering low-residency options, the program allows these students to complete much of their coursework remotely. This means they can stay at home rather than moving to campus, making it easier for them to balance their studies with their existing commitments.

“This grant provides significant opportunity to bring students into the helping professions who might not otherwise have access to this kind of specialized training,” said Danielle Jatlow, a co-principal investigator and social worker who coordinates UVM’s bachelor’s of social work program, in a press release from the university.

UVM faculty, including program co-leaders Robin Hausheer and Lance Smith, both associate professors of counseling, are starting outreach to rural schools. They hope to place graduate students in schools as early as this semester, according to the release.

“There are people and kids that are getting served this year that might not have been otherwise,” Elliott said in the release. “So that feels like everything.” 

This story was originally published on VT Digger.

In partnership with Fresno Pacific University and six school districts throughout Tulare County, the year-long program housed within the county’s California Center on Teaching Careers hopes to curb shortages that have left schools throughout the state with student to counselor ratios at 1:461, nearly double the recommended 1:250. 

Since its launch at the start of this school year, the School Counselor Residency project has provided one on one support to a small pilot cohort of twelve counselors and looks to expand statewide. Counselors in training earn a master’s of arts in school counseling and a $45,000 living stipend while being mentored by experienced counselors in their region. 

“Through this pathway, we’re truly able to grow our own, which means preparing individuals of our own communities who grew up here, who know parents … students of our own schools, to then be part of our system,” said Marvin Lopez, the Center’s executive director.

The program is hands-on, requiring 1,200 hours of clinical training and field experience, 400 hours beyond the required amount to obtain a credential. 

Like other residencies to boost teacher pipelines, the model aims to recruit a more representative pool by eliminating the financial barriers and loans professionals often take on to enter the field. 

Graduates of teacher residencies, which the SCR program has been modeled after, stay in their school districts at much higher rates than those who have entered through traditional or other alternative pathways, “stabilizing” the force, according to the Learning Policy Institute. The pools they recruit are also more racially diverse. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why launch this residency now, and what’s at stake without it? 

Marvin Lopez: I’m going to take you back a decade. In 2012, we began looking at residency models, specifically for teachers, across the nation. We spent six years looking at models in California, Chicago, New York City, to see what are best practices and spend time with some universities that have been running teacher residencies for some time. 

We realized we needed to bring a pathway like that to our area – we’re in this central region of the state in California, near Sequoia, Yosemite, Fresno, Bakersfield. It’s very agricultural, rural, low-income with many high needs schools. We realized that not only do we need a model like this for preparing teachers, but also mental health professionals – school-based social workers and school counselors. We tackled the entire ecosystem of our school. 

Through this pathway, we’re truly able to grow our own, which means preparing individuals of our own communities who grew up here, who know their communities, who know parents. The students who were students of our own schools to then be part of our system. 

To your question of why, when you look at the student ratio of school counselors and students in our area, it’s 1 to 460+, which is double what is recommended nationally. There’s a gap that we’re trying to close and bridge. By having this pathway in place, it’s allowing us to not only recruit from local talents, but also prepare them in a way that gives them a full year of clinical experience. The data doesn’t lie.

What challenges did you all come up against before launching, and what did you do to overcome them? 

As a new pathway, [it required] a lot of informing and educating school leaders about the benefits, and sharing retention data about residencies. I wouldn’t call it a challenge, it was a learning experience. 

How might this residency impact what you all are seeing with regards to the youth mental health crisis, particularly as you mentioned that this county you’re serving is predominantly high needs, schools that, as you mentioned, have large shortages of mental health support staff? 

We’re looking at the entire ecosystem of our schools and the workload that teachers have, specifically after the pandemic. The silver lining is that a lot of mental wellness issues came to light and the public are more open to conversation. It’s now more important and obvious that we do need more services; school counselors play a big role in that ecosystem as well as social workers. Providing another part of the support that our students need in the classroom, that’s the impact that we see. We’re providing more wrap-around support to our schools and students by preparing teachers, social workers, and school counselors through our residency model. 

I‘m wondering about the scale of this, what’s interest been like since you launched in September and how large of a cohort do you hope to recruit this first year? 

Initially our plan was to have a small pilot cohort of 8. We launched with 12, and now we’re getting requests from districts for next year already. It looks like that might double, and it’s because of the needs of our districts and the value they see added by having residents at their sites and the impact they’re already having with their students. 

Our goal is to actually scale up and expand our program throughout the state. We’re working closely with a couple of county offices around this work, and we are always willing to share best practices as well as guide and provide support to any other regions that are looking to implement a similar program. 

If you had to boil it down, what are three things that you think that folks who are taking on this kind of work should keep in mind? 

First, having a vision that’s student centered. Second, building and nurturing partnerships with your districts and universities. And ultimately, providing quality mentorship for the residents, working alongside district leadership to make sure that those individuals are the right fit for a school. 

Is there anything I haven’t asked you but that’s on your mind or just that you want me to know? 

Beyond the living stipend for residents, we also provide a stipend for the mentors that’s $4,000. That’s unique because they’re spending quite a bit of time throughout the year. It’s important to recognize the efforts that not only the residents are putting into this, but the mentors who play a huge component in this process.

Stein, who will be the state’s first Jewish governor, has singled out improving the state’s schools as his top priority as he switches roles from attorney general. He will succeed current Democratic governor Roy Cooper, who could not seek re-election as his term expired. 

Though his win was anticipated by experts as the Robinson campaign crumbled in the wake of multiple scandals over the last few weeks, the vote was historic for North Carolina, which typically sees wins below a 4-point margin. Stein claimed a 14-point victory.

In September, as polls began showing favor for Stein, CNN reported Robinson called himself a “Black Nazi” and said “slavery is not bad” on a porn site. His staffers quit and donations dried up. Former endorser President Donald Trump distanced himself.

Addressing supporters on election night after the race was called, moderate Stein rejected “hate” and re-emphasized his commitment to working across party lines for progress. 

“We have big challenges ahead, but we have even bigger dreams to realize,” Stein said. “…We must reject the politics of division, fear and hate that keep us from finding common ground. We will go further when we go together. Not as Democrats, not as Republicans, not as independents, but as North Carolinians.”

For schools, Stein campaigned on plans to improve youth mental health by recruiting counselors, nurses and social workers; increasing teacher pay; expanding career and vocational education; and providing universal school meals. Stein was endorsed by the state’s teachers union. 

Robinson, in contrast, threatened to reject billions of federal funding for education and campaigned on expanding the voucher system that allows families to attend private schools with public funding. 

Robinson’s flare for hateful, anti-LGBTQ and misogynistic rhetoric, condemned by the NAACP, would have also likely fueled disrespect for educators, whom he called “wicked,” and distrust for the department of education, which he had said he wanted to get rid of entirely. 

While electing Stein, voters split their ballots to support Trump, but also elected a Democratic schools chief, overlooking party affinities in the interest of their childrens’ education. Democrat Mo Green, a large-district superintendent, claimed victory early Wednesday morning for state superintendent, earning 119,000 more votes than right-wing homeschooling advocate and January 6 insurrectionist Michele Morrow. 

Governor-elect Stein grew up in Chapel Hill, a college town, before studying history, law and government. He taught English and economics in Zimbabwe and served as a state senator for seven years before becoming attorney general in 2017. 

Stein has also promised to protect abortion rights, in a state where Republican lawmakers are discussing restricting access with a 6-week ban. 

A critical seat in the state legislature also flipped Democrat this Election Day, removing Republicans’ supermajority, which they used to repeatedly bypass Governor Cooper’s vetoes and enact legislation against LGBTQ youth. The body may now be forced to negotiate more with Stein. 

While fat-shaming may be among the last socially acceptable forms of discrimination, a new story in The Hechinger Report highlights the children who endure weight stigma at school — and its devastating toll on their well-being and academic performance. 

“Do you want a cupcake?” one fifth grader recalled being asked by one of her classmates who routinely called her “fatty.” Teachers routinely fail to confront students who fat-shame their classmates — and play their own role in anti-obesity bias.  

The 15 million U.S. children who are considered obese are more likely than other kids to have poor academic performance — a reality dubbed the obesity achievement gap. Now, new research suggests bias among teachers could be part of the problem. 

“Teachers often perceive children with obesity as emotional, unmotivated, less competent and noncompliant,” journalist Kavitha Cardoza wrote. “That can lead to teachers giving these students fewer opportunities to participate in class, less positive feedback and lower grades.”

Schools nationwide have policies that prohibit bullying on the basis of race, gender and religion. Few mention body weight. 

Read Cardoza’s latest story (which was also published in Teen Vogue) here.

In the news

Can’t stop reading about the election. Won’t stop reading about the election: Survivors of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which resulted in the deaths of 20 children and six adults, are now old enough to vote. Six explain how the shooting continues to influence their lives — and their picks for president. | The Washington Post

• These are the states where youth voters have the most potential to affect the presidential election results. | CIRCLE
• Donald Trump has vowed to carry out mass deportations if elected. It could separate millions of families — and leave schools to pick up the pieces. | Chalkbeat
• Inside school shooting survivor David Hogg’s multimillion-dollar bid to elect young progressives. | The 74

About two-thirds of teachers use tools designed to catch students who use artificial intelligence to cheat on homework, but an investigation into the leading services found error rates “can quickly add up” and can carry “devastating consequences for students who are falsely flagged.” | Bloomberg

• Lawsuit alert: Parents are suing their son’s Massachusetts high school in federal court, arguing he was wrongly penalized for using AI to research and write a history paper. At the time of the incident, the district lacked a policy on the acceptable uses of AI. | The 74

School security vendor faces new scrutiny: Evolv, a publicly traded security company that sells “weapons detection” metal detectors to schools, warned shareholders last week not to rely on its most recent financial statements as an independent investigation dissects its sales practices. | Associated Press

• For more than a year, industry insiders have scrutinized the claims Evolv makes in its sales pitches — and its detectors’ high rate of false alarms. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission opened an inquiry into the company’s marketing practices following allegations Evolv overstates the capabilities of its technology. | The 74
• A year after Virginia’s Prince William County Public Schools entered into a $10.7 million deal to install Evolv scanners, educators reported a decline in weapons confiscations. School safety officials found zero firearms, three knives, two box cutters and a “pneumatic” paintball or airsoft gun. The results, one school board member said, present “a pretty good ROI [return on investment] on these Evolv scanners.” | WTOP

What teachers need to know about the rise of AI-generated deepfakes — including computer-generated and nonconsensual nude images that students have created to harass their peers. | Education Week

The spy and the school board: Atlanta’s Cobb County school district hired a private security company purportedly led by anonymous former U.S. intelligence agents to analyze students’ social media accounts and identify potential online threats. The public learned about the unnamed company that is being paid an undisclosed amount during a school board meeting presentation by a man “only identified as Rob.” | Atlanta News First

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments Dec. 4 in a case that challenges Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, which could have implications for transgender youth nationally. | Them

Day in the life: A Minnesota-based journalist walked the halls with a school resource officer. Here’s what he learned about school-based policing. | The Minnesota Star Tribune

ICYMI @The74

• Native American Leaders Call Again for Action After Boarding Schools Apology

• Computer Programs Monitor Students’ Every Word in the Name of Safety

• Civil Liability for Parents in Florida Could Deter School Threats

Emotional support

Matilda doesn’t need a costume. She’s a monster every day. 

(Can we see your pet costumes!?)

A coalition of social and health service providers wants to remap the labyrinth of seven different agencies spread across state government that offer children’s behavioral health services.

The 42 organizations that make up the Rhode Island Coalition for Children and Families called for a new cabinet-level state department to oversee children’s behavioral health in a report released Thursday at an event in Providence.

“Kids’ behavioral health is not akin to adult behavioral health,” Benedict F. Lessing Jr., the CEO of Community Care Alliance, said of the findings in the coalition’s 22-page report titled “Children in Crisis Can’t Wait: The Case for System Transformation.”

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“We know that kids suffer in terms of behavioral health concerns from infancy through adolescence.”

The proposed cabinet would be similar to the Office of Healthy Aging, said Tanja Kubas-Meyer, the coalition’s executive director. Technically a division within a department, the aging office reports directly to the governor like a cabinet position — a model preferable to what the new report calls “too-often disjointed access to care for children and their families.”

This hypothetical division would be charged with coordinating the services of existing state agencies who serve kids with behavioral health needs, which would mean being responsible for things like licensing and contracting providers.

One example: While the Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities & Hospitals (BHDDH) handles both substance use and mental health treatments for adults, the agency is only responsible for youth who use substances. The Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF) is responsible for youth who experience what the state calls “serious emotional disturbance” — whether they are or aren’t in state custody or foster care, which DCYF also provides via contracted providers.

“This is not simply a matter the state will wrap up by itself, and it will be all unicorns and rainbows,” Kubas-Meyer said, adding the recommendations were made in the “spirit of collaboration, as opposed to a criticism.”

The report gives no estimate for what the creation of the new office would cost nor does it calculate the savings that could come from consolidating children’s services. Determining the cost would be difficult anyway.

“Another challenge is that there is not a state-wide unified Children’s Behavioral Health budget that clearly articulates how much money is being spent on these services, and which funding is available to children in general versus only for children with targeted needs,” the report states.

The executive-level Rhode Island Children’s Cabinet has reported a “children’s budget” annually since 2018, which is included in the governor’s executive summary. For fiscal 2025, it rose 4.6% to over $2 billion.

But, “there is no clear breakdown of what this funding includes, without which the public is not able to understand what relevant investments were recommended or funded,” the coalition report states.

“The system is really fragmented,” said Sen. Bridget Valverde, a North Kingstown Democrat, one of two state legislators who attended the report release, in an interview after the event. “I think where there are a lot of duplicated efforts, that’s an opportunity where children fall through the cracks.”

Democratic Rep. Tina Spears of Charlestown, who is the executive director of the Community Provider Network of Rhode Island, a nonprofit that supports people with disabilities, also attended.

A new cabinet would have to be achieved through legislation, said Valverde, calling the recommendation “a good suggestion that should absolutely be explored.”

“Efficiency in government — I think that’s something that everybody wants, in all of our sectors, so let’s do it for our kids,” Valverde said.

Other recommendations from the report include establishing a working group of public and private stakeholders to shape the cabinet’s goals, as well as a shared state data hub with more reliable information for understanding children’s behavioral health.

“We worked with Brown University earlier this year, thinking that we were going to put together a data dashboard, and found that neither the coalition nor Brown could access the data that they needed within any kind of reasonable time,” Kubas-Meyer said.

An out-of-office reply for kids’ mental health

Rhode Island’s health system is “deeply frustrating” and it can be confusing for families to access the services they need for their children, the report states.

“You need to invest not just federal dollars, but also state dollars in children’s medical services,” Kubas-Meyer said. “Not every component of services for children are medically eligible, and we need alternate financing. The state must have financing mechanisms that make it possible for both large and small organizations to continue to provide services.”

Lessing pointed to an erosion of diverse outpatient services as one reason he sees behavioral health care having declined in the Ocean State the past two decades. An emphasis on residential treatments or hospitalization in the absence of alternative models has led to situations wherein kids may be staying in psychiatric hospitals — an allegation made by federal and state attorneys against DCYF back in May, who reported the agency was “warehousing” kids at Bradley Hospital for longer than needed.

“There has not been a concerted effort in terms of what are the outpatient needs for kids and families,” Lessing said. “These have been generally left to individual organizations to kind of figure out, and that has become more and more problematic over the years…I think what happened 20 years ago, when the state basically gave these programs to managed care, was that it got off track.”

The state lost control over programming, Lessing said, and assumed that managed care organizations would figure out the rest.

“We began to see kids being boarded in emergency departments. That never happened 20 years ago…There were just not enough services in the community.”

Margaret Holland McDuff leads the coalition’s public policy committee and is also CEO of Family Service Rhode Island, which hosted the event. She started her career as a home-based clinician — an example of the community-based care often referenced in calls to reform behavioral health care for children. It’s a holistic approach that means “having a clinician, a case manager, whatever support that you need, within the setting that you need,” McDuff said.

A community-based clinician can observe more deeply a child’s routine, life experiences and formative traumas, McDuff said. The community-based care model allows for collaborations with schools to intervene and offer support when needed.

“Whether it’s a coach or an art teacher or whatever, to say, ‘You know, we know that you’ve been having challenges. Let’s all work together as a team, wrap around this child to be able to get the supports that they need,’” McDuff said, “It’s about being out of the office and being in the community with family.”

McDuff arrived at that perspective after working in residential treatment, which she found lacked the perspective of family life.

“I really felt like I wanted to work with the whole family and not just the child while they were an inpatient, and then send them home, and then see them come back,” she said.

But McDuff noted that organizations like Family Service can’t compete with the wages offered by managed care organizations.

“People have to make a living,” McDuff acknowledged. “And so the two tracks that really became available were institutions or outpatient.”

Similar statewide or cabinet initiatives for kids’ behavioral health already exist in states like New Jersey. McDuff said the state has seen a reduction in hospitalization rates.

“The biggest predictor of if a child is going to be in a psychiatric hospital is if they were in a psychiatric hospital before,” McDuff said.

Rhode Island Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Rhode Island Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janine L. Weisman for questions: info@rhodeislandcurrent.com. Follow Rhode Island Current on Facebook and X.

Whether it’s a research project on the Civil War or a science experiment on volcano eruptions, students in the Colonial School District near Wilmington, Delaware, can look up just about anything on their school-provided laptops.

But in one instance, an elementary school student searched “how to die.”

In that case, Meghan Feby, an elementary school counselor in the district, got a phone call through a platform called GoGuardian Beacon, whose algorithm flagged the phrase. The system sold by educational software company GoGuardian allows schools to monitor and analyze what students are doing on school-issued devices and flag any activities that signal a risk of self-harm or threats to others.

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The student who had searched “how to die” did not want to die and showed no indicators of distress, Feby said — the student was looking for information but in no danger. Still, she values the program.

“I’ve gotten into some situations with GoGuardian where I’m really happy that they came to us and we were able to intervene,” Feby said.

School districts across the country have widely adopted such computer monitoring platforms. With the youth mental health crisis worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic and school violence affecting more K-12 students nationwide, teachers are desperate for a solution, experts say.

But critics worry about the lack of transparency from companies that have the power to monitor students and choose when to alert school personnel. Constant student surveillance also raises concerns regarding student data, privacy and free speech.

While available for more than a decade, the programs saw a surge in use during the pandemic as students transitioned to online learning from home, said Jennifer Jones, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute.

“I think because there are all kinds of issues that school districts have to contend with — like student mental health issues and the dangers of school shootings — I think they [school districts] just view these as cheap, quick ways to address the problem without interrogating the free speech and privacy implications in a more thoughtful way,” Jones said.

According to the most recent youth risk behavior survey from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly all indicators of poor mental health, suicidal thoughts and suicidal behaviors increased from 2013 to 2023. During the same period, the percentage of high school students who were threatened or injured at school, missed school because of safety concerns or experienced forced sex increased, according to the CDC report.

And the threat of school shootings remains on many educators’ minds. Since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, more than 383,000 students have experienced gun violence at school, according to The Washington Post’s count.

GoGuardian CEO Rich Preece told Stateline that about half of the K-12 public schools in the United States have installed the company’s platforms.

As her school’s designee, Feby gets an alert when a student uses certain search terms or combinations of words on their school-issued laptops. “It will either come to me as an email, or, if it is very high risk, it comes as a phone call.”

Once she’s notified, Feby will decide whether to meet with the student or call the child’s home. If the system flags troubling activity outside of school hours, GoGuardian Beacon contacts another person in the county — including law enforcement, in some school districts.

Feby said she’s had some false alarms. One student was flagged because of the song lyrics she had looked up. Another one had searched for something related to anime.

About a third of the students in Feby’s school come from a home where English isn’t their first language, so students often use worrisome English terms inadvertently. Kids can also be curious, she said.

Still, having GoGuardian in the classroom is important, Feby said. Before she became a counselor 10 years ago, she was a school teacher. And after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, she realized school safety was more important than ever.

Data and privacy

Teddy Hartman, GoGuardian’s head of privacy, taught high school English literature in East Los Angeles and was a school administrator before joining the technology company about four years ago.

Hartman was brought to GoGuardian to help with creating a robust privacy program, he said, including guardrails on its use of artificial intelligence.

“We thought, ‘How can we co-create with educators, the best of the data scientists, the best of the technologists, while also remembering that students and our educators are first and foremost?’” Hartman said.

GoGuardian isn’t using any student data outside of the agreements that school districts have allowed, and that data isn’t used to train the company’s AI, Hartman said. Companies that regulate what children can do online are also required to adhere to federal laws regarding the safety and privacy of minors, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule.

But privacy experts are still concerned about just how much access these types of companies should have to student data.

School districts across the country are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on contracts with some of the leading computer monitoring vendors — including GoGuardian, Gaggle and others — without fully assessing the privacy and civil rights implications, said Clarence Okoh, a senior attorney at the Center on Privacy and Technology at the Georgetown University Law Center.

In 2021, while many schools were just beginning to see the effects of online learning, The 74, a nonprofit news outlet covering education, published an investigation into how Gaggle was operating in Minneapolis schools. Hundreds of documents revealed how students at one school system were subject to constant digital surveillance long after the school day was over, including at home, the outlet reported.

That level of pervasive surveillance can have far-reaching implications, Okoh said. For one, in jurisdictions where legislators have expanded censorship of “divisive concepts” in schools, including critical race theory and LGBTQ+ themes, the ability for schools to monitor conversations including those terms is concerning, he said.

A report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group based in San Francisco, illustrates what kinds of keyword triggers are blocked or flagged for administrators. In one example, GoGuardian had flagged a student for visiting the text of a Bible verse including the word “naked,” the report said. In another instance, a Texas House of Representatives site with information regarding “cannabis” bills was flagged.

GoGuardian and Gaggle both also dropped LGBTQ+ terms from their keyword lists after the foundation’s initial records request, the group said.

But getting a full understanding of the way these companies monitor students is challenging because of a lack of transparency, Jones said. It’s difficult to get information from private tech companies, and the majority of their data isn’t made public, she said.

Do they work?

Years before the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, the school district purchased a technology service to monitor what students were doing on social media, according to The Dallas Morning News. The district sent two payments to the Social Sentinel company totaling more than $9,900, according to the paper.

While the cost varies, some school districts are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on online monitoring programs. Muscogee County School District in Georgia paid $137,829 in initial costs to install GoGuardian on the district’s Chromebooks, according to the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. In Maryland, Montgomery County Public Schools eliminated GoGuardian from its budget for the 2024-2025 school year after spending $230,000 annually on it, later switching to Lightspeed, according to the Wootton Common Sense.

Despite the spending, there’s no way to prove that these technologies work, said Chad Marlow, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union who authored a report on education surveillance programs.

In 2019, Bark, a content monitoring platform, claimed to have helped prevent 16 school shootings in a blog post describing their Bark for Schools program. The Gaggle company website says it saved 5,790 lives between 2018 and 2023.

These data points are measured by the number of alerts the systems generate that indicate a student may be very close to harming themselves or others. But there is little evidence that this kind of school safety technology is effective, according to the ACLU report.

“You cannot use data to say that, if there wasn’t an intervention, something would have happened,” Marlow said.

Computer monitoring programs are just one example of an overall increase in school surveillance nationwide, including cameras, facial recognition technology and more. And increased surveillance does not necessarily deter harmful conduct, Marlow said.

“A lot of schools are saying, ‘You know what, we’ve $50,000 to spend, I’m going to spend it on a student surveillance product that doesn’t work, instead of a door that locks or a mental health counselor,’” Marlow said.

Some experts are advocating for more mental health resources, including hiring more guidance counselors, and school policies that support mental health, which could prevent violence or suicide, Jones said. Community engagement programs, including volunteer work or community events, also can contribute to emotional and mental well-being.

But that’s in an ideal world, GoGuardian’s Hartman said. Computer monitoring platforms aren’t the only solution for solving the youth mental health and violence epidemic, but they aim to help, he said.

“We were founded by engineers,” Hartman said. “So, in our slice of this world, is there something we can do, from a school technology perspective that can help by being a tool in the toolbox? It’s not an end-all, be-all.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.

It had only been a year since Estelle Sievert and her wife, Jane, joined the foster care program at SAFE Alliance in Austin when they were introduced to 3-week-old Noah in 2022.

The couple immediately fell in love with their soon-to-be adopted son but knew the future might contain some challenges. The infant’s biological parent had a lifetime of severe mental illness compounded by years of using methamphetamines and PCP that went unaddressed, and studies show that trauma and mental illness can be passed down through generations.

This meant the early stages of this child’s life could be the key to ensuring a healthy physical and mental future.

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“We wanted to take a proactive approach to parenting to set him up with skills from very early on to identify emotions and validate his feelings,” Sievert said. “Kind of preparing for whatever may come down the line.”

Among the resources the couple found was Austin-based Mainspring Schools, a child care center that has built a nationally recognized mental health program for children as young as infants and toddlers.

Although a focus on mental wellness for infants, toddlers, and kindergarteners started to develop about 30 years ago, a growing number of child care centers, such as Mainspring, are emphasizing mental health as much as literacy in their curriculum — that the ability to express emotions and form relationships is equally crucial to school success as learning to read at an early age.

Additionally, Texas officials — after lagging behind other states such as Arkansas and Colorado for decades — are starting to study the current state of early childhood mental health care in Texas to determine the best way to create a statewide mental health system for the state’s youngest residents — an effort driven in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the pandemic accelerated incidents of mental health concerns, rates of childhood mental health challenges and suicide had been rising steadily for at least a decade before and have only risen further.

In Texas, more than 500,000 children were diagnosed with anxiety or depression in 2020, an increase of 23% since 2016, according to a 2023 Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute report on child and youth behavioral health.

Seventy-one percent of Texas youth with mental health issues will go untreated, compared with the national average of 61.5%, due in part to a severe shortage of child and adolescent psychiatrists in the state. Jarring statistics like these point to the necessity for early identification and intervention in facilities that touch the most children at very young ages — child care centers.

In partnership with nonprofits like United Way, grassroots organizations do much of the work in early child care mental health, a feat that has impressed the most ardent supporters of children’s mental wellness.

“You will hear people say, ‘Oh c’mon, it’s just child care,’ but no, it’s so much more. This can alter the direction of these kids’ lives,” said Colin Denby Swanson, executive director of Mainspring Schools.

Mental wellness in toddlers

While it’s too early to tell if Noah has inherited mental illnesses, he can become overwhelmed in certain everyday situations. The Sieverts found that a traditional day care setting was too intense for their child.

However, finding a preschool or day care that fits those needs was more complex than expected.

“We learned quickly not all day cares are created equally,” Sievert said.

Mainspring Schools, where Noah has been enrolled in since early 2023, prepares children ages 6 weeks to 5 years old for success in school through early education and mental wellness. This includes specializing in trust-based relational intervention designed to help children who have experienced adversity. Children with these needs often have trouble trusting adults, which frequently leads to perplexing behavior at a young age.

Mainspring Schools tries to address this issue through monthly family dinners and weekly family support nights, where the children and their parents can form a relationship while receiving parenting advice from licensed professionals. The school also has a low child-to-teacher ratio of four to one, allowing for more detailed learning and observation.

“We wanted a program that didn’t use the traditional punitive punishments for children,” Sievert said. “Mainspring School shared the same language that we used at home and understanding of support we felt was needed. We are already seeing the results of this work.”

At 1 or 2 years old, understanding and managing one’s behaviors and reactions becomes critical. At 2 to 3 years old, a child with good mental health will continue to interact with people and build healthy relationships, including copying what other people say and do — a primary reason why young children and their parents can benefit from a robust mental wellness program in a child care center, said Barbara Grant Boneta, director of the Success by 6 coalition, a childhood wellness program in Travis County.

“We are almost teaching adults how to allow children to be children again. We are focusing on forming a loving relationship and giving kids time and space to have big feelings and help them label those feelings,” Boneta said.

This is a change to the child-rearing process where literacy and education at an early age were given priority in child care facilities and preschools. Studies have found play and good mental health are just as key to success in school later on in life as much as literacy does.

“The two can go hand in hand,” Boneta said. “It’s one of those things you want to infuse throughout the curriculum.”

The pandemic’s impact

Boneta said trauma-informed care programs like those at Mainspring Schools doesn’t need to be limited to families who have dealt with severe trauma, since the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on young children is still being studied.

“Families were stressed, and it was a pressure cooker, and children could not form relationships,” Boneta said. “Some of these preschoolers and kindergartners never got to go to a library or gymnastics class before entering elementary school. They missed out on key experiences.”

Children born during the pandemic scored lower in gross motor, fine motor and social-emotional development than before, according to a Columbia University research study. Children with poor or underdeveloped social and emotional skills display more challenging behavior, including anger, withdrawal, anxiety, and aggression.

Additionally, since the onset of the pandemic, fewer toddlers and young children have been receiving early intervention services. Underidentification could increase referrals in elementary schools in the next few years.

The pandemic shuttered many child care facilities, making it hard for parents to find programs like Mainspring Schools, said Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, founder of the Center for Youth Wellness and former Surgeon General of California, when she visited Mainspring Schools last month.

In 2023, the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Institute for Excellence in Mental Health attempted to collect data from state programs and organizations implementing trauma-informed care to infants and early childhood. What they found was that there was no universal understanding of Texas’ approach to delivering infant and early childhood mental health care, meaning it currently looks different from community to community.

“This is precisely the type of program I was talking about when I said there were solutions to adverse childhood trauma, and it can make all the difference in the world,” Harris said. “We need to ask ourselves how we can all play our part as a community because if we address this in our children, we can transform the outcomes of entire communities.”

Texas’ progress

The state of Texas is ready to listen. In 2023, the federal government awarded the state $16 million a year until December 2025 to address the gaps in its early childhood system, which were made worse by the COVID-19 crisis.

This has led to a partnership between UT-Austin’s mental health institute and the Texas Workforce Commission to analyze the landscape of infant and early childhood mental health and present recommendations for a state system. The institute’s researchers interviewed 14 states and nine Texas child care stakeholders and conducted two surveys of statewide early childhood programs to determine the best way to create a statewide toddler and early childhood mental health care system in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Texas Legislature also directed the Statewide Behavioral Health Coordinating Council to develop a children’s mental health strategic plan to be published Dec. 1. The plan will cover children from birth through 17 years of age.

These efforts will complement the state’s Early Childhood Intervention program, which supports families with children from birth through 35 months of age who have disabilities or delays in any area of development, including social-emotional development. The program offers counseling, behavior intervention, occupational therapy, social work, specialized skills training and case management.

Although Texas has no statewide effort, many states for decades have used infant and early childhood mental health consultants as a critical component of their continuum of care, especially for children from birth to 5 years old.

Infant and early childhood mental health consultants primarily work in homes or in early childhood education settings with the adults in the young children’s lives to build their capacity to support their child’s healthy social and emotional development — before formalized intervention is needed.

Arkansas has a statewide program established in 2004 and overseen by the University of Arkansas School of Medical Services. The university provides all training and supervision to consultants across the state.

Colorado’s Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation program focuses on building a qualified workforce by investing in higher education pathways, such as the Colorado State University School of Social Work’s mental health consultant program.

Connecticut is the national leader in infant and early childhood mental health consultations. Established in 2002, it was the first state to standardize its state program model, which is overseen by a nonprofit organization called Advanced Behavioral Health.

Workforce strain

To achieve a statewide program similar to what other states have created, Texas officials must develop a workforce for this specific field.

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry estimates that the country needs 47 child and adolescent psychiatrists per 100,000 children. In Texas, there are roughly 10 CAPs per 100,000 children, illustrating the dire state of youth mental health services.

“There isn’t a lot of funding available, and you got to be trained in this and have the education around this, and unless you are in a place that can give you that training, it can be hard to get into the industry,” said Boneta.

Meanwhile, child care centers, where many of these youngest Texans can receive mental health services, have struggled since the COVID-19 pandemic.

About one-third of Texas child care centers and homes closed at some point during the pandemic, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

This is due to the cost of running a child care facility.

More than 75% of Mainspring’s students receive need-based tuition subsidies or scholarships, but state and federal reimbursements through programs like Early Head Start and the Texas Workforce Commission cover less than half of that amount.

“For a program like Mainspring, the cost is about $2,100 to $2,400 per child per month,” said Swanson, executive director of Mainspring, which has an annual budget of $2.3 million “We rely exclusively on grants and individual giving to support the family services piece.”

The Texas Legislature has attempted to address the child care crisis by allowing cities and counties to exempt specific child care centers from some or all of their property taxes, but local governments have been slow to adopt the exemptions.

In addition to a full property exemption for child care centers, Travis County leaders are allowing voters to determine in November whether to create a 2.5 cent property tax hike to infuse $75 million into child care.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to address child care in our county and support the mental health services needed here,” Aaron DeLaO, vice president of impact for United Way for Greater Austin, said about the tax initiative. “We are on the cusp of being able to address generational trauma in our communities.”

Noah just turned 2 years old this year, and the Sieverts and Mainspring Schools are starting to work on his emotional regulation and finding out how important it is for parents to model behaviors.

For the family, there isn’t an age too young or too old for mental wellness education.

“It makes just as much sense to them as anything else we are telling them at that age,” Sievert said. “So why not start talking earlier about mental health and just identify feelings and how to deal with them?”

For 24/7 mental health support in English or Spanish, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s free help line at 800-662-4357. You can also reach a trained crisis counselor through the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

The effects of bullying on teens’ mental health are well-documented. But could bullying also shape their future aspirations?

In 2023, 72% of transgender students and 69% of those questioning report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness and 1 in 4 attempted suicide. By comparison, 11% of cisgender girls and 5% of cisgender boys reported a suicide attempt. Ten percent of trans youth received medical treatment after trying to take their own life. 

Last year marked the first time data on high school students’ gender identity was collected as part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Administered every other year to some 20,000 ninth- through 12^th-graders, the survey has long been considered the most accurate depiction of the well-being of LGBTQ youth. 

This most recent survey is also the first to collect data on student welfare since dozens of laws in almost half of U.S. states have rolled back protections for LGBTQ youth and limited transgender people’s access to health care. A separate, peer-reviewed study released in September by The Trevor Project found the rate of suicide attempts rose by up to 72% in places that enacted the laws between 2018 and 2022. 

“The figures reported by the CDC are harrowing and indicate that much remains to be done to support transgender young people’s health and safety in the U.S., especially as we’re witnessing another record-breaking year of anti-transgender legislation,” says Ronita Nath, Trevor’s vice president of research. 

The federal data adds to research showing that LGBTQ students aren’t safe at school. Compared with 8.5% of cisgender male students, more than 1 in 4 gender-nonconforming youth reported skipping school within the last month out of fear, and 40% said they were bullied. More than 10% of transgender and questioning students lacked stable housing, a rate five times higher than that of their cisgender peers. 

“These data confirm what we have long known to be true: Transgender young people are disproportionately impacted by a number of health disparities,” says Nath. “It’s crucial to clarify that these young people are not inherently prone to these negative mental health outcomes, but rather placed at higher risk because of how they are mistreated and stigmatized by others.”

According to the Movement Advancement Project, which tracks legislation, 53% of all LGBTQ people now live in states where there are no legal protections for queer students. Another 2% live in places where new laws prohibit local governments, including school districts, from enacting anti-discrimination policies. States with anti-bullying laws are home to 45% of the LGBTQ population.

Data about trans youth is scarce, but the statistics that are available underscore higher rates of poor mental health, suicidality, in-school victimization and other struggles. The number of youth who identify as gender-nonconforming or questioning in the new CDC data is much higher than past estimates. Extrapolating from 2017 and 2019 Youth Risk Behavior statistics drawn from a smaller number of states, in 2022 the Williams Institute, a UCLA-based LGBTQ research center, suggested 1.4% of teens are transgender. 

It is known that a higher number of youth now identify as LGBTQ in general than previous generations. But researchers caution that at least one more CDC survey cycle is needed to draw conclusions about whether teens are now more likely to say their gender identity does not match the sex they were assigned at birth. 

In 2022, President Joe Biden issued an executive order geared at expanding LGBTQ data collection by the U.S. Department of Education and other federal agencies. At the same time, however, at least 10 states — including six where anti-gay and trans legislation has been enacted — have stopped participating in the Youth Risk Behavior Survey in full or in part. Civil rights advocates have complained that this will make it harder to document the impact of the new laws. 

“We are grateful to see that, finally, transgender young people are being counted,” says Nath. “We urge all public health institutions to continue collecting data on this population, and to fund additional research and resources to better serve and protect transgender youth across the country.”

In an effort to address rising incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia, New York City’s Education Department launched an anti-hate hotline, officials said Monday.

The goal is to streamline how students and staff report incidents related to hate, harassment, and discrimination, adding another avenue on top of a four-year-old online portal for all bullying complaints.

The hotline (718-935-2889), staffed with Education Department employees, will be open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Friday. Callers can remain anonymous, but the pre-recorded greeting suggests having your student’s ID number or your staff ID number to “expedite your call.”

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“There is zero tolerance for hate in our schools,” incoming Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos said in a statement, “and this new hotline will help ensure incidents are reported and addressed.”

The announcement was part of a suite of initiatives the Education Department highlighted as the city commemorated the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 terror attacks by Hamas on Israel, which killed more than 1,200 people. More than 250 people were taken hostage and more than 60 remain in captivity. Israel’s subsequent attack on Gaza has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, including many children, and has led to a wider conflict in the region.

Prior to the new hotline, students and staff members could report incidents with their school or through a bullying portal the department launched in 2020 in response to a fatal school stabbing a few years earlier by a student who had been bullied.

From September to January last school year, the city saw roughly 440 school reports about incidents related to ethnicity or national origin, up about 30% from the same time the year before, according to public data. There were nearly 290 reports related to religion, up nearly 78% from the year before.

Students also reported that such bullying was on the rise, according to the annual school surveys. About 40% of the middle and high school students who responded to the survey reported seeing harassment based on race, ethnicity, religion, or immigration status, up from 30% in 2019.

Many people had been asking the Education Department to create a hotline or dedicated way to specifically report hate-rated incidents, including Karen Marder, the teacher at Hillcrest High School in Queens, who faced a raucous student protest over her support of Israel in the aftermath of the attacks on Oct. 7, 2023.

Marder recently sued the city for failing to protect her before students began marching in the hallways, calling for her ouster. She has, however, remained at the school — she now helps oversee student discipline as one of the school’s deans — and has been heartened that the new school year has started off relatively calm under a new principal. She spent much of the past year calling on outgoing schools Chancellor David Banks to create a hotline like the one that was just launched.

“I’m very happy they are finally doing this though it shouldn’t have taken a year,” she told Chalkbeat.

As local colleges braced for protests, the Education Department’s Office of Safety and Prevention Partnerships expected to deploy additional staffers to public schools on Monday, officials said. And ahead of Oct. 7, Education Department officials sent reminders to principals about the role of schools to create safe spaces for students to engage with current events — but in ways that ensure schools don’t take political stances, officials said. Students have previously complained that they don’t feel supported or encouraged to discuss the issues.

Additionally, the Education Department this fall is offering new anti-discrimination staff training with a specific focus on antisemitism and Islamophobia. The city’s Hidden Voices curriculum — which focuses on historical figures whose stories seldom get told — is expected to release installments by the end of the school year on Muslim Americans and Jewish Americans, and the city is encouraging schools to visit museums to help deepen students’ understanding of different cultures and their histories. The school system’s Interfaith Advisory Council is continuing to meet this year, as a way to demonstrate to students how to build bridges across different groups.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters. 

A lead researcher on the study said when preschoolers spend time on tablets at 3 ½ years of age, they show increased outbursts of anger by age 4 ½, which then leads to increased time on computer tablets at age 5 ½.  

Researchers described the trend as a “vicious cycle,” where excessive tablet use delays children’s ability to deal with their emotions, leading them to use screen time to soothe themselves when they’re upset. 

“The preschool years are a very important time for learning how to cope with negative emotions [like frustration and anger],” said Gabrielle Garon-Carrier, an assistant professor of psychoeducation at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec. “Learning to recognize emotions and adopt behaviors that are acceptable to society cannot be done in front of tablets.”

The study was published this month in JAMA Pediatrics.  

Previous research has linked the use of mobile devices to emotional dysregulation in children, Garon-Carrier said, but few studies have been able to show a direct link between tablet use and a cycle that could interfere with the development of self-regulation skills. 

Preschoolers learn to use time in front of a screen to cope with frustration or other challenging emotions, Garon-Carrier said, rather than how to manage those feelings. 

Student researchers visited the homes of 315 families with preschool-aged children in Nova Scotia, Canada three times — when children were 3 ½ in 2020 and again in 2021 and 2022. 

Parents were asked how much time children spent using a tablet and also about emotional behaviors; along with how the child handled transitions at bath or bedtime.  

Researchers found that children whose tablet use increased by 75 minutes when they were 3 ½ were 22 percent more angry or frustrated at other points of the day by the age of 4 ½, according to the study. A year later, the same children were using the tablet about 17 minutes more per day.

The study followed the same children over three years, from 2020 to 2022, as part of a bigger research project into other aspects of family life such as sleep and physical activity, Garon-Carrier said.

A parent can’t be blamed, she said, for letting a child who has frequent tantrums spend more time in front of a screen.

“It’s probably challenging for parents who have kids with destructive behaviors,” she said. “That could explain the cycle. The child spends time on the tablet and doesn’t learn to regulate his emotions. He has more outbursts and the parent is exhausted.”

She acknowledged that the research took place during the pandemic, when both children and adults spent more time in front of screens. But the findings hold, she said, because children continue to spend time in front of tablets.

The findings led Garon-Carrier and her co-investigators to believe parents should delay introducing young children to screen technology. This aligns with recommendations from the World Health Organization, which stress the importance of physical activity, interactive play and quality sleep over sedentary screen time.

While the study did not account for what type of content children were watching, Garon-Carrier said many preschoolers watch videos on Youtube, which allows parents to adjust settings on their accounts so that once one video is over, another doesn’t automatically begin. This approach helps limit screen time to just one video at a time.

It’s especially important to remove screens from important moments in the day, she said, including mealtimes and before bed. Also, parents can model good screen habits for their children. It can be helpful to make a family plan about screen use, which might include a rule that bans phones at the dinner table.

“This can be challenging for adults,” Garon-Carrier said. “Imagine how challenging it is for preschoolers. They need external people to say, ‘That’s enough.’ They can’t say that for themselves.”

The warning signs are unmistakable. Younger students, who were in their formative years when schools shut down, are not catching up as quickly as their older peers. Chronic absenteeism remains alarmingly high, creating a vicious cycle of missed learning and disengagement. Meanwhile, teachers are stretched to their limits, grappling with the dual pressures of addressing learning loss and managing their own burnout. These are not just temporary setbacks; they are harbingers of long-term consequences that could define a generation.

The situation is even more dire for students with disabilities, English learners and others facing unique challenges. The nation’s schools underserved these students even before the pandemic, and now the gaps have widened. Americans are witnessing a deepening of educational inequities that could have devastating effects if policymakers and educational leaders do not intervene.

Perhaps most concerning is that politicians and government agencies aren’t being open and honest with parents and advocates about these problems — or about potential solutions. In a recent analysis, CRPE found that only seven states made it easy for the average parent or website user to see the pre- and post-COVID educational data that every state is required to provide.

The path forward is clear: Educators must urgently expand the use of proven strategies that are already showing results, such as targeted tutoring, high-quality curricula and extended learning time. But these alone will not be enough. The pandemic has laid bare the fact that the nation’s education system was never designed to meet the needs of every student, particularly those with the most complex challenges. Truly supporting all students will mean reinventing the system itself.

This means moving beyond the traditional, one-size-fits-all model of education. Schools must become more flexible, adapting to students rather than forcing them to conform to outdated norms, such as a single teacher per classroom and ineffective special education programs. School superintendents and principals must embrace new staffing and scheduling approaches, such as team teaching, that allow for more personalized instruction and support. Further, schools must harness the power of technology, including artificial intelligence, to provide real-time insights into student progress and tailor learning experiences to each child’s individual needs.

Students who have fallen behind developmentally or academically during the pandemic are being placed at very high rates in special education or language programs that the parents we interviewed for our report described as rigid, unresponsive and fundamentally lacking in high expectations for their children. Students who do not fit neatly in programmatic boxes, such as “twice exceptional” children who are both academically gifted and in need of disability accommodations, exemplify why such boxes too often fail to meet individual needs. 

In the pandemic’s wake, it is critical for schools to abandon flawed and outdated approaches. This will mean redeploying staff and reconfiguring schedules to avoid pitting academic tutoring against special education services and supplemental pullout services against core instruction. It will also mean giving parents more options and power if their child is failing to thrive in the assigned program or school. 

But systemic change requires more than just innovative ideas — it takes political will and a commitment to evidence, equity, accountability and a relentless focus on innovation. Policymakers, advocates and philanthropists must work together to ensure that the most vulnerable students receive the targeted support they need. This includes providing honest, transparent data on academic performance so parents and educators can make informed decisions and ensuring that resources are directed where they are most needed.

The stakes could not be higher. If the current state of affairs continues, COVID-19 will leave its indelible mark on yet another cohort of students — young people whose potential will go unrealized and whose futures will be constrained by the failures of adults to act. The time for incremental change has passed. Those with the power to make these critical shifts must act with urgency, creativity and a deep sense of responsibility to all our students. The future of our society will be shaped by decisions and leadership actions in the coming year.

A few years ago, Dr. Steven Rogers, a physician in the emergency department at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, started a new initiative. He wanted to screen every child age 10 and up who passed through the department for suicide risk. That’s around 15,000 kids a year. 

“There’s lots of stigma around this question,” Rogers said. “I’d rather be able to identify kids who are low risk and need help versus when they’re an imminent risk or have already made an attempt.”  

In Connecticut, 11 children have died by suicide so far this year, nine of those in the past few months. To put that in perspective, just six children 17 and younger died by suicide in all of 2023. 

“I hope this isn’t a canary in the coal mine,” said Gov. Ned Lamont in late August at a roundtable event on youth suicide. 

There were no clusters of deaths, according to the Office of the Child Advocate, and deaths were distributed across the state, as well as among races and genders. The children were between the ages of 13 and 17. 

“We have a problem,” Sarah Eagan, Connecticut’s child advocate, said during the roundtable. She said most children who die by suicide in Connecticut die by asphyxiation, and in recent years, the age of those children is skewing younger. 

“We have work to do,” Eagan said, “and that work is not done until no child is bereft and alone, not knowing where to call, and there is no parent who … can’t sleep not knowing if they’re doing the right thing for their child.” 

For Rogers, the summer’s high numbers were especially hard to take in.

“It feels like a failure, especially for somebody who has committed a good part of their career to identifying kids at risk,” he said. 

Connecticut Children’s effort is just one example of a broadened push to respond to the youth mental health crisis in the state, one that has become increasingly urgent since the COVID pandemic. But even before the pandemic, Rogers was adamant that the screening tool was needed. Suicide is the No. 2 cause of death in children 10 and older, trailing unintentional injuries. 

And so, since August 2019, clinicians have been screening children 10 and older in the emergency department at Connecticut Children’s in Hartford, asking them a series of questions to assess their suicide risk, after their parent or caregiver is asked to leave the room. The process takes less than a minute, Rogers said. 

“Once you screen a kid positive that you didn’t suspect would be positive … I don’t want to be too dramatic and say it’s life-changing, but it is an eye-opener.”

Kids who do screen positive are directed toward appropriate mental health services. For some high-risk children, that might be an inpatient program. For others who are not in immediate danger of self harm, a counseling session or further evaluation might be scheduled in the comfort of their home. 

Of the 75,000 children that the hospital has screened in the past five years, 18% were positive for risk of suicide. That’s nearly 1 in 5 children. Most of those children came to the emergency department for a behavioral health issue in the first place. But an extraordinary number — around 6,000 children — initially came in for a medical issue like an asthma attack or a broken bone and ended up screening positive for suicide risk.

Rogers says he is fighting a perception that simply discussing suicide with children might plant a seed of suicidal ideation. But according to Rogers, this is a misnomer.

“It plants the seeds of hope,” he said.

In fact, he said, the screening tool can at the very least inform children that there is a place they can go that will ask them if they are considering suicide, a place where they can also get help. Because, he said, all too often, caregivers never have these conversations with children at all.

Rogers often thinks about the story of an 11-year-old girl who came to the hospital for a medical issue. To the clinician’s surprise, and to her mother’s, she screened positive for suicide risk. The mom asked her daughter — weren’t they best friends? They were, the girl told her mother. But, the mother said, didn’t best friends tell each other everything? “And she turned to her mother and just said, ‘Well, you never asked.’ “

New York City’s free online therapy platform for teens may violate state and federal laws protecting student data privacy, lawyers from the New York Civil Liberties Union and advocates charged in a letter Tuesday to the city’s Education and Health Departments.

Teenspace, a $26 million partnership between the city Health Department and teletherapy giant Talkspace launched in late 2023, connects city residents between ages 13 and 17 with free therapists by text, phone, or video chat.

In less than a year, roughly 16,000 students have signed up, Health Department officials said. Sign-ups disproportionately came from youth who identified as Black, Latino, Asian American and female and live in some of the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods, officials said in May.

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Information shared with a therapist is subject to stringent protections under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. But before connecting with a therapist through Teenspace, teens go through a registration process that asks for personal information like their name, school, mental health history, and gender identity. Advocates are concerned such information is being improperly collected and could be misused.

For one, teens enter the registration information before securing parental consent – a possible violation of federal student privacy laws, the letter contends.

And families don’t get a chance to review the privacy policy – which discloses that registration information can be used to “tailor advertising” and for marketing purposes – before entering the registration information, advocates allege. There’s an option for teens to request that their data be deleted from the company’s platform, but it’s hard to find, according to advocates.

“It’s all very invasive,” said Shannon Edwards, a parent and founder of AI For Families, an organization that seeks to help families navigate artificial intelligence, who co-authored the letter along with NYCLU and the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. “It’s also very unclear that parents understand what they’re getting themselves into.”

Advocates also pointed to the risk of a potential data breach – something the city has experienced with multiple outside vendors in recent years.

Advocates say similar privacy questions about Talkspace have been circulating for years and questioned whether city officials did sufficient due diligence or built in enough additional privacy safeguards before inking the contract.

“It’s the opacity of the relationship here, and the failure to make manifest what the city is doing to ensure there isn’t this data accumulation and sharing for inappropriate purposes,” said Beth Haroules, a senior attorney at the NYCLU who co-authored the letter.

Health Department spokesperson Rachel Vick said the agency has “taken additional steps to protect the data of Teenspace users and ensure information is not collected for personal gain, including stipulations that require all client data to remain confidential during and after the completion of the city’s contract and barring use of data for any purpose other than providing the services included in the contract.”

Client data is destroyed after 30 days if a teen doesn’t connect with a therapist, officials said.

A spokesperson for Talkspace referred questions to the Health Department.

The extent to which Teenspace is subject to state and federal laws governing student privacy in educational settings is somewhat murky, given that the contract is with the city’s Health Department, not its Education Department.

But NYCLU attorneys contend “the City cannot absolve itself of its responsibility to provide the protections inherent in federal and state laws…simply because the contract sits with DOHMH instead of DOE. The service is promoted on public school websites, and it is DOE’s responsibility to ensure that student data is protected, regardless of which City agency signs the contract.”

Parents may be more inclined to trust the platform because it has a “stamp of approval” from the school system, Edwards added.

A Health Department spokesperson didn’t specify whether the program is subject to education privacy laws, but said it’s “not a school based service.”

Teenspace has been the city’s highest-profile effort to address the ongoing youth mental health crisis.

“We are meeting people where they are with a front door to the mental health system that for too long has been too hard to find,” said Ashwin Vasan, the city’s health commissioner, in May.

Some teens have praised the program, noting it’s a way to bring mental health care to young people who may not otherwise have access.

But some mental health providers have argued it can’t replace the kind of intensive care a clinician provides, especially for kids with severe mental health challenges.

Company officials shared in May that they had helped 36 teens navigate serious incidents including reports of suicide attempts and abuse – cases they referred to child protective services, in-person therapists, or hospitals.

Talkspace CEO Jon Cohen previously told Chalkbeat the company uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to scan transcripts of therapy sessions to help identify teens at risk of suicide.

Even advocates critical of Teenspace’s privacy protections acknowledge the severe shortage of mental health providers and say teletherapy can play a role in filling the gap.

“We know you cannot find providers … there is such a need,” said Haroules. But advocates said the city can do more to ensure its vendors are meeting strict standards for data privacy, especially with such sensitive information.

“Everyone thinks, well, mental health is important for kids, these kids of services are required … when on the other side is: ‘How are they getting to it?’” said Edwards. “It doesn’t matter what the app is, there has to be a standard.”

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

Kids were grieving for the first time – more than Baldwin Union Free School District counselors, teachers and administrators had ever realized. 

“I don’t think we’ve ever seen — or maybe we weren’t attuned to before — the number of students who have lost a parent for one reason or another,” said Shari Camhi, the New York district’s superintendent, reflecting on the 2023-24 school year. ”We see a lot of cancer. We’ve seen just a lot of death.”

Baldwin is far from the only district tasked with supporting grieving students. As of spring 2022, nearly 250,000 children across the country lost a parent or caregiver to COVID alone.  

Perhaps, as Camhi conceded, it’s always been like this. Perhaps kids have been grieving quietly. And now, only after concerted efforts to boost family connections and prioritize students’ emotional well-being, were they opening up. 

Now, Baldwin was ready to support them: By the time counselors flagged the stories they’d been hearing from kids, a new, free wellness center had just been built – the home base from where they could launch bereavement groups. 

Their creation illuminates the thread that unites Baldwin’s wellness initiatives: family relationships. Camhi says the approach is old-school, a throwback to a time decades ago, before cell phones pushed kids into introversion and became a hotbed for bullying, when neighbors really knew each other and what was going on in their lives. 

After all, most schools do not monitor family deaths, information only discerned through building “rapport and trust,” said Gina Curcio, health, wellness, and community director for the district on Long Island.  

Serving kids across all grades, homed at the middle school with a separate entrance for privacy, the wellness center is open late each weeknight, staffed by child therapists and psychologists. Established through a partnership with PM Pediatrics and a 4-year grant from former House Representative Kathleen Rice, it opened in the fall of 2023 without common hiccups districts often face, like having to take on hiring hard-to-staff behavioral health positions. 

In the calm-colored space adorned with student artwork, bean bags and infographics about how the mind works, two peer bereavement groups hosted 11 children for six, weekly sessions during the school year; another ran this summer, with children meeting for 90 minutes weekly grouped by age. 

Beyond the stages of grief, they have learned coping skills through mindfulness, art and music therapy, and forged friendships with peers they had no idea were dealing with similar feelings. All things previously out of reach due to a combination of stigma, financial strain, and not having a comparable resource in their community. 

The bereavement space and “transition” groups they inspired, for kids making the leap into pre-K, 6th and 9th grade, and college, are just some of the many initiatives Baldwin has taken in recent years to address childrens’ emotional and physical well-being, which impacts their ability to show up at school ready to learn and feel safe.  

“We still suspend kids for doing things that make it unsafe for other kids… [but] we will reduce the suspension in exchange for weekly counseling for students, because we believe that if you are exhibiting behavior that way – something’s going on,” Camhi added. 

In ways big and small, Baldwin looks for ways to forge strong connections between children and their community. 

At game days this summer, parents were pushed to participate with their kids – no electronics allowed. By third grade, all students have had lessons on wellness tools, like grounding and breathing techniques to manage and express hard emotions. Each year high school seniors in AP Photography interview second graders about their dreams, their hopes and faces printed and exhibited around campus, in a local hospital and family courthouse. 

As national reports emerge that only 29 and 37% of Black and low-income families report their child’s school offers counseling and other support services compared to 52 and 59% of their white, more affluent peers, Baldwin’s wellness center and connection with families provides a strong contrast.  

From January through March this year, the wellness center hosted over 600 sessions for the predominantly Black and Latino district – ranging from peer conflicts — which psychologists say have been more difficult for children to navigate after pandemic isolation— to divorce, cyberbullying and symptoms of anxiety and depression. 

In groups and in individual therapy, often art-based, kids have learned how to set goals, compromise, and practice role-playing interactions with mean people or conflicts with friends. 

“I think you can make me happy again,” one six year old told a clinician, who had started sessions by saying they were sad and “depressed.”

Having the wellness services available to families on-campus, without the hassle of waitlists or insurance run-arounds, has been a game changer for families – even in times of extreme uncertainty. 

Last school year, one Lenox Elementary School mother got a call that her ten year old blurted out in class that he wanted to kill himself. 

“It stopped me in my tracks,” she told The 74, recalling immediately leaving work to hug her son and talk with the school social worker. She learned he felt behind and left out socially, and knew he was quicker to outbursts than her other children, but did not know he had been hiding suicidal thoughts because he didn’t want to make her sad. 

The Jamaican family, whose name has been withheld for privacy, became one of the first served at the wellness center. Initially scared to start, with an image in mind of being forced to talk on a couch to a stranger, her son changed tune after the first of about 20 therapy sessions where he used drawing as a way to express harder emotions.

“I love it. It’s not like the movies. It’s nice.”

Today he is sleeping better, has fewer intrusive thoughts, knows now how to notice and talk through bad feelings when they arise. He brought some of the tools home, like Legos, plush toys, drawings and stickers. Within his friendships, he’s not taking things as personally, or overreacting.

In 2019, in the district where more than a quarter are considered low-income, the graduation rate was 95%. By 2023, it grew to 99% – 12% above the national average. The number likely has something to do with Baldwin’s emphasis on how students feel while at school – reflecting whether kids feel connected to each other, their work, and the place. 

Belonging, research confirms, is also key to curbing risky adolescent behaviors like drug use and violence. 

In a first grade classroom just before the end of the school year, a group of Baldwin elementary students sat crossed legged, intently listening to each other recap one wellness skill that they “loved or learned” from the year. Together they held a “breathing ball” – taking a low, deep breath as they picture a ball filling up with air in their hands, expanding and contracting slowly. 

One said quietly when he got upset at home, he recalled the “sound bowl” – metal, sometimes filled with water, that when hit with wood released a calming frequency – and would feel better. 

The wellness educator encouraged him to craft or visualize his own version at home, urging: “remember, you can go anywhere in your imagination.” 

Access to in-school mental health support varies dramatically along class and race lines, with Black and low-income families far less likely to report their child’s school offers counseling and other support but are more likely to use them than their affluent, white peers. 

Just 29% of Black families and 37% of low-income families report that their child’s school offers mental health services, compared to 52% of white families and 59% of the most affluent, according to the Nation’s Kids at Risk report released last week by University of Southern California researchers. Lower income families reported using in-school mental health services more than five times as much as those with the highest incomes. 

“We often talk about mental health struggles today with teens as kind of one issue and often in generalities,” said  lead author and USC researcher Amie Rapaport. “… I’m hopeful that differentiation will help inform interventions and services to help kids that are most in need.”

The survey of 2,500 families is the latest national attempt to show the “very clear link” between poor mental health and chronic absenteeism. Over one in five children considered chronically absent, missing 10% or more of a school year, experienced conduct problems, like losing temper or fighting with peers. About one in ten report emotional or peer struggles. 

Across the country, more than one in four kids were chronically absent by the end of 2023. 

Researchers acknowledge the absences themselves may be creating more emotional distress, negatively impacting how students feel about themselves as learners. Regardless, the currently or on-track to be chronically absent students group struggled emotionally or behaviorally three to four times more than their peers with good attendance. 

“There are kids in need that aren’t being reached,” Rapaport said. 

Among all families, one in five would have used services had they been available, though Black and Hispanic families show the highest desire. Of all families receiving services, roughly 3 in 4 are “satisfied,” saying they help. 

Teen girls, between 13 and 17, struggled most with depression and anxiety symptoms, but Black and Hispanic girls appear to be struggling less than their white and Asian peers. Pre-teen boys, particularly Black boys, are experiencing the most conduct concerns, such as increases in fighting, lying, cheating, distraction, bullying and stealing, the report found, adding detail to recent CDC reports about increases in violence and bullying. 

The findings came as somewhat of a surprise to Rapaport, who expected mental health struggles to be more evenly distributed across age and gender; and because  student mental health was a priority for many districts nationwide in spending federal pandemic relief funds in the last few years. 

She explained the disparities may have to do with access to information and care – whether or not schools are adequately reaching parents about what resources are readily available, or curbing long waiting lists. 

 “Clearly, policy can help better target mental health supports to meet the needs of the children who could benefit from them the most,” the report stated, calling the patterns “unfortunate.”

With my family, I pretended everything was fine because they also told me, “You’re a young Black girl who will end up in child protective services because the system is racist against people like us.” When my middle, elementary and high school reached out about therapy, my family refused. A meeting was set up with my grandmother and mother to discuss mental health options, but they declined. When I came home, I was met with yelling and I was berated by my family for making “the school think something damn wrong at home.”

Even when I did briefly get a therapist through a health center at age 14, the provider, a Black woman, told me, “You’re a Black girl. They’re going to put you in the system and label you as crazy and aggressive.”

I have more stories like these, and I know other Black girls do too. Here’s what our schools need to know: We are not as strong as you think we are. We are strong only because we were forced to carry the weight of systemic stereotypes, unresolved trauma and our own emotional needs. That’s why schools need to address the elephant in the room: their lack of mental health support and how it is affecting Black girls. 

Our issues start at home due to our families’ fear of the school system perpetuating racism through lack of cultural connection, and schools worsen this fear through budget cuts to mental health services and by criminalizing Black girls. As a result, the Strong Black Woman stereotype is placed on us at an early age. Rather than making us feel empowered, it only leads to unique internalized pain, depression and anxiety.

As early as age 2, your Black daughter is often treated as if she’s 5. At 10, she is treated like she’s 15. By the time we’re even aware of our own existence, the world has already adultified us. This is where society considers Black girls less innocent compared to their white counterparts. People often believe Black girls ages 5 to 14 need less nurturing, protection, support and comfort than white girls of the same age. By the time we learn how to use the bathroom on our own, parents and authority figures believe we’re independent enough to handle our own emotions. Because we’re expected to know better — by parents, teachers and even the judicial system — we are also more likely to receive harsher punishment, with a whopping 37.2% of Black girls being arrested at school, compared with 30.2% of white girls.

Black people overall are less likely to seek help from professionals than our Caucasian counterparts, and this is true about teens, too. Black communities also have fewer resources. And historically, there’s a Eurocentric influence on therapy. As a result, many Black families feel like therapy isn’t made for us — and when children aren’t encouraged by their families to seek treatment, they can wind up with unhealthy coping mechanisms: problems such as cruelty, bullying others, aggression and emotional dysregulation. NYU conducted a study on 227 black women and found that in them, depression shows up as insomnia, irritability and self-criticism. Irritability is a large factor in the “Angry Black Woman.” Yet, society expects them to be strong. No wonder they’re less likely to seek treatment. 

Now, imagine having to regulate your own emotions and existence and foster independence in order to avoid further social and systemic discrimination. This is what happens to Black women who were adultified early on. They mature into the “Strong Black Woman” stereotype, portraying themselves as strong, independent women who are able to achieve motherhood without a father, balance multiple jobs and take up caregiving roles within the community, all without getting angry, crying or having other strong emotional reactions. The history behind the “Strong Black Woman” is extensive — each experience a Black woman faces stems from a coping mechanism required to keep not only themselves alive, but their family during slavery. However, this burden of strength only leads too many women — possibly some in your family and community — to internalize their pain.

I know firsthand how, when mental health struggles aren’t addressed, they get worse and affect other people, too. I lost a friend in fifth grade because her mother worried I’d influence her with my ideas of suicide and self-harm. Eight years later, my best friend told me other students in elementary school had been scared of me and found my frequent talk of death terrifying. They thought I was a witch. I can see why they were worried. To combat bullying and the fear of being seen as weak, I began having aggressive outbursts in fifth grade toward my classmates, I sat under desks to regulate my emotions and even threatened students who I felt had emotionally harmed me. My coping mechanisms have since haunted me into my teenage years. 

In ninth grade, I had an altercation with my mother over reaching out to my school in Brooklyn for help. That was during COVID. My mother eventually agreed, but started interrogating me on what was said during sessions, because she was in earshot of the conversations. However, returning to school in person in 10th grade saved me. After years of my family denying help from my elementary, middle, and high school, I finally received help from the mental health office at my high school. I met weekly with two counselors to improve my anger management and anxiety. For the first time, an adult finally understood me without instilling the fear of social implications. Due to the confidentiality of the services, I was able to discuss my issues in a healthy manner.

Unfortunately, just as I was beginning to see improvements, the office cut back its services. This exacerbated not only my mental health struggles, but those of my classmates who also relied on the office for help. At one point in my first semester of 12th grade, I broke down on the staircase when I couldn’t find a provider. 

I finally got the help I needed at my school from counselors by the second semester of 12th grade. Whether it was to gossip and vent or when I experienced emotional episodes, I had a community of counselors to support me who knew the struggle of being a Black teen girl. My school noticed and gave me an award for advocating for my mental well-being and persisting to do so — even when the odds were against me.

Unfortunately, this is not the story for many black girls in New York City and across America.

So here’s what needs to be done. Knowing that African-American families have a deep-rooted fear of trusting health systems, Black girls can benefit from counselors incorporating racial socialization into trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy. This means implementing counseling and providers centered around African-American cultures, attitudes and values , as well as cultural competence, to help Black girls tackle the discrimination and historical traumas we as a community continue to endure.  

For schools to do better at mental health services, they need to recognize how Black girls are treated and how they experience the world. Schools must implement racially socialized mental health services by hiring staff who share the culture of their students or have a willingness to understand a student’s background. Black girls are far behind in receiving mental services in their schools, and the Black community has to catch up. Our community has to work together in destroying mental health barriers that are deterring its members from seeking help. It is vital for learning institutions to aid in the efforts to destroy harmful stereotypes placed on young Black girls through their families and schools.

Like most kids, Aahil Valliani has been frustrated by the filters that his school uses to block inappropriate websites. Often, he has no idea why certain sites are blocked, especially when his web browsing is tied to his schoolwork.

Many students in this situation find a way around their districts’ web filters. They access the internet on their phones instead, or use proxy servers or virtual private networks to essentially access a different, unfiltered internet. Aahil, searching for a more systemic solution, teamed up with his younger brother and father to start a company called Safe Kids, raise almost $2 million in venture funding, and design a better filter.

As The Markup, which is part of CalMatters, reported in April, almost all schools filter the web to comply with the federal Children’s Internet Protection Act and qualify for discounted internet access, among other things. Most schools The Markup examined used filters that sort all websites into categories and block entire categories at once. Others scan webpages for certain off-limits keywords, blocking websites on which they appear regardless of the context. In both cases, the filters are blunt tools that result in overblocking and sometimes keep kids from information about politicized topics like sex education and LGBTQ resources.

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Aahil, now 17, points out that schools’ overly strict controls disappear as soon as kids graduate. “That’s a recipe for disaster,” he said. Kids, he contends, need to learn how to make good choices about how to use the internet safely when trusted adults are nearby so they are ready to make good decisions on their own later.

The Safe Kids filter turns web blocking into a teachable moment, explaining why sites are blocked and nudging students to stay away from them of their own accord. It uses artificial intelligence to assess the intent of a student’s search, reducing the number of blocks students see while conducting legitimate academic research. One example: if a student searches for Civil War rifles for a class assignment, Safe Kids would allow it. If a student tries to shop for an AK-47, it wouldn’t. Other filters would block both.

The filter also keeps student browsing data private, storing only categories of websites accessed, not URLs or search terms themselves. And it works through a Chrome browser extension, which means students can’t simply get around it with a proxy server or VPN while using that browser.

Safe Kids got its start during the early COVID-19 lockdowns. Sitting around the dinner table with his father, a tech entrepreneur; his mother, a self-employed fashion designer; and his younger brother Zohran, a budding computer scientist, Aahil got his family to strategize how to help all the kids getting sucked into dark corners of the web and battling the mental health consequences of their internet use.

Their idea, building off of the invasive and ineffective filters the brothers saw in school, essentially puts better training wheels on the internet. Aahil said his father did a bit of hand-holding in these early days, helping find board members and angel investors, as well as the data scientists who would train the AI machine learning model behind the filter and psychologists who could craft and test the filter’s hallmark pop-ups directing students toward more appropriate browsing. The company also spent time and money getting their designs patented. Aahil has three patents under his name and Safe Kids has five.

As Aahil and his family were preparing to chase seed funding for Safe Kids, the ACLU of Northern California was demanding the Fresno Unified School District stop using a product called Gaggle, which districts use to monitor students’ internet use, block potentially harmful content, and step in if student browsing patterns indicate they may need mental health supports. The problem, according to ACLU attorneys, was that Gaggle amounted to intrusive surveillance, trampling on students’ privacy and free speech rights.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation levied similar accusations against another web filter called GoGuardian after getting records from 10 school districts, including three in California, that revealed the extent of the software’s blocking, tracking and flagging of student internet use during the 2022-23 school year, when Aahil was piloting Safe Kids. Jason Kelley, a lead researcher on EFF’s GoGuardian investigation, The Red Flag Machine, looked into Safe Kids in response to an inquiry by The Markup. Accustomed to pointing out how bad filters are, he offered surprised praise for Safe Kids, commending its focus on privacy, its open source code that offers transparency about its model, and its context-specific blocking.

“This is, really, I think, an improved option for all the things that we are generally concerned about,” Kelley said.

So far, Safe Kids has not been able to break into the school market. Still, Aahil hopes to one day sign a contract with a school district, and he is marketing to parents in the meantime, offering them a way to put guardrails on their kids’ home internet use. While Safe Kids started out charging for its filter, Aahil said an open source, free version will be released next month.

One of the company patents is for a  “pause, reflect, and redirect” method that leans on child psychology to teach kids healthy browsing habits when they try to access an inappropriate website.

“When kids go to a site the first time, we consider that a mistake,” Aahil said. “We tell kids why it’s not good for them and kids can make a choice.”

For example, if a student tries to play games during a lesson, a pop-up would say, “This isn’t schoolwork, is it?” Students can click a “take me back” button or “tell me more” link to get more information about why a given site is blocked. When students repeatedly try to access inappropriate content, their browsing is further restricted until they address the issue with an adult. If that content indicates a student might be in crisis, the user is advised to get help from an adult, and in a school setting, a staff member would get an automated alert.

The teen expects to keep building the company, even as he shifts his focus to college admissions this fall. A rising senior at the selective Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, one of the nation’s best public high schools, Aahil plans to major in business or economics and make a career out of entrepreneurship.

Safe Kids stands out in a web filtering market where products’ blunt restrictions on the web have barely become more sophisticated over the last 25 years.

Nancy Willard, director of Embrace Civility LLC, has worked on issues of youth online safety since the mid-1990s. She submitted testimony for the congressional hearings that resulted in passage of the Children’s Internet Protection Act in 2000 and describes the filtering company representatives that showed up as snake oil salesmen, selling a technology that addresses a symptom, not the root of a problem.

“We need to prepare kids to manage themselves,” Willard said. When traditional filters block certain websites with no explanation, kids don’t learn anything, and they’re often tempted to just circumvent the software.

“This approach helps increase student understanding, and hopefully there’s a way also in the instructional aspects (to increase) their skills,” she said about Safe Kids.

Students on Chromebooks in particular can’t circumvent Safe Kids and its design aims to keep them from wanting to. Now Aahil and his family just need to find buyers.

Kelley said he’s not surprised Safe Kids hasn’t been able to yet, given the “hardening” of school security and student safety efforts over the last decade. “We’ve gone from having cameras and some pretty standard filters to having metal detectors, and locked doors, and biometrics, and vape detectors in the bathrooms, and these much more strict filters and content moderating control software,” he said, “and all this is hard to undo.”

This story was originally published on CalMatters.

LGBTQ teens are twice as likely as the overall student population to have a medically documented disability. Three-fourths of the disabled LGBTQ students researchers surveyed have a mental health diagnosis, such as depression or anxiety, and nearly 60% have a neurodevelopmental disability such as autism. One-fourth have a physical disability. More than half have more than one diagnosis.  

Nearly two thirds — 62.5% — reported physical or verbal harassment in the month before the survey. Half were made fun of, while 1 in 10 were hit or pushed by other students, according to the report.

More than 80% of disabled LGBTQ students surveyed are transgender or nonbinary, posing challenges ranging from the availability of suitable restrooms to barriers to participation in school sports. They are more likely to be bullied than their straight, cisgender disabled peers. Only a third say they have reported harassment to school staff. 

“Gender-inclusive restrooms, locker rooms and other spaces are a rarity,” the report notes. “As a result, disabled trans and gender-expansive youth face heightened access barriers to bathrooms and facilities that both match their gender identity and which accommodate their disability.” 

Separate research by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that two-thirds of school buildings are not physically accessible to many people with disabilities. Restrooms were one of the top settings the agency found that children with impaired mobility and other physical disabilities could not use.

One-fourth of LGBTQ children with disabilities surveyed by the Human Rights Campaign have physical disabilities. 

Paradoxically, the high number of barriers disabled LGBTQ youth face may partially account for the fact that they are more likely to be out to the adults in their lives than their non-disabled peers, the campaign found. Three-fourths say they have disclosed their gender identity or sexual orientation to a school staff member, versus 64% of all LGBTQ youth. Nearly 90% are out to at least one member of their immediate family, versus 83%. 

Over the last four years, right-wing lawmakers throughout the country have introduced hundreds of bills in state legislatures and Congress seeking to curtail LGBTQ student protections. In-school victimization has skyrocketed during that time, along with reports by young people that bathrooms, locker rooms and other settings specifically targeted by many of the resulting new laws are increasingly unsafe. 

In February a nonbinary teen in Oklahoma died by suicide the day after being jumped by three students who had been bullying them. A new state law forced Nex Benedict, who was disabled and Native American, to use the girls’ bathroom where their head was smashed into the floor. Calls to mental health crisis lines soared after the incident, which is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education. 

A February Washington Post analysis of FBI records found that anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools have quadrupled in states where the laws have passed. A 2023 investigation by The 74 Million found rates of in-school victimization rising in places where queer students still enjoy strong protections, something researchers attribute to a “spillover effect.”

The new report draws on a subset of data gathered in a 2022 survey by the Human Rights Campaign and researchers at the University of Connecticut. Of the LGBTQ youth ages 13 to 18 surveyed, 30% reported having been diagnosed with one or more disabilities by a health care provider. This is twice as high as the rate at which disabilities are diagnosed among all students.  

The actual number of LGBTQ children with disabilities is likely higher, since many families lack the resources to get formal diagnoses. Although their experiences are not included in the report’s data analysis, a higher number of LGBTQ youth overall — some 35% — reported a self-diagnosed disability. The disparity was higher among gender non-conforming youth, with one-third reporting a medical diagnosis and 41% saying they considered themselves disabled. 

In general, children from marginalized demographics and those with inadequate insurance are most likely unable to get a medical diagnosis, which is often necessary to access disability services.

In schools, the specific accommodations a special education student needs are spelled out in a legal document known as an individualized education program. Involving a team of caregivers and educators, the creation of this plan may account at least in part for the greater likelihood that disabled LGBTQ students are out to school staff, says Human Rights Campaign Public Education and Research Director Shoshana Goldberg. 

“This IEP process could establish the teacher as a trusted adult, which would increase the student’s desire to [or] comfort with disclosing LGBTQ+ identity,” she said in an email. “In addition, within the IEP, trans and gender-expansive students may also need to outline specific accommodations that address their gender identity — e.g. access to single-gender restrooms [or] locker rooms — necessitating being out to teachers.” 

Separate research has documented dramatically higher rates of transgender individuals diagnosed as autistic. In one study, 5% of cisgender people were autistic, versus 24% of gender non-conforming people. 

Other surveys of queer youth well-being have found escalating mental health issues as hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in statehouses in recent years. In a 2023 report, The Trevor Project found that almost half of LGBTQ 13- to 17-year-olds had considered suicide in the prior year, compared with 19% of high school students overall. Seventy percent reported anxiety and 57% experienced depression.

Advocates are careful to note that LGBTQ youth and children with disabilities have high rates of depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions in part because of the discrimination and barriers to inclusion they often face. Nonetheless, the disproven idea that mental illnesses can cause people to become gay or transgender persists in political debates.

The Human Rights Campaign report adds to a growing body of documentation linking unsafe school environments to poor mental health — often a particular physical space such as a locker room or restroom. In a 2021 school climate survey, GLSEN found nearly half of LGBTQ students avoid school bathrooms because they feel unsafe. About 4 in 10 avoid locker rooms and gym classes. 

LGBTQ students in general are half as likely to participate in school athletics than straight, cisgender children: 22% versus 49%. While two-thirds of disabled queer youth engage in some sort of extracurricular activity, only 18% play sports.

Some 1.5 million students of all ages are excluded from athletics because of a physical disability, while 37% of transgender and nonbinary youth ages 13 to 17 are now banned from participation on teams that align with their gender identity. Estimates of how many U.S. teens are gender nonconforming vary because more young people now identify as something other than trans or cis gender, but the one authoritative source suggests 300,000 are transgender.     

Data on LGBTQ youth that can be analyzed by demographic subgroup, like the Human Rights Campaign’s surveys, is rare. Sexual and gender minority status is rarely noted in data collected by census, education and public health officials.

In 2023, two in ten teens were bullied at school and one in ten did not attend due to safety concerns, 4% increases since 2021. Two percent more were injured or threatened at school. About one in ten experienced sexual violence, roughly the same amount as two years ago, according to 20,000 high schoolers surveyed nationwide for the latest iteration of the CDC’s Youth Risk and Behavior survey.

For the first time, the CDC’s 2023 survey prompted teens to reflect on racism, unfair discipline and social media use. Nearly one third of students reported being “treated badly or unfairly at school because of their race or ethnicity” by educators or peers.

Some key indicators show “progress” in combatting the youth mental health crisis: About 10% of Black students reported attempting suicide in 2023, down from 14% in 2021. At the same time, fewer female and Hispanic students seriously considered suicide or experienced persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2023 than in 2021. But roughly half of both groups still experience depressive symptoms, and at rates higher than national averages. 

“The data released today show improvements to a number of metrics that measure young people’s mental well-being – progress we can build on. However, this work is far from complete,” said Debra Houry, chief medical officer with the agency, in a press release last week. “Every child should feel safe and supported, and CDC will continue its work to turn this data into action until we reach that goal.” 

Only about half of teens felt close to people in their school, with key demographic groups reporting being especially vulnerable: Girls, LGBTQ and Native youth were forced into or experienced risky behavior more than their peers across nearly all metrics, including substance use, physical and sexual violence, depression, and suicidality. 

The general rise in aggressive behavior, while concerning, is not particularly surprising to experts.

“We are still seeing a long-tail of effect from the height of the pandemic with kids having been isolated… The ninth grader of today is still a bit less mature, not as good at problem solving, not as clear in their communication with peers, especially when it comes to conflict,” said child psychologist and Boston-area schools consultant Deborah Offner.

Students’ sexual activity and drug use overall mirrored rates from 2021, significantly declining over the last decade. Fewer teens have ever had sex, from about half to one in three. But those that have engaged in more risky behavior: fewer used condoms or were tested for STIs. 

While overall declines in depressive symptoms and suicidality are not “giant,” said Offner, “as we emerge from the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, kids in my orbit are overall doing better on average than they were a few years ago. Most of that is [thanks to] the reentry into the social environment of school and activities.”

Recommending stronger health education and opportunities for young people to build relationships, belonging at school, the CDC urged schools to prioritize adolescent well-being. Some ideas for schools include facilitating mentorship or advisory opportunities for older students to be role models for younger students, who may be feeling lost in their first years in high school, and training all school staff to be strong listeners, “because you never know who a kid is going to tap into,” Offner said. 

Below are five key findings from the report: 

1. Violence and bullying increased 2% and 4%, respectively, from 2021 to 2023, with about one in ten avoiding school for safety concerns and two in ten being bullied. 

Sexual violence was as prevalent in 2023 as it was in 2021: roughly one in ten teens. Girls and LGBTQ youth were more likely than their peers to experience sexual and physical violence. 

The frequency of bullying at school, students report, increased 4% since 2021, bumping back up to pre-pandemic levels. LGBTQ students experienced bullying the most of any subgroup, with three in ten having been bullied and two in ten missing school because of safety fears.

2. 2023 saw a 2% decline in the share of kids persistently sad, hopeless or making suicide plans, but significantly more experience depression symptoms than did in 2013.

Four in ten teens on average reported consistent depression symptoms, up from three in ten just a decade ago. While 4% fewer girls experienced such symptoms than and 3% less seriously considered suicide than in 2021, the proportion of girls experiencing depressive symptoms is much higher than their peers: over five in ten, 53%.

Among LGBTQ youth, six in ten felt persistently sad or hopeless, and two in ten attempted suicide.

Offner said while social media is often scapegoated as the core driver of depressive symptoms, the most common reasons youth cite as causes of internal conflicts are family or friend-related, like witnessing parents’ economic uncertainty or emotional instability, and working through friendship disagreements. 

Many, she added, are also feeling climate anxiety and worried about material needs more than other generations – their parents placing intense pressure to succeed academically and go onto lucrative careers. 

However social media does serve as a “social comparison accelerator,” she said, where teens may compare themselves to others or feel bad about being excluded from activities. 

Native teens – the subgroup spending least amount of time on social media according to the CDC, with about half using it several times a day – are still the subgroup experiencing highest rates of poor mental health and persistent depressive symptoms. 

3. One third of teens experienced racism, and nearly two in ten reported being unfairly disciplined. 

With the CDC asking for the first time, 32% of high school students reported being “treated badly or unfairly in school because of their race.” Asian, multiracial, and Black students reported this more often than peers, at 57%, 49%, and 46% respectively.

On average, 19% of teens were “unfairly disciplined” at school in 2023, with male, Native, Black and multiracial students reporting at a rate 3-13% above average. One in three Native youth reported being unfairly disciplined, more than any other race or ethnicity.

4. No significant changes in teens’ sexual behavior since 2021. Overall, students are having less sex than in 2013. 

While three in ten teens reported having had sex, down from about five in ten a decade ago; only a third used some form of oral birth control, and half used condoms. 

Six percent of teens polled had four or more sexual partners in 2023, compared to 15% the decade prior. 

Some reasons for the decline may be increased immaturity, said Offner, which is impacting kids’ relationship experience. She has also witnessed more young people express ownership of their bodies and wanting to go slowly in their sexual experiences, “I think they’re learning from the mistakes of previous generations, too.” 

5. Alcohol, marijuana, and illicit drug consumption is declining. But vulnerable student populations — LGBTQ, Native youth, and girls – used more than their peers. 

In 2023, about 22% of teens reported drinking alcohol, a significant decrease from 35% ten years prior. The number is slightly higher for girls, with about one in four drinking. While the proportion of Black kids drinking increased from 2021 to 2023, their rate is still under average, at 17%. 

Roughly the same amount used marijuana as did two years ago, about 17%, down from 23% in 2013.

Only about one in ten used illicit drugs, like psychedelics and stimulants, or misused prescription opioids. Teens’ illicit drug use has declined 6% overall in the last decade. 

Offner observed teens today are a little more health cautious, and have witnessed more siblings and peers practice sobriety intentionally. “It’s much more acceptable to say that you don’t use them or aren’t interested in using them,” she added. 

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Additional resources are available at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources. For LGBTQ mental health support, you can contact The Trevor Project’s toll-free support line at 866-488-7386.

Top challenges in more than half of the country’s schools were students being unprepared or disruptive in the classroom, according to the Department of Education’s research arm in its 2023-24 School Pulse data release. 

For 40-45% of schools, student learning and staff morale was also limited by students’ “trouble” working with partners or in groups and use of cell phones, laptops, or other tech when not permitted. In 75% of schools, students’ “lack of focus” moderately or severely negatively impacted learning and staff morale. 

Fighting and bullying were also pervasive: In about one in five schools, physical fights occurred about once a month, while weapons were confiscated at 45% of schools. Thirty percent report cyberbullying is a weekly occurrence; for 11%, it is daily.

Researchers say while overall, key adverse student behaviors have been on a downswing compared to prior generations, such as illicit drug use, violent crime and teen birth rates, several forces are compounding for students and impacting their wellbeing: High rates of trauma, a fraught political climate, and feeling they are being left behind, unsafe or unseen in school.

“Look what these students have gone through … not only the pandemic, through wars. Through a tumultuous, divisive political environment in the last six or seven years that’s only intensifying between right and left, between Black and white, between immigrant and non-immigrant. [Those separations] are filtering into schools and classes, perhaps with an awareness that we have not had before,” said Ron Astor, UCLA professor of social welfare and expert on bullying, school violence and culture. 

Students are also witnessing state legislatures and local school boards limit what classrooms can and cannot teach, leading them to question whether they belong in their school, he said. The atmosphere is impacting families across the political divide: “If parents and society see the school as teaching the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, if you’re not reflected in that school – that’s going to impact your attention, too.” 

From coast to coast, districts are weighing phone bans amid rising concerns about bullying and distractions. But some researchers say solely nixing phones without boosting mental health supports or addressing overall school culture wouldn’t curb the negative attitudes students may be forming about school and the purpose of their education. 

Astor said some young people are experiencing conditions like ADHD, depression and PTSD, which can manifest in dissociation. Lack of focus can also stem from feeling irrelevance, either that the subject matter is not important to their future or that some part of who they are is not represented at school.

Framing students’ inability to focus as the cause for delay in learning recovery, “ignores the fact of why they’re maybe not motivated, why they’re not connected as they should be, why they don’t see themselves in the curriculum,” he added. “Why, when they did see themselves, they’re being taken out or not allowed to say or do things because they’re part of an oppressed group,” referencing book bans, history challenges, and restrictions on diversity, equity and inclusion curricula and positions. 

Astor and Johanna Lacoe, research director with the California Policy Lab, point to several ways school leaders can address these behavioral concerns: stronger classroom management training for teachers and keeping counselor, nurse, psychologist and social worker roles filled. 

“Young people who are in the classroom and who are behind, frustrated and struggling are just so much more likely to check out,” said Lacoe, a commissioner on San Francisco’s Juvenile Probation Commission. “For a teacher with 33 kids, who has maybe not that much experience managing a classroom, to teach to the range of abilities that present themselves with no support, is what we’re currently asking teachers to do.”

How schools handle disciplinary action after cyberbullying, violent behavior, and disruptions can greatly impact student perceptions of school. Lacoe pointed to several models that help students feel belonging after an incident such as restorative justice in lieu of suspensions for low-level infractions, particularly as school leaders’ concerns about chronic absenteeism grow.  

In the community school model, schools provide services such as healthcare, behavioral and housing support to children and families.

There are models at work where, “you’re always telling a student that they belong here even in the time of this [adverse] behavior – that they can make right what happened through a process, inclusive of the people involved,” Lacoe said. “You can figure out a way to resolve it that works for everyone and if possible, keeps the young person engaged at school.”

The vast majority of school leaders surveyed in late May by the National Center for Education Statistics – over 80% – agree the pandemic’s impacts are still lingering, negatively impacting the behavioral and socioemotional development of their students. At least 90% of public schools reported increasing social, emotional support offerings for students since 2021. 

Students, including Astor’s own undergraduates, are asking, “‘Where do I fit in this world? How do I fit in society?’ … I think all of this impacts your ability to focus and your attention, including your motivation.”

A new state-by-state report shows Indiana’s child well-being ranking has dropped — in part due to Hoosier kids’ dismal math and reading scores, as well as increased rates of youth deaths.

Although Indiana continues to rank in the bottom half of states for its rates of teen births and children living in high-poverty or in single-parent households, those numbers are showing improvement.

The 2024 KIDS COUNT Data Book ranked Indiana 27th among states, three places lower than last year. It’s still a slight improvement, however, compared to 2022 and 2021, when the state ranked 28th and 29th, respectively.

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In specific categories covered in the latest report, Indiana came in 15th for economic well-being, 17th in education, 31st in family and community, and 32nd in health.

“Indiana has significant opportunities and challenges ahead in supporting the well-being of our children,” said Tami Silverman, president and CEO of the Indiana Youth Institute.

“We should celebrate the progress we’ve made, especially in economic well-being areas such as parental employment rates and housing affordability; and we must acknowledge the disparities that persist for our kids,” Silverman continued. “Every child in Indiana should have access to quality education, regardless of their background or circumstances. By addressing these disparities head-on, we not only invest in the future of our children but also in the economic prosperity of our state.”

The report is prepared by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in conjunction with organizations across the county, including the Indiana Youth Institute. It rates states in 16 wide-ranging areas, which are lumped together under the categories of health, education, economic well-being, and family and community support.

Gaps in reading and math

The education portion of the latest edition — focused on student achievement — reiterates low numbers familiar to Hoosier education officials.

Just 32% of fourth graders nationally were at or above proficiency in reading in 2022, the latest year for which numbers were available. That was down from the 34% who were proficient in 2019, before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scores were even worse for eighth grade math. Nationwide, only 26% of eighth graders were at or above proficiency in math two years ago, down from 33% in 2019.

In Indiana, one-third of fourth graders performed at or above proficiency in reading — a four percentage-point decrease from the 2019 rate of 37%, the report showed.

Further, only 30% of Indiana eighth grade students performed at or above proficiency in math, marking an 11% decrease from 2019, ranking the state 11th nationally.

Among Indiana fourth graders in 2022, Black students had an average reading score that was 23 points lower than that of white students. Students eligible for the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) had an average reading score 18 points lower than those not eligible for NSLP, according to the KIDS COUNT report.

Meanwhile, eighth grade Black students in Indiana had an average math score that was 31 points lower than white students. Hispanic students in the same grade had an average math score that was 19 points lower than their white peers.

The Casey Foundation report contends that the pandemic is not the sole cause of lower test scores, though. Rather, the foundation says educators, researchers, policymakers and employers who track students’ academic readiness have been ringing alarm bells “for a long time.”

U.S. scores in reading and math have barely budged in decades. In Indiana, state education officials have repeatedly pointed out that Hoosier literacy exam scores have been on the decline since 2015.

During the 2024 legislative session, state lawmakers took decisive action as part of an ongoing push to improve literacy and K-12 student performance.

Paramount among the new laws passed was one to require reading-deficient third graders to be held back a year in school.

Stats on youth health and family life

Health-focused portions of the report show that — after peaking in 2021 — the national child and teen death rate stabilized at 30 deaths per 100,000 children and youth ages 1 to 19.

But in Indiana, the death rate has continued to rise. While 29 deaths per 100,000 Hoosier children and youth were recorded in 2019, the rate increased to 36 deaths in 2022, per the report.

The Indiana Youth Institute (IYI) has already drawn attention, for example, to higher rates of mental health crises such as depression and suicidal ideation among the state’s youth. According to IYI data, one out of every three students from 7th to 12th grade reported experiencing persistent sadness and hopelessness. One out of seven students made a plan to commit suicide.

The most recent data available additionally show that nationwide and in Indiana, the child poverty rate improved and economic security of parents increased back to pre-pandemic levels.

Between 2018 and 2022, roughly 113,000 — or 7% — of Hoosier children were reportedly living in high-poverty areas. That’s a drop from 10% between 2013 and 2017, according to the report.

From 2019 to 2022, teen births per 1,000 declined from 21 to 17, and the percentage of children in single-parent families also dropped from 35% to 32%.

Still, some gains

Advocates pointed to “some bright spots” for Hoosier kids and their families in this year’s national report, as well:

Between 2019 and 2022, more parents (75%) had full-time secure employment in Indiana — which surpassed both the national average and that of the four neighboring states: Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Ohio.

In 2022, fewer children (22%) lived in households that faced a high housing cost burden, spending 30% of their income solely on housing expenses, in comparison to the national average (30%).
In 2022, more Hoosier teens (95%) between the ages 16 and 19 were either enrolled in school or employed, an improvement from 93% in 2019.
Far fewer children under 19 (5%) were also uninsured. Indiana saw the fifth-highest decrease nationally in uninsured children between 2019 and 2022 — a 29% improvement.

The report offers several recommendations for policymakers, school leaders and educators that include chronicling absenteeism data by grade, establishing a culture to pursue evidence-based solutions and incorporating intensive, in-person tutoring to align with the school curriculum.

“Kids of all ages and grades must have what they need to learn each day, such as enough food and sleep and a safe way to get to school, as well as the additional resources they might need to perform at their highest potential and thrive, like tutoring and mental health services,” said Lisa Hamilton, president and CEO of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. “Our policies and priorities have not focused on these factors in preparing young people for the economy, short-changing a whole generation.”

Indiana Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on Facebook and Twitter.

One-third of LGBTQ youth outed to their families were more likely to report major symptoms of depression than those who weren’t, according to the University of Connecticut research. Transgender and nonbinary youth who were outed to their parents reported both the highest levels of depression symptoms and lowest amount of family support. 

The first research to link teens’ nonconsensual disclosure of sexual orientation or gender identity to poor mental health, the report also found 69% said the experience was extremely stressful. Forcibly outed youth also reported low levels of family support. 

Since 2022, eight states have passed laws requiring schools to out transgender students to their families, potentially affecting more than 17,000 young people: Idaho, North Dakota, Iowa, Indiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama. Proponents say the measures are necessary to uphold parents’ right to information about their kids. LGBTQ and mental health advocates counter that the laws violate students’ privacy rights and can put them in danger of being abused or thrown out of their homes. 

Forced outing “is a relatively common experience, and we need to understand more about it,” says Peter McCauley, a doctoral candidate at UConn. “People should be coming out under their own terms.” 

The data, McCauley says, bolsters research on why queer students who are victimized in school often don’t seek help. According to research cited in the new report, 44% of LGBTQ youth say they have not reported harassment to an adult at school out of fear their parents would learn their identity. A majority of sexual-minority teen boys were threatened with outing by peers.

The new report used data from a survey of some 9,300 queer youth ages 13 to 17 collected in 2017 by the Human Rights Campaign and the university’s Department of Human Development and Family Sciences. Two-thirds of respondents identified as cisgender, and 70% said their LGBTQ status was not involuntarily disclosed to their families. Of those not outed, 36% said their parents did not know they were not heterosexual. Nearly half of gender-nonconforming students said they were not out to their families. 

The survey found no significant racial differences in the stress of being outed. Youth whose parents had postgraduate degrees reported few depressive symptoms and high family support. 

Previous surveys by The Trevor Project, GLSEN and other advocacy groups consistently find that nearly all LGBTQ youth say they are harassed at school — which many nonetheless say is a more supportive environment than home. Fewer than four in 10 queer youth say their homes are LGBTQ-affirming.

There is evidence that people who disclose their sexual and gender identities in adolescence experience less depression and greater life satisfaction in adulthood. But not all teens who come out do so to their families. Some share with friends or trusted adults other than their parents. Youth are often reluctant to come out because they have heard their caregivers talk negatively about LGBTQ people or issues.

In addition to the eight states that mandate outing, Florida, Arizona, Utah, Montana and Kentucky — which collectively are home to a quarter-million LGBTQ youth — have new laws that critics say encourage involuntary disclosure of students’ sexual orientation or gender identity. These measures mandate discipline for educators who “encourage or coerce” children to withhold information from their families, stop schools from “discouraging or prohibiting” parental notification about pupils’ well-being and grant caregivers broad access to mental health and other records. 

Fights over forced outing are also playing out at a local level throughout the country. In at least six states, families who believe student privacy protections violate their parental rights have sued districts. So far, none of the suits has succeeded.  

A Houston Landing investigation found that during the first two months after mandatory parental notification went into effect in August 2023 in Texas’ Katy Independent School District, 19 students were outed. After the story was published, the U.S. Department of Education opened a Title IX investigation into the district’s actions, which local advocates had complained discriminated on the basis of gender. 

At least six California districts require schools to disclose a range of information. In January, California Attorney General Rob Bonta warned districts that parental notification policies violate the state’s constitution and education laws. The admonition came after a judge’s October 2023 order temporarily halting the enforcement of an outing rule in Chino. 

As legislation seeking to restrict LGBTQ students’ rights has swept statehouses in recent years, the number of states fully administering the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System — the nation’s chief survey of young people’s welfare — has fallen. Some states, such as Florida, stopped participating altogether, while others refuse to ask questions about sexual orientation, gender identity, mental health and suicidality.

“Perhaps it’s the cell phones?” we wonder. “And the TikTok?” 

Sure, screens — and how kids engage with them — are part of this story. And yet, and especially, America tolerates relatively high levels of child poverty compared to peer nations. Nearly 50% of U.S. students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch subsidies because of their families’ low incomes. And yet, as has become custom, Congress recently missed a bipartisan opportunity to do something about this shameful, persistent American problem. 

To explain this latest congressional stumble, we need some history. In 2021, the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan cut U.S. child poverty rates nearly in half by significantly expanding the country’s child tax credit. Critically, the expanded credit was administered in monthly payments, giving families a steady stream of new resources instead of a once-annually infusion at tax time. As Dr. Shantel Meek and I put it in a February 2022 analysis, “[M]easured against its goal, the expansion of the child tax credit is one of the great policy successes in recent memory. Few other big federal ideas have so suddenly achieved precisely what they intended.” 

But the measure expired after one year, and several efforts to reinstate it have floundered in Congress. 

Then, this year, a bipartisan group of House representatives drafted a compromise measure giving progressives a partial reinstatement of the expanded credit in return for a handful of corporate tax breaks prized by conservatives. The bill passed with strong bipartisan support in the House, but lost steam in the Senate — at least partly because of conservative concerns that it might help President Biden in an election year. “I think passing a tax bill that makes the president look good — may allow checks before the election — means that he can be reelected and then we won’t extend the 2017 tax cuts,” Sen. Chuck Grassley. (R-Iowa), told The Washington Post. 

Whatever else you think is causing young Americans’ pessimism these days, it pales in comparison with the impact of this sort of cynicism. Put aside the hand wringing about culture wars and polarization and “woke” indoctrination embedded into K–12 history curricula. U.S. kids don’t distrust Congress because their schools tell them an honest account of America’s complicated past. They distrust Congress because, when confronted with a tested policy solution to a substantive problem that affects their lives, elected representatives dither and find politically expedient excuses. 

Make no mistake: the case for providing cash support for families with young children is empirically airtight. Researchers have known since at least the 1966 publication of the famous Coleman Report that families’ socioeconomic resources significantly shape children’s educational performance and outcomes. Studies suggest that increases in family income produce better developmental, academic and life outcomes for children. As a policy matter, regular cash transfers to families like the Biden Administration’s expanded child tax credit —known as “child allowances” — appear to be a particularly efficient way to pull children and families out of intergenerational poverty. 

At this point in the waves of evidence, conservatives sometimes argue that, sure, perhaps there’s a case for investing more funding in low-income families, but only if we apply conditions and require that it be spent on particular things. Won’t families “waste” new resources unproductively? But this, too, is cynical and baseless political posturing: analysis showed that families overwhelmingly used their expanded child tax credit dollars on urgent, eminently reasonable necessities.

And yet, here we are, stuck. Legislative failures like these are the operational definition of a failing democracy. When democracies struggle to do simple things that we know would improve citizens’ — especially children’s — lives, they’re undermining their main institutional selling point. If representative government cannot accurately represent the public’s interest by identifying and addressing its problems, why bother with the messiness of organizing our political lives this way?
U.S. kids are not alright. But it’s not just because they’re living in an information sphere increasingly shaped by technology. Without a shift to a more pragmatic approach to these problems, that trust will only continue dropping — however well legislative sclerosis serves conservatives’ short-term political needs.