By Javeria Salman
Several times a week, Ericka Santiago-Diaz can be found driving around her low-income, underserved school community in New Jersey’s Asbury Park with bags of school supplies, replacement technology, food and donated clothing in the back seat to deliver to students.
At some homes, she translates school emails into Spanish and answers technical questions. Then she gets down to what has become the meat of her job as a school social worker at College Achieve Greater Asbury Park Charter School: making sure her students and their families are coping with the multiple stresses of the pandemic.
“We do counseling in school, but sometimes the student needs a little bit more than that school counseling,” Santiago-Diaz said.
That’s why, even though half the school’s students still learn remotely, Santiago-Diaz and two other social workers, along with the two school resource officers, spend half their work day doing in-person home visits. Before heading out, they call families to see what supplies are needed, including supplies like papers, pencils and crayons, back-up Chromebook chargers or food and warm clothing for kids. In school-provided gloves and masks, they try to meet students and parents outside on front porches or at a neighborhood park to follow social distancing rules.
Prior to the pandemic, the school had one full-time social worker on staff, said Jodi McInerney, the charter school’s executive director and principal. While the school had planned to hire a second, the onset of the coronavirus pandemic made it clear that students, many of whom already faced stressors like poverty and gang violence. At College Achieve Asbury, the majority of the students are Black or Hispanic and over 90 percent qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. The school also has a significant number of English language learners and students in special education.
“This year, we felt that is was even more critical,” she said. “We really increased our services when Covid started in March.”
The unprecedented events of the past year have taken a toll on the mental health and well-being of students of every age. Isolated from their friends and teachers, many students cited “feeling depressed, stressed, or anxious” as the number one obstacle to learning, according to a new survey by YouthTruth, a national nonprofit that focuses on student voices in education. Distractions at home, family responsibilities and worries about their health and that of their families were the other two big obstacles. Hispanic or Latinx, Black, African American and multiracial students, on average, reported dealing with more obstacles than white or Asian students.
While some districts have prioritized the mental health of their students, Kelly Vaillancourt Strobach, the director of policy and advocacy for the National Association of School Psychologists, said such districts are the exception.
“Even before the pandemic and all of the added stress of that, a lot of communities were struggling to meet the needs of their students because there simply weren't enough professionals,” she said.
Now, remote learning creates added challenges, she said, because it’s harder for teachers to recognize “signs and symptoms of mental health problems of the students that they serve.” Previously, if teachers were worried about a student, they could ask school mental health professionals to come into a classroom to observe. Seeing students only through a screen makes it “much more difficult to reach families,” especially those in underserved communities who might have limited broadband or technology access, she said.
Although funding was tight, last fall College Achieve hired Santiago-Diaz to join its head social worker on the staff. Now, one of the school’s substitute teachers is also training to be a social worker, and will join the team as a full-time social worker once he graduates in June. McInerney said the school tried to be “as cost conscious as possible and save in other areas.” Last year, instead of purchasing new office or classroom furniture, the faculty agreed to repurpose older furniture and get used furniture from a company that no longer needed it, for example.
Each of the school’s 327 students is assigned to one of the three social workers. Students can check in with their assigned social worker any time during the day, and the social workers also pop in on virtual classes to see how students are doing. Santiago-Diaz said sometimes they’ll send a private link via Google Meet to students who seem to be having trouble. Students can jump into a quick counseling session to help them get back on track.
The charter also increased the counseling it offered outside of school hours, and included this support over summer vacation, McInerney said. From Monday to Friday all summer, students could schedule a live call with one of the social workers. In the fall, the school added family hours in the evenings and on Saturday mornings for family therapy sessions. This winter, for the first time, College Achieve Asbury also continued counseling services over the winter break for struggling families.
Even with three social workers, College Achieve Asbury can’t address the incredible need for service this year. To help meet these needs, the school’s leaders have asked every adult in the building to pitch in to check on students.
Strobach said schools everywhere should do the same, whether or not they have mental health workers on staff.
“I think it's something that all schools should be doing for all kids,” Strobach said. “One of the strongest assets and strongest predictors of student success is that they have a positive relationship with an adult in the building.
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Send story ideas and news tips to salman@hechingerreport.org. Tweet at @JaveriaSal. Read high-quality news about innovation and inequality in education at The Hechinger Report. And, here’s a list of the latest news and trends in the future of learning.
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1. How to teach project-based learning AP classes. PBLWorks and the College Board have teamed up to provide a new project-based learning professional development program for teachers of advanced placement courses in environmental science and U.S. government and politics. The program is based on new research released by the Center for Economic and Social Research at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. The study found that high school students in AP classes that used the project-based learning method with real-world applications outperformed their peers on the AP U.S. Government and Politics and AP Environmental Science exams. Teachers in the study were given extensive professional development before teaching the PBL-focused AP classes. The PD course, which will be offered by PBLWorks and College Board later this summer, aims to prepare teachers to use this model in their AP classes.
2. Addressing concerns on student privacy. As remote learning continues for many students nationwide, schools are trying to address the issue of student data and privacy protections online. A recent report found that while parents and teachers agree that education technology is “very important” during the pandemic, 1 in 3 indicated having concerns about student privacy. In response to such concerns, the Center for Democracy & Technology will host a panel webinar for parents and educators on how to navigate issues of student privacy protection and responsible ed tech use in schools and at home. The webinar is scheduled from 3-4 p.m. ET tomorrow, Feb. 25.
3. Complaint against ed tech platform alleges unfair practices. Last Friday, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a nonprofit, filed a letter of complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against Prodigy, a popular math game. The complaint, signed by CCFC and 21 other advocacy groups, alleges the platform is “engaged in deceptive and unfair practices” that harm families during an already difficult time. In addition to its call for the FTC to investigate the claims, the group also released research into Prodigy’s practices. According to reporting from NBC News, globally 90,000 schools, two thirds of them in the United States, have used the platform to assign math homework to thousands of elementary students.
4. Putting students in charge of developing writing skills. To provide teachers with a supplemental tool to help develop student’s writing skills during remote learning, technology company Texthelp launched a writing assessment tool, WriQ last year. WriQ, which can be used as an add-on for Microsoft Word or as a Google Chrome extension for Google Docs, allows teachers to instantly evaluate student writing and give feedback online. Because students can also track their own writing progression, the tool encourages student-centered learning.
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