After taking a break from social media, Orange County student Elise Choi helped write a bill that would mandate California schools teach digital wellness — a response to growing concerns about how technology is affecting students’ mental health.

Assembly Bill 2071 would require California schools to include digital wellness in health classes, teaching students how social media and AI affect their mental health and behavior. Supporters say the bill focuses not on limiting access, but on teaching students how to use technology responsibly. 

Elise, a junior at the Orange County School of the Arts and a member of the student coalition, GenUp, said a bill that serves students — not simply alleviates parent anxieties — has been long overdue. 

“It’s powerful to have students at the center of policy change when it comes to education legislation,” Elise said. “It’s important because we are the ultimate stakeholders, and these issues affect us and our future.”

The bill follows landmark court verdicts that found social media companies Meta and Google liable for designing “addictive” features and endangering children online. Elise said it also responds to what experts describe as a growing , fueled in part by  about social media use. 

If the bill is passed, the California Department of Education must develop by January 2028 a plan to teach students about topics such as healthy screen habits, algorithms and AI and safe interactions on social media. The proposal passed a committee hearing last week and is expected to pass in the Legislature with bipartisan support. 

State Assemblymember Josh Hoover, R-Folsom, who introduced the bill in the Legislature, said the idea of digital wellness instruction was born out of student pushback against the Phone Free Schools Act, which would require all public school districts to create policies to ban or prohibit mobile phone use starting in July. 

“Now, students are realizing how much the screen time and the social media use really does impact their well-being,” Hoover said. “And they’re actually getting excited about making changes and helping their peers actually improve their health as well.”

Where cellphone bans fall short

For many digital wellness advocates like Kelly Mendoza, a senior education leader at ���Ķ���vlog Education Lab who served as an expert consultant on the bill, digital wellness education picks up where California schools’ cellphone bans fall short. 

“Phone-free schools can reduce screen time or potentially reduce behavioral issues that can happen at school, but that doesn’t teach students healthy media use, decision-making and self-regulation,” Mendoza said. “Students are still not offered the opportunity to learn these skills in school in a structured and valuable way.”

Mendoza said she regularly sees students who are cyberbullied, experience depression and suicidal thoughts, are unhealthily attached to social media or struggle with loneliness in her work at a phone-free high school. A digital wellness course, she said, would teach students that they have control over their relationship to their phones.

Students would learn practical skills such as adjusting account settings, disabling notifications and managing algorithms to limit harmful or addictive content. They would also work through scenarios such as cyberbullying, body image pressure and misinformation to develop healthier behaviors online.   

Elise said she would like the curriculum to include families, particularly those from low-income and under-resourced communities. She recently attended a digital wellness workshop at a private school in San Diego, where parents and students learned to create a screen time agreement.

“Digital wellness instruction is very inconsistent, and it depends a lot on the resources of the school,” Elise said. “I also envision digital wellness to be an equitable subject that hopefully all students can have access to.”

Social media can be ‘good’ but ‘inescapable’ 

Elise said social media also served as an essential “tool” for building connections after she switched to a different high school. She met students online who had launched social impact clubs and helped her sister recruit volunteers to teach dance classes for people with disabilities. 

“We’re not anti-tech,” Elise said. “We’re for education, and we have to be balanced with technology, because it can be good and also inescapable.”

Elise said she met with representatives from Google last week, who she said generally supported “the course of safety (for) children and youth online” and expressed support for the bill. 

Hoover, however, emphasized that the bill is not meant to shield social media companies from regulation.  

“We cannot count on these companies to police themselves when it comes to child safety, so it’s important that we’re educating students, but also putting the right rules and regulations in place,” he said.

Hoover has introduced additional bills to regulate children’s use of social media, including one that would prohibit children under 16 from creating social media accounts — similar to Australia’s blanket ban — and another that would establish an e-safety commission to enforce age compliance. 

“Tech companies have a responsibility to be regulated to make sure that they’re not entrapping kids into a very addictive technology,” Hoover said.

Mendoza, a parent of a teenager, said her daughter uses social media to share and receive feedback on her art, where she has connected with a community of artists. She said the course could also teach students how to reap the “rewards and opportunities” of social media. 

The course would examine “What are the healthy communities that you connect to that are really fostering your growth and your development as a person? And how can you change your algorithm to connect more with those things?” Mendoza said. 

Before she got her first phone, Elise said she spent her time solving Rubik’s cubes, baking and reading. She said she is now spending time on those hobbies when she gets home from school. 

“The cellphone ban only gets us halfway — it doesn’t change our relationship with our devices,” Elise said. “We need to teach kids and give us skills for what happens when we get our phones back at the end of the day.”

In February, the telehealth company , including clinicians who worked directly with students and families, leaving about 500 employees. 

The company lost one of its biggest customers, the Los Angeles County Office of Education, last year. It shortened its contract with the Chicago Public Schools because of “challenges securing funding,” a spokeswoman said. And several districts across the country have also either ended their business with Hazel or have contracts that expire later this year. 

they are “restructuring” the company to put it in a better position as it pursues more stable sources of funding, like billing Medicaid and private insurance, now that the federal relief funds some districts used have expired. Company spokeswoman Emilie Fetterley said no additional layoffs are expected “at this time” and that many states and districts plan to renew their contracts. 

But according to internal memos, by a news outlet covering mental health, CEO Iyah Romm said the company was losing “too much money” to meet its goals. Since the expiration of the Los Angeles contract, the company has even, at times, absorbed the cost of services, Fetterley said. 

Some say the company faces a difficult road ahead.

There is a “massive need” to address student mental health and behavior issues, said Adam Newman, co-founder of Tyton Partners, a consulting firm focused on the education sector. Until the relief funds ran out, “there were enough dollars in the system for schools and districts to find ways to underwrite these types of programs. But the risk has always been: What’s the durable funding model?”

In Missouri, the Ferguson-Florissant district, outside St. Louis, ended its business with Hazel last year.

“They were great to work with,” said spokeswoman Onye Hollomon. Hazel served about 2,000 students in the district, which used COVID relief funds to pay for the program. “Once that phased out, we had to make that cut.”

Los Angeles spent more than $28 million in one year to make Hazel available to the county’s 80 districts, according to GovSpend, a data company tracking payments to government agencies. It funded its deal with the company by tapping a $389 million . Between March 2022 and May 2024, 804 schools in the county referred 9,337 students for services, according to data Hazel provided to the county. Of those, 4,162 students received at least one visit, with students participating in an average of six visits. Fetterley said once a student is referred to Hazel, parents don’t always follow through with a visit or may seek help elsewhere.

In addition to taking a loss on services for some students since last year, Hazel has relied on billing insurance, including Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, and contracts with individual districts. Leaders are currently negotiating contracts with districts for next school year. 

Hazel is also one of eight providers approved for a new program that allows 700 districts throughout California to be reimbursed for services by Medi-Cal or private insurers. It participates in a similar in Iowa, and in Nevada, the Clark County School District uses Medicaid funds to pay for Hazel services, but that ends in June. A spokesperson said the board has not yet decided whether to renew it.

‘Made their mark’

Telehealth programs, delivered through schools, were expanding long before the pandemic. They offer families convenient access to a remote doctor or therapist while preventing students from missing school for appointments that often turn into full-day absences. Hazel Health, founded in 2015 by health care executive Josh Golomb, was part of that growth. 

“Telehealth providers have made their mark in school-based health care,” said Nirmita Panchal, a senior policy manager at KFF, a nonprofit focusing on health policy. “They eliminate transportation barriers, where students may not be able to physically get to a provider.”

During the pandemic, when learning and work suddenly went virtual, telehealth programs for schools . of school-based health centers showed that during the 2020-21 school year, more than 80% of respondents offered telehealth services, up from 19% in 2016-17. 

The financial landscape has since changed. A lot of districts are now cutting budgets to close deficits. GovSpend, which doesn’t capture all district spending, shows a decline in payments to , a similar company, since 2023, while , another virtual mental health provider, saw a more stable influx of funds from 2024 to 2025. 

Among providers, however, Hazel Health stands out. The company, which serves 6,000 schools in 21 states, initially focused on primary health care, with physicians prescribing over-the-counter medications for routine symptoms like stomach pain or headaches. In 2021, the company broadened its model to provide mental health services and respond to “rising unmet student needs and limited access to care,” Fetterley said. 

In Florida’s Duval County schools, Brittany Beimourtusting reached out to Hazel last school year when she was going through a divorce. Her middle child, she said, was having trouble adjusting.

“It was a single-parent household all of a sudden, and I thought, ‘How am I supposed to get him to get help because I think he could use therapy,’ ” she said. The provider, she said, met with him about five times and helped him open up about what he was feeling. “It was definitely worth it.”

But when Superintendent Christopher Bernier looked for ways to save the district some money last year, a $1.4 million payment to Hazel was on the list.

‘A connected system’ 

Four years ago, the startup’s future looked bright.

It attracted over $50 million from investors, including Fiore Ventures, founded by Walton family heiress Carrie Walton Penner. As recently as last year, Hazel was still eyeing growth. It made two acquisitions, including , which offers family therapy, to further expand mental health services. 

“Together, we are building a connected system that supports children from their classrooms to their kitchen tables,” wrote Andrew Post, then �Ჹ�����’s president, in October. But he has since resigned, writing this month that it was time to turn to the “next chapter” in his career.

�Ჹ�����’s was supposed to run through the end of 2027. Now it will end on June 30. Still, district officials said the layoffs have had no impact on the services students receive. In a pilot program that began in March 2025, the district made mental health services available to 84 high schools. As of January, 420 students had taken advantage of the program, the district said.

In December, Destiny Singleton, the honorary student member of the Chicago Board of Education, told members that students don’t always feel comfortable talking to school counselors about personal issues because those staff members are often focused on academic performance and preparing for college. That’s why talking to an outsider can be helpful. But she added that students at the district’s larger high schools are often unaware that Hazel is even an option.

Some Chicago parents, however, are wary of Hazel and say families don’t always know what they’ve agreed to when they consent to allowing their child to meet with a Hazel provider. In to Chicago district leaders last year, student privacy advocates said they were concerned about whether Hazel properly secures students’ private information. 

The company’s acquisition of Little Otter, , raises red flags because Rebecca Egger, its CEO, formerly worked for Palantir, a federal contractor known for using AI to assist the Department of Homeland Security in its . 

In a response to Chicago officials, Romm, the CEO, wrote that Hazel does not “sell, share, or use student data for any commercial purpose,” and that it “does not have any relationship with Palantir, commercial or strategic.”

Fetterley, the company spokeswoman, also said Hazel is in the early stages of rolling out chatbots to “simplify administrative tasks like scheduling for parents and clinicians,” but that AI will never be a “substitute for our human providers.”

Even so, some districts see a much higher demand for in-person rather than virtual clinicians. In Broward County, Florida, where Hazel provides medical services, but not mental health support, 179 students completed a telehealth visit between August and December last year, according to district data. Over that same time period, more than 134,000 students visited a school clinic.

“Parents want nurses,” Cynthia Dominique, chair of the District Advisory Council and a parent in the district, told the school board in March. As a nurse practitioner, she questioned how a provider working remotely can diagnose and treat most common symptoms, like congestion or a sore throat.

“I can’t ask the registrar from the front desk, ‘Can you look in the kid’s mouth and tell me what you see?’ ” she told The 74. “They don’t know what they’re looking for.”

For district leaders, however, �Ჹ�����’s ability to keep kids from missing school provided an effective selling point.

During a 2023 meeting, Duval County School Board Member Darryl Willie said the program had saved the district 4,000 “classroom hours” during the 2021-22 school year.

“We’re talking about making sure we’re focused on reading, writing and math,” he said. “The only way we can do that is if students are in school, in classrooms, sitting in seats.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

After nine days of deliberation, a Los Angeles jury found Google and Meta liable for harms stemming from the design of their social media products on Wednesday and ordered them to pay $3 million in compensatory damages to a plaintiff who said that Instagram and YouTube caused depression, body dysmorphia and suicidal thoughts.

Meta was 70 percent of damages and YouTube the rest. The amount owed the plaintiff may rise, and the jury will over potential punitive damages for egregious conduct, per The New York Times.

This is the tackling the legal question of whether features of social media, like autoplay, infinite scroll and beauty filters can cause harm to users.

“This momentous verdict shows that tech companies will be held accountable for the harm they cause. These companies have spent years choosing profit over people’s well-being, and now a jury has decided they must pay the price for their actions,” said Maddy Batt, a legal fellow at Tech Justice Project, a law firm specializing in suits against AI chatbots.

The plaintiff, KGM, filed her lawsuit using a pseudonym in 2023. KGM, now 20, says she has been addicted to social media since she was a child. It was one of three cases selected out of thousands as “bellwether trials” to test out a new theory of liability.

Batt cautioned that the outcome of this trial doesn’t mean “an automatic legal win” for the thousands of pending cases, as determining causation varies greatly given the circumstances. “Each individual plaintiff still does have to show, if they go to trial, that any negative mental health outcomes they personally experienced were linked to social media,” she said.

It is a huge boon to tech accountability advocates to see this success though, Batt said, and could lead to tech companies changing their products because of the amount of money in play to settle cases or pay damages. This jury decision, coupled with a $375 million verdict against Meta announced yesterday, is the first step to achieving that goal.

The New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Meta in 2023, alleging the company misled constituents over how safe its platforms are for children. State prosecutors focused specifically on Instagram’s potential to facilitate the sexual exploitation of kids.

On Tuesday, a jury sided with New Mexico, saying the company also engaged in deceptive trade practices. Meta was ordered to pay $5,000 per violation — $375 million total. Torrez at a future bench trial, and hopes to compel changes to the platform. Meta said it plans to appeal.

Batt pointed out that this trial is the first time tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg have had to make a case and submit to questioning in front of a jury of their peers. (The CEO did not take the stand in the New Mexico case.) Large tech companies have faced a public backlash over the past decade, and much of it has revolved around their products’ impact on the mental health of young people.

Frances Haugen, a whistleblower, leaked internal research documents from the company previously known as Facebook showing girls reported their eating disorders worsening after using Instagram. Social media use can prompt girls to compare and criticize their own bodies, and many companies struggle to moderate on their platforms.

Over two-thirds of teenage girls reported using Instagram, more than boys. A quarter each of Black and Latinx teens said they use Instagram and YouTube “constantly” according to a by Pew Research Center.

Google argued that YouTube was not social media, while Meta of KGM’s anxiety, depression and body dysmorphia. Meta’s lawyers deconstructed KGM’s home environment, alleging her parents’ divorce and treatment by her mother were the root cause of her emotional pain. The companies also argued that it wasn’t the way their products were designed that caused problems, but rather the specific content seen.

KGM originally named the companies behind Snapchat and Tiktok in the lawsuit, but those parties settled for an undisclosed sum before the trial started. The trial focused on Instagram and Facebook, both Meta products, and YouTube, which is owned by Google.

The burden was on KGM’s lawyers to prove that Meta and Google were negligent in their design of social media products and show that those same products caused the plaintiff’s mental health issues. The jury agreed with those arguments.

KGM testified that features like notifications , and she was unable to stop whenever she tried to limit her usage. She said she started her first Instagram account at age 9 and joined YouTube at age 10, even though legally kids aren’t supposed to have online accounts before they’re 13. Almost all of her Instagram posts had image filters on them, and KGM said she didn’t feel bad about her body until she began using the platform.

The tech accountability watchdogs who rallied behind KGM are ecstatic over this win. “The era of Big Tech invincibility is over,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of The Tech Oversight Project, in a statement.

For parents who have lost their kids to what many describe as social media-related harms, this is a moment of vindication.

“For years, families have been told this was a parenting issue, but the jury saw the truth: these companies made deliberate decisions to prioritize growth and profit over kids’ safety,” said Shelby Knox, director of online safety campaigns at nonprofit ParentsTogether.

Social media companies have been battling allegations of harm, particularly to kids, for years. Most of the claims are easily dismissed under Section 230, the law that says a platform isn’t held liable for third-party content it hosts. But these bellwether cases are testing whether the design of products like YouTube, Facebook and Instagram are inherently harmful. Plaintiffs have pointed to the impacts of features such as infinite scroll and face filters as harmful regardless of the content being shared.

The case concludes as Congress works to pass a package of internet bills that is but that critics say may lead to the removal of digital and — a particular concern given the Trump administration’s policy positions.

In her statement, Haworth at The Tech Oversight Project called on lawmakers to pass the Kids Online Safety Act, one of the most hotly debated pieces of tech legislation in recent years. It has failed to pass the House since its first was introduced in 2022, but now is being considered as part of the aforementioned package.

“It’s good that people are suing these companies and winning in court to reduce their power and force them to change their policies,” said Evan Greer, director of digital rights nonprofit Fight For The Future, to The 19th. But she’s concerned how the verdict in KGM’s case will be used to advocate for laws that she says could threaten free speech online.

Greer pointed to the way activists are using social platforms to monitor abuses by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, advocate for human rights and discuss accustations of sexual abuse against people like Jeffery Epstein. “We need policies that address corporate abuse without kneecapping the ability of front-line activists to use social media to change the world,” she said.

Jess Miers, associate professor of law at the University of Akron School of Law, is concerned about the long-term consequences of the verdict. While these cases focus on the way platforms are designed, said in practice, there isn’t a strong delineation between content and feature design.

“Autoplay is only engaging because of what it plays,” she told The 19th. “Infinite scroll only retains users because of what it surfaces.” She pointed out many apps use these kinds of features, but those aren’t the ones being sued.

Thus, liability tied to design will inevitably trickle down to judgements about content. “The only practical way to reduce the risks alleged in these suits is to restrict or suppress categories of content that might later be characterized as harmful or ‘addictive,’” she noted.

And what’s the content most likely to be labeled as harmful? “History shows they expand to cover disfavored speech—whether that’s reproductive health information, gender-affirming care, or speech about policing and immigration enforcement,” she said.

“The people most likely to be affected are those who already rely on the Internet as a primary space for connection and support,” Miers said — like disabled people, LGBTQ+ youth or people looking for accurate information on contraception.

was originally reported by Jasmine Mithani of . .

The parents of called on Indiana lawmakers to limit minors’ access to social media after their daughter’s death was linked to a 39-year-old man she spoke to online.

The original version of SB 199 would have banned social media operators from allowing Hoosier children to make accounts on their platforms and limited access for older teenagers. But this language was stripped in the Senate.

Now, House lawmakers are considering adding a version of the restriction back with an amendment.

Speaking at the House Education Committee Wednesday in support of the amendment, Beau Buzbee said 17-year-old Hailey had been lured away from their home by an online predator last month. Law enforcement announced Feb. 1 that she is believed to be deceased and that an Ohio man was arrested in connection with her disappearance.

Buzbee said their experience showed glaring gaps in Indiana law that needed to be addressed.

“We are losing the fight to protect our children. The internet and social media are the devils’ and predators’ playgrounds, and it’s on this front that we must fight,” Buzbee told lawmakers. “Please do not let this opportunity slip away.”

Supporters of have also called for schools to provide mandatory updated predator education and for updates to the state’s missing person alert system. they would add an expansion to the alert system as an amendment to HB 1303, a bill that increases the penalties for child exploitation, and that they would discuss adding more education to the existing health standards.

Indiana— but ultimately — a social media ban for minors under 14 and restrictions for those under 17 this year.

The most recent iteration of the ban is the amendment to SB 199, which requires social media providers to estimate the age of an account user and seek permission from the parents of users under 16. For minor accounts, the amendment forbids social media providers from using an algorithmic feed or selling data for advertising purposes, restricts who can contact the user, and gives parents monitoring tools.

Critics have raised First Amendment concerns as well as the possibility that the state will be drawn into an extended legal challenge over the law.

But supporters of a restriction on social media, including Secretary of Education Katie Jenner, say the state must act to address the risks of social media to children and teens the way it does for other dangerous activities, like tobacco use. Social media use is linked to depression, irregular sleep, and a lack of physical activity and social emotional support, said State Health Commissioner Lindsay Weaver. And these issues spill over to classrooms and affect learning, school leaders said.

House lawmakers heard hours of testimony overwhelmingly in support of the language on Monday, but did not take action to add it to the bill.

Supporters of the amendment included South Bend student Rima Bahradine-Bell, who said social media use promises community and affirmation but actually leads to comparison and dependency.

“I’m coming to you as a teenager and a high schooler, and I’m telling you that I would have liked to not have any social media at that age,” she said. “My friends are telling me to tell you that we did not want this.”

Amy Klink, a school counselor at Guerin Catholic High School, said she frequently speaks to students experiencing mental health crises as a result of social media and to their parents, who struggle to restrict social media access.

“Even when parents are aware of a social media account, they can’t be aware of every account with a new name. Parental verification could help with this,” Klink said. “It’s not the magic pill, but it will help.”

SB 199 will return to the House Education Committee on Wednesday for lawmakers to amend and vote.

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Dulcie and her family, who live in the Twin Cities metro, are afraid every day when they leave for work and school.

“All of my friends are staying at home. No one comes out. It gets to me,” said Dulcie, who declined to use her last name because she fears retribution from federal agents, who have been detaining citizens and legal immigrants.

Recently, Dulcie began driving her parents to work every morning before school, as early as 4 a.m. — because she is afraid they might disappear.

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“I would rather do that than never hear from them. I’d rather know at least where to look for them then never hear a single word from them probably,” she said.

Like many area schools, Dulcie’s school is offering an online option for students worried about coming to school, but she has continued to go to school in-person, even if she doesn’t always feel like it.

“Most of the time I don’t even want to go because everything just feels so depressing,” Dulcie says.

The nation’s conscience has been shocked by high-profile incidents of federal immigration enforcement agents engaging children, including apprehending on his way home from school.

But the impact on children and their families extend beyond these viral incidents, affecting the lives of children and families broadly across race, immigration status and economic class in the Twin Cities. The ongoing immigration surge of around has created a climate of fear — not just for the criminals and undocumented immigrants they claim to be targeting — but for ordinary families trying to maintain the routines and normalcy of childhood.

“We are just kids, and instead of being kids and living our lives as kids, we have to step up and support our community,” said Taleya Addison, an 18-year-old senior at FAIR School for Arts in downtown Minneapolis. She said her best friend’s father has been in ICE detention for weeks, and his mother is a stay-at-home mom. The family is struggling, so Addison has been picking up groceries and running errands for them.

With a Trump executive order in hand allowing stepped up immigration enforcement around schools and churches, federal agents have detained at least nine students in Columbia Heights, which canceled school Feb. 2 after feds were observed stalking bus stops and schools around arrival and dismissal.

Duluth Public Schools, Fridley Public Schools and Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union, against the feds, alleging the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedures Act by rescinding the sensitive areas policy that had previously protected schools from immigration enforcement activity.

Among the many incidents around schools:

On the day of Renee Good’s killing, immigration agents deployed chemical irritants and smoke outside of Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis. After the murder of Alex Pretti, federal agents deployed smoke outside of an elementary school in Minneapolis.

On Jan. 14, federal agents were spotted gathering outside of an elementary school around dismissal time .

Roseville schools reported that on Jan. 21 immigration enforcement agents used a school parking lot as a staging area.

Parents interviewed by the Reformer said immigration agents have lurked outside of schools in Minneapolis, and one said agents in a vehicle concealed themselves in the parent pickup line at a suburban school, while staff scrambled to get students safely inside.

Federal agents have also been confronted after around in the Twin Cities.

On Jan. 14, Area Public Schools reported that a parent waiting at a bus stop had been taken by federal agents. And on Jan. 23, Public Schools reported that two students and their parents had been taken by federal agents in an incident witnessed by another parent in the district.

On Jan. 15, transporting students and staff from St. Paul Public Schools were stopped by federal agents.

On Jan. 27, Public Schools reported that two of its vans had also been stopped by federal immigration agents while students and staff were on board. And on Jan. 29, reported that federal agents had boarded a bus while students were on board.

The�����ڴǰ������ spoke with more than a dozen Twin Cities teens, parents of younger children and teachers to understand the impact on the daily lives of children. Their experiences range from the minor inconveniences of having extracurricular activities postponed or canceled, to fearing for their own safety leaving the house for school or work.

Students have gone missing from school

Heather, who declined to use her last name because she fears retribution against her students and school, teaches English learners at a middle school in the Twin Cities. Since her district introduced an online learning option, her typical class of 20 students is down to just four or five students in person. Many students are also not showing up online either.

Although absenteeism has been worse since the killing of Good on Jan. 7,  Heather has had students regularly missing school because of concerns about immigration enforcement since November. One student has temporarily moved in with family out of state because their parents believe they are safer there.

Heather said she is concerned that many of her students who have moved to online learning might never come back to the classroom.

Student absenteeism is also putting some funding at-risk for Minnesota school districts. When students miss more than , districts are required by state law to drop students from enrollment. Most K-12 school funding in Minnesota is tied to , averaged over the school year, so as students remain absent for extended periods, districts will start to lose funding.

Significant short-term and long-term consequences for children are already well documented

Researchers have previously shown the impact of intensive immigration enforcement, beginning with short-term effects like missed school and increased anxiety.

When immigration enforcement increased in last year, students missed 22% more days of school, with the youngest students missing the most days. Missing school is tied to lower academic outcomes.

But the long-term impacts extend beyond academic outcomes. In the year following an on a meatpacking plant in Morrison, Tenn., in 2018, researchers found consequences for children’s wellbeing up to a year after the raid.

They documented more suspensions and expulsions from school for student behavior, and a doubling of serious mental health disorders including substance use disorder, depression, self‐harm, and suicide attempts or ideation. Children were more likely to be victims of sexual abuse in Morrison in the year following the raid.

The Morrison raid was a single incident that resulted in detention of about 100 adults. By contrast, Minnesota has been subject to intense, ongoing enforcement actions that have now lasted for over two months and affected thousands of families.

Recent research in Florida suggests the impact extends beyond families caught in the enforcement dragnet. A recent study of , where immigration enforcement increased significantly at the start of the second Trump administration, found that student test scores dropped for American-born Spanish-speaking students just as much as for those born outside the U.S. They also found a decline in test scores for Hispanic students broadly, not just those who speak Spanish.

The same Florida study also showed that the impacts were more significant for students in middle and high school, among girls and students already struggling in school. And, for schools with higher concentrations of poverty, increased immigration enforcement had a larger impact on students, controlling for other student characteristics.

Once higher rates of absenteeism kick in, the negative effects can spread to an entire school community. Teachers struggle getting students back up to speed after they miss even one day of classroom instruction, data show. And, research during the COVID-19 pandemic showed that students and families can struggle to resume attending school regularly when their routine has been disrupted by time away from in-person learning.

A student alters her daily routines after a killing near her home

Children in the Twin Cities aren’t just facing the threat of federal detention. Hattie, a Black high school senior who declined to use her last name for fear of federal retribution, lives near where federal officers shot and killed Alex Pretti. The killing, along with the continuous presence of federal immigration enforcement activity around her home, has created a fearful atmosphere. She and her friends have quit taking their customary strolls around the neighborhood or taking the bus to get around.

Hattie said she doesn’t feel like she is a target for federal agents. As a Black woman, however, she knows they would see her, and assumes they’d read her as an opponent.

“I’m scared to go out there because you really never know when or where or who or why,” Hattie said.

She said she has noticed subtle changes in her school, like more Latino students choosing to attend online and extra security around.

“I can definitely see the difference in who takes the bus, who’s walking home,” Hattie said.

She’s struggled to manage the stress.

“At least for me, personally speaking, I’m not really coping. It’s just like, let’s just make it to the next day and not be targeted,” Hattie says.

Like many others around the Twin Cities, Hattie has also been spending her time helping to organize donations and support for people staying at home for their own safety. She said that while people definitely need food, households sheltering in place also need toys and activities for children stuck inside, assistance getting medical care, and even help taking laundry to the laundromat.

Effects of immigration enforcement felt in suburbs

Eve, who has one parent who is an immigrant to the United States, attends high school in a suburb of the Twin Cities. Although she and her family haven’t had direct interactions with federal agents, she has been impacted in smaller ways: A friend’s birthday was moved out of Minneapolis because the friend group comprised a diverse group with many immigrant parents.

Eve, who declined to use her last name because she fears retribution from the feds, said that despite the challenges, the crisis has yielded some positive outcomes, like seeing small gatherings outside of her school at dismissal expressing opposition to ICE, and demonstrators on overpasses and street corners regularly expressing similar sentiments.

Eve’s school has also had ongoing fundraisers to help support those more impacted by immigration enforcement. Seeing people come together and express opposition to what is happening has been a silver lining for her, she said.

Eve’s mother said that she has expressed concerns about her father, although he is a naturalized citizen. Although Eve said she thinks most of her classmates and teachers are opposed to what is happening, her mother said Eve has expressed concern about a few students expressing racism and hatred of immigrants at school.

Dulcie is the only person in her friend group of Latinas that is attending in-person school. She said almost all of the Latino students at her school have chosen the online option. The school’s Latino Club has moved its meetings online.

She said some of her teachers struggle to simultaneously manage classroom and online instruction. Some of her classes have a Spanish-speaking co-teacher or aide, which she said is helpful for keeping the online students on-track. But most of her classes lack this additional support.

Her friends are doing their best to log into online classes, and keep up with the teacher. In her classes without an aide, Dulcie said, she has started using her cellphone in class to text with her friends online to help them keep up. Her school, like many in the Twin Cities, has a strict no cellphone policy. But she said her teachers understand.

Counselors at Dulcie’s school, which is racially and economically integrated, have been collecting donations for students and their families impacted by the federal siege. Dulcie said that she hasn’t asked for any help though because she feels guilty when others need more. She is also concerned that students attending online are feeling more disconnected from school, and are not aware of the assistance available through the school.

Most of her friends are no longer leaving their homes. While online school allows them to stay safely inside, she said that many are growing restless and bored, spending too much time on their phones or screens, like during the early days of the pandemic.

But in some ways worse, because at least during the COVID pandemic, her friends were leaving the home, Dulcie said.

Dulcie said she worries that if the intensity of immigration enforcement activity continues, she and her friends could miss out on important milestones, like prom and graduation. It is already keeping her friends from celebrating their birthdays.

“I’ve gone through two historic moments already,” Dulcie said, referring to the COVID pandemic and murder of George Floyd. “It’s like, too much.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.

For those of us who work in schools, this isn’t a surprise. It is simply the data catching up to what we see every day: Our children are struggling, and too many are not getting the support they need.

Across the country, young people are facing unprecedented levels of . This is true for children of every background. But as with nearly every social challenge in America, in low-income communities of color like the one my school serves on Chicago’s South Side. Families here are more likely to face housing instability, food insecurity, community violence and untreated trauma — and they are less likely to have easy access to high-quality mental health care.

When behavioral health needs go unmet, the consequences ripple far beyond the child. We see it when students can’t concentrate, regulate their emotions or trust adults. We see it in . We see it in teachers stretched to their limits and families overwhelmed by crises that could have been prevented with earlier support. Mental health is not separate from learning; it is a prerequisite for it. As I tell my team, children cannot learn if they are not safe, warm, dry, fed and well.

The recent report also makes something else clear: Families are being asked to carry more and more of the financial burden. Out-of-pocket spending on children’s behavioral health care is growing at more than twice the rate of other health care costs, increasing by an average of 6.4% each year. Families with a child receiving behavioral health care are far more likely to experience severe financial strain. In practice, this means that getting help for a child increasingly depends on whether a family can afford it.

That is how a two-tier mental health system takes root. Families with money can access private therapy and specialists. Families without it are left to wait, to ration care or to reach the system only when their child is in crisis. While the study does not break down spending by race or income, it’s clear that in a country where wealth and healthcare access are deeply unequal, rising behavioral health costs will hit Black and low-income families the hardest.

That is why schools like mine have become something they were never designed to be: frontline providers of mental health care.

At , a kindergarten through eighth grade public school on Chicago’s South Side, 28% of our students receive school-based mental health services. We partner with organizations like , offer virtual coaching through and employ multiple, full-time social workers because our students need these supports to succeed.

These services are not extras; they are as essential as textbooks and teachers. But providing them requires tradeoffs, and too often schools are forced to choose between academic programming and mental health care.

School-based services work because they eliminate the barriers that keep so many families from accessing help. There is no need to take time off work, find transportation or navigate an unfamiliar health system. Students receive support in a place they already know and trust. Problems are identified earlier, before they escalate into emergencies that lead to hospitalizations, school removals or long-term harm. In communities where mental health providers are scarce or unaffordable, schools have become the most reliable point of access.

But this role is not sustainable without public investment. Schools should not be propping up a broken healthcare system with education dollars.

If our leaders are serious about equity, they must fully fund school-based behavioral health services, especially in high-need communities. That means investing in counselors, social workers, psychologists and strong partnerships with community providers. It means creating stable, ongoing funding streams rather than short-term grants that disappear just as programs take root. And it means ensuring that Medicaid and other insurers reimburse schools directly for the care they provide, so schools are not forced to subsidize health care out of classroom budgets.

The data make clear that children’s behavioral health care has become a central part of what it takes for young people to thrive. As long as access to that care depends on a family’s income or ZIP code, the gap between those who get help and those who do not will continue to grow. Schools like Great Lakes Academy are doing everything we can to fill that gap. With the right public investment, schools can ensure that every child — no matter their race or family income — has the support they need to learn, heal, and succeed.

Ann’s three young boys had been through a lot already. Her marriage to their father was marked by violence, and a divorce was followed by multiple violations of a protective order, she said. While their father sat in prison in North Dakota, she moved the family to the Twin Cities.

But while the move gave them distance, it didn’t solve their problems, said Ann, who asked to be identified by her middle name to protect her children’s privacy. Her sons, especially the two youngest, suffered mental health issues including , and anxiety. Her middle son was diagnosed with , characterized by angry and sometimes violent outbursts.

“I had 13 police calls within a nine-month period to my house,” Ann said. When a police officer handed her a domestic violence information card, she knew things had to change.

Ann’s middle son had been enrolled in public school in a suburb of St. Paul, but after being removed from his mainstream classroom due to his behaviors, he wasn’t receiving the support he needed academically or emotionally.

A social worker told her about , located in Minneapolis Public Schools’ Wilder Complex and offering intensive supports to children in grades K-8 struggling with mental illness. Despite her nerves, Ann scheduled a visit. In one of her first interactions, an intake person said, “‘Because you’re here looking for help, you’re more advanced than most adults,’” Ann recalled. “I knew at that moment we were in the right place.”

A trauma-informed approach for kids

Jessica Dreischmeier, Catholic Charities Children’s Day Treatment Program director, said that her program is a good match for children like Ann’s sons. Staff not only understand the impact that early childhood trauma can have on mental health, but the program’s approach helps them make progress with kids deemed unfixable by other schools.

“I would say a majority of the youth that come here for treatment have experienced some type of trauma,” Dreischmeier said. “We know that those symptoms can manifest themselves in a number of ways, including depression, aggression, anxiety, ADHD — and we have deep experience working with those kinds of kids.”

With the right approach, she said, most kids can recover from mental illness.

“One day might be hard, but over time we get there with pretty much everybody — which is awesome.”

A long and loyal legacy

Catholic Charities Children’s Day Treatment was founded in 1968 as an extension of , founded in 1869 as a residential shelter for orphans. The day treatment program was created to provide an alternative option for children at St. Joseph’s who needed extra mental health support.

St. Joseph’s Home closed in 2020, but the day treatment program continued. Enrollment is capped at 40 students who work with 17 full-time staff members. Students come from around the metro area but enroll in through a partnership with the district. Mental health services are billed through health insurance.

Many staff members have worked at the center for decades. Karen Johnson, a mental health practitioner who has been employed by the program for 24 years, said she feels a deep connection to the children in her care.

“I should have retired five years ago,” Johnson said. “Each time I have that thought, another kid comes through the door, and  I’m like, ‘Now I have to stay until they finish the program.’ Then another kid comes.”

A focus on parent connection and long-term success for kids

According to the Minnesota Department of Human Services, there are . Still, Dreischmeier said that Catholic Charities’ program remains in high demand.

“The need for mental health services for youth and children in Minnesota has been going up for a while,” she said, “but especially after Covid, it’s particularly evident.”

A typical day for students includes two three-hour blocks – one for academics and the other for mental health therapy and treatment.

Mental health support is delivered in individual and group settings with a focus on parent and guardian involvement, Dreischmeier said. Families are taught how to build strong connections with their child and to reinforce strategies they’re practicing at school.

The kids work on setting goals for their life beyond the program. While students’ individual goals look different, the overall aim is a return to home life and a less restrictive school setting. “We’re hoping our intervention helps kids stay in their home and with their family and not have an out-of-home placement,” Dreischmeier said.

‘We’re not going to leave anybody behind.’

For parents like Ann, the transition to day treatment often comes amid deep distrust of past educational settings. Families arrive feeling guarded, Dreischmeier said. They wonder: “‘Are you going to perceive my child as a problem?’ ‘Will you only see them for the behaviors they are having when they are having a hard time, or will you see my whole child?’”

The kids often wonder the same thing, Johnson said. “A lot of these kids come here with no hope. They think, ‘People say I’m bad so I’m never going to be nothing.’ I try to change that narrative.”

Dreischmeier said that her staff remains undaunted even by the students’ most challenging behaviors.

“If something is hard, we’re going to all come together and work on it and talk about it,” she said. We’re going to move forward all together. We’re not going to leave anybody behind.”

Academically, the aim is not just to keep students on track, but to move them ahead. In traditional school settings with larger class sizes and fewer supports, children with serious mental health issues are often separated from their peers and fall behind.

Dreischmeier said things are run differently at Children’s Day Treatment, where the ratio of adults to students is much higher – often three adults to every six or seven students. “Students are really able to focus in and learn,” she said.

On average, students participate in the program for a year to a year and a half, Dreischmeier said. Most then move back to their local community school. Some are recommended for further services, including residential and outpatient mental health programs.

Surprised by hope

After two years at Children’s Day Treatment, Ann’s middle son graduated  last year. Though he struggled in the beginning, she said, he eventually settled in and found success.

“His graduation was the most incredible thing,” Ann recalled. “Staff said he’d emerged as a leader. We did not know that about my son. To hear his peers get up and give their testimonies about him – there was not a dry eye in the room.”

Today, he’s enrolled at a school in her home district – something she never thought possible – where he continues to receive special education support. Ann’s youngest son enrolled at Children’s Day Treatment in the fall. She’s optimistic: “I’m just grateful for people like them who want to help children like mine.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

California school districts were bracing for their mental health grants to be cut at the end of the month, but a recent court ruling could force the Trump administration to temporarily release the remaining funds used for school social workers and counselors. 

A court ruling on Dec. 4 rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to stall a preliminary injunction in which a federal judge ordered the U.S. Department of Education to release millions of dollars in grants for school mental health workers. 

The ruling is part of an ongoing multi-state lawsuit alleging that the administration’s sweeping cancellation of mental health grants — $168 million for California schools — in April was unlawful and jeopardized services “critical to students’ well-being, safety and academic success” in rural and underserved parts of the country. 

The mental health program, which was funded by Congress after the 2022 , included grants meant to help schools hire more counselors, psychologists and social workers.

In an April discontinuation letter, the Trump administration accused grant recipients of violating “merit, fairness and excellence in education,” broadly targeting diversity, equity and inclusion in the grant program. 

Amanda Mangaser Savage, an attorney at the nonprofit law firm Public Counsel, said the injunction does not issue a final ruling on the legal basis of the cancellation. It issues a temporary release of funds, she said, that is not guaranteed to be permanent or timely enough to retain all mental health worker roles before Dec. 31, the cutoff for funds listed in the cancellation notice. 

“So it’s not like someone flips a switch and all of a sudden everybody gets money,” Savage said. “It’s that the Department of Education can’t rely on these unlawful considerations that it relied on to discontinue the grants.” 

Injunctive relief applies only to a subset of grantees who had submitted declarations of harm to the court, including McKinleyville Union School District and Northern Humboldt Union High School District in Humboldt County. Represented by Public Counsel, McKinleyville Union also filed its own independent lawsuit in October, seeking a release of nearly $6 million in remaining mental health grant funds, Savage said. 

The ruling restores roughly $3.8 million in Madera County in the Central Valley and $8 million in Marin County in the Bay Area.

Jack Bareilles, the grants and evaluation administrator with the Northern Humboldt Union High School District, said the court ruling is a step in the right direction, but that it is not enough to retain the four social workers and project staff, as well as prospective social work interns, he expects to lose, unless a final ruling guarantees restored funds for the district. Northern Humboldt is still expecting to lose more than $6.5 million in grant funds. 

“We’re happy that the panel ruled the way they did, but this administration has made a habit out of continuing to appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court,” Bareilles said. “It doesn’t give us any certainty at this moment.”

Unlike in McKinleyville Union’s independent lawsuit, Northern Humboldt and other school districts are not the main plaintiffs in the multi-state lawsuit, which was filed by a coalition of 16 states in June. Bareilles said that he is also uncertain whether the injunction would release funds to all 49 grant recipients, or only those who declared support for the lawsuit, in California. If or when the district does receive its funds, Northern Humboldt would not be able to fully recover its team of school counselors and social workers, he said. 

“It will be very hard to regain the momentum,” Bareilles said. “We can’t even rehire in some cases, because we’re in the middle of the school year, and people have already taken other jobs.”

Grant provided funds to hire more counselors

Before the grant, McKinleyville Union had only one school counselor per 850 students. Since then, it has been able to hire five more counselors. If the district does not receive funds in time, the school could lose these workers, as well as a mental health grants administrator. 

“And, most problematically, students start to develop relationships with the mental health providers that are in their schools. If all of a sudden those positions are cut, in some ways that’s even more harmful than if you would never start them at all,” Savage said. “Because students believe that they’re going to have this care and then all of a sudden, they don’t.”

Through the grant, Northern Humboldt has provided more than 3,600 additional students with mental health services since 2023 and has helped credential and employ over 25 mental health clinicians in the county. Bareilles is hopeful that the restored funds will allow for the continued training of prospective social workers and school counselors. 

“But for our students, there’s hundreds of kids this year who have not had a person to serve them because that person wasn’t there,” Bareilles said. “That’s just the sad nature of this process.”

In Humboldt County, where McKinleyville Union and Northern Humboldt Union are located, more than half of all youths have experienced traumatic events like abuse or homelessness, according to Savage. The county also has the highest number of Native American youth in California who rely on grant funds to receive services like grief intervention and suicide prevention, she said. 

“What’s really going on here is the Trump administration is having an ideological disagreement with the Biden administration, and it’s basically throwing these kids under the bus,” Savage said. “It just shows how little they actually care about the mental health of these students.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

It was in physical education class when Laila Gutierrez  Vaping.

Like students across the country, Gutierrez got dragged between vape manufacturers, who used celebrity marketing and fruity flavors to hook kids on e-cigarettes, and educators, who’ve turned to surveillance tools and discipline to crack down on the youngest users. Gutierrez was suspended for a week after she was nabbed vaping in a crowded school bathroom during her lunch hour. 

In my latest investigative deep dive, , I reveal how school districts across the country have spent millions to install vape-detecting sensors in school bathrooms — once considered a digital surveillance no-go. The devices prioritize punishment to combat student nicotine addiction.

My analysis of public records obtained from Minneapolis Public Schools reveals the sensors inundated administrators with alerts — about one per minute during a typical school day, on average. Their presence brought a spike in school discipline, records show, with and younger middle school students facing the harshest consequences. 

The sheer volume of alerts, more than  across four schools, raises questions about whether they’re an effective way to get kids to give up their vape pens. And some students voiced privacy concerns about the sensors, the most high tech of which can now reportedly detect keywords, how many young people are in the bathroom at one time and for how long. 

“Surveillance is only a diagnosis,” Texas student activist Cameron Samuels told me. “It only recognizes symptoms of a failed system.”  

In the news

Charlotte, North Carolina, school officials reported more than 30,000 students absent on Monday, two days after federal immigration agents arrested 130 people there in their latest sweep. That more recent data point underscores the 81,000 school days missed by more than 100,000 students in California’s Central Valley after immigration raids earlier this year, according to a newly peer reviewed Stanford University study. | 

• Los Angeles schools have lost thousands of immigrant students — from 157,619 in the 2018-19 school year to just 62,000 this year — because of the city’s rising prices and falling birth rates. Now, that trend has intensified after the “chilling effect” of recent federal immigration raids, district officials said. | 

• Student enrollment is dropping in school districts across the country amid President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. In Miami, for example, the number of new immigrant students has decreased by more than 10,000 compared to last year. | 

Ten Commandments: Siding with the families of students who argued they infringed on their religious freedom, a federal judge on Tuesday ordered some Texas public school districts to remove Ten Commandment displays from their classroom walls by next month. | 

• 28 Bills, Ten Commandments and 1 Source: A Christian Right ‘Bill Mill’. | 

Online gaming platform Roblox announced it will block children from interacting with teens and adults in the wake of lawsuits alleging the platform has been used by predators to groom young people. | 

Furry and freaky: “Kumma,” a Chinese-made teddy bear with artificial intelligence capabilities and marketed toward children, is being pulled from shelves after researchers found it could teach its users how to light matches and about sexual kinks. | 

A teenage girl from New York reported to a police officer at school that her adoptive father had been raping her at home for years. The officer, who didn’t believe her, bungled the case — and she was abused again. | 

‘Brazen cruelty’: A federal judge has ordered the release of a 16-year-old Bronx high schooler who has spent nearly a month in federal immigration custody despite having a protective status reserved for immigrant youth who were abused, neglected or abandoned by a parent. | 

Civil rights groups have decried proposed federal changes to the Education Department’s data collection on racial disparities in special education that could make it more difficult to identify and address service gaps. | 

‘Dead-naming’ enforced: A Texas law now requires school employees to use names and pronouns that conform to students’ sex at birth. Several transgender students whose schools are complying say it has transformed school from a place of support to one that rejects who they are. | 

ICYMI @The74

Emotional Support

“Let’s circle back in 2026.”

-Taittinger, already

The robots have 

New research suggests that a majority of  at school. To write essays. To solve complicated math problems. To find love. 

Wait, what? 

Nearly a fifth of students said they or a friend have used artificial intelligence chatbots to form romantic relationships, according to . Some 42% said they or someone they know used the chatbots for mental health support, as an escape from real life or as a friend.

Eighty-six percent of students say they’ve used artificial intelligence chatbots in the past academic year — half to help with schoolwork.

The tech-enabled convenience, researchers conclude, doesn’t come without significant risks for young people. Namely, as AI proliferates in schools — with help from the federal government and a zealous tech industry — on a promise to improve student outcomes, they warn that young people could grow socially and emotionally disconnected from the humans in their lives. 

• Dig Deeper: 

In the news

The latest in Trump’s immigration crackdown: The survey featured above, which quizzed students, teachers and parents, also offers startling findings on immigration enforcement in schools: 
While more than a quarter of educators said their school collects information about whether a student is undocumented, 17% said their district shares records — including grades and disciplinary information — with immigration enforcement. 

In the last school year, 13% of teachers said a staff member at their school reported a student or parent to immigration enforcement of their own accord. | 

• Call for answers: In the wake of immigration enforcement that’s ensnared children, New York congressional Democrats are demanding the feds release information about the welfare of students held in detention, my colleague Jo Napolitano reports. | 
• A 13-year-old boy from Brazil, who has lived in a Boston suburb since 2021 with a pending asylum application, was scooped up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after local police arrested him on a “credible tip” accusing him of making “a violent threat” against a classmate at school. The boy’s mother said her son wound up in a Virginia detention facility and was “desperate, saying ICE had taken him.” | 
• Chicago teenagers are among a group of activists patrolling the city’s neighborhoods to monitor ICE’s deployment to the city and help migrants avoid arrest. | 
• Immigration agents detained a Chicago Public Schools vendor employee outside a school, prompting educators to move physical education classes indoors out of an “abundance of caution.” | 
• A Des Moines, Iowa, high schooler was detained by ICE during a routine immigration check-in, placed in a Louisiana detention center and deported to Central America fewer than two weeks later. |
• A 15-year-old boy with disabilities — who was handcuffed outside a Los Angeles high school after immigration agents mistook him for a suspect — is among more than 170 U.S. citizens, including nearly 20 children, who have been detained during the first nine months of the president’s immigration push. | 
  

Trigger warning: After a Washington state teenager hanged himself on camera, the 13-year-old boy’s parents set out to find out what motivated their child to livestream his suicide on Instagram while online users watched. Evidence pointed to a sadistic online group that relies on torment, blackmail and coercion to weed out teens they deem weak. | 

Civil rights advocates in New York are sounding the alarm over a Long Island school district’s new AI-powered surveillance system, which includes round-the-clock audio monitoring with in-classroom microphones. | 

A federal judge has ordered the Department of Defense to restock hundreds of books after a lawsuit alleged students were banned from checking out texts related to race and gender from school libraries on military bases in violation of the First Amendment. | 

More than 600 armed volunteers in Utah have been approved to patrol campuses across the state to comply with a new law requiring armed security. Called school guardians, the volunteers are existing school employees who agree to be trained by local law enforcement and carry guns on campus. | 

No “Jackass”: Instagram announced new PG-13 content features that restrict teenagers from viewing posts that contain sex, drugs and “risky stunts.” | 

A Tuscaloosa, Alabama, school resource officer restrained and handcuffed a county commissioner after a spat at an elementary school awards program. | 

The number of guns found at Minnesota schools has increased nearly threefold in the last several years, new state data show. | 

More than half of Florida’s school districts received bomb threats on a single evening last week. The threats weren’t credible, officials said, and appeared to be “part of a hoax intended to solicit money.” | 

ICYMI @The74

Emotional Support

These realities compound the mental health challenges already intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. For many students, the fear of separation, the pressure to stay invisible and the stress of seeing loved ones targeted by inhumane immigration enforcement is deeply personal and destabilizing. 

There are real steps we can take to support the well-being of students. That includes protecting school areas from immigration enforcement, ensuring students know their rights and building systems of care that recognize the unique needs of these families.

But there’s another element we should be thinking about: our school-based mental health infrastructures. These spaces can be better equipped to support students in times of crisis, especially those disproportionately impacted by fear, racism and systemic injustice. 

This moment demands that we listen to students, not just because they are the most affected, but because they are already leading the way by helping to design and taking part in peer-support programs at their schools.  

At eight high schools across California, students are stepping into leadership roles as part of the,  launched by The Children’s Partnership in conjunction with the California Department of Health Care Services. The program was born from the vision of TCP’s youth-led policy council, the, which called for culturally responsive, student-led mental health support on campus. 

Young people are redefining what it means to support one another. At Serrano High School in Phelan north of San Bernardino, for example, peer leaders run a daily wellness center where they organize lunchtime wellness activities, host restorative circles and mentor English learner students, including those new to the U.S. To better serve their peers, several students proposed stationing themselves at the wellness center during an elective period so they could provide in-the-moment support to other students during the school day.  

At Sierra High School in San Bernardino, wellness ambassadors known as the “” have organized a Substance Abuse Prevention Fair that led to the identification and implementation of support-based alternatives to suspension, school policy changes and increased engagement among students. Since its inception more than three years ago, the Sunshine Crew has expanded into a structured, student-led wellness program with about 40 active members advancing mental health awareness, harm reduction education and public service initiatives.

This fall, the group is also launching a peer counseling program to complement its work. Across the pilot demonstration last year, 936 students statewide used peer support services,  underscoring the reach and impact of student-led mental health initiatives.

As one student put it, “This program is student-led, and it gave me the confidence to speak up, to lead and to support others.” Another reflected, “I didn’t think I’d graduate. Now, I lead school tours and tell my story to others.” 

This shift in school culture is the result of students driving change and institutions stepping back to make room. It happens when students are trusted, resourced and heard. And while programs like this are powerful, young people have made it clear: They need more. 

They want inclusive mental health education in classrooms. They want wellness centers that stay open beyond crisis moments. They want adults — educators, policymakers and community leaders — to treat mental health as a basic necessity, not a luxury. 

Now more than ever, in a climate where fear is being weaponized against vulnerable communities, we must commit to making schools places of healing, not more harm. That means investing in school-based mental health supports, expanding peer-to-peer programs, and ensuring that every student — regardless of immigration status, race or ZIP code — can access the tools they need to care for themselves and each other. 

We cannot separate mental health from the social and political realities young people are living through. And we cannot claim to support youth if we ignore the systems that harm them. When we center students — especially those from immigrant, low-income and LGBTQ communities — in designing and leading mental health strategies, we build schools that are not just supportive but transformative. 

Students have shown extraordinary resilience in the face of chaos. Their strength in navigating fear and instability is powerful, but it should not be the only tool they have. Resilience alone is not a solution; it’s a starting point. The youth are already doing the work. It’s time we meet them with the urgency, resources and respect they deserve. 

It may be that no one knows more about school-based mental health than Nancy Lever. As executive director of the University of Maryland’s , she’s dedicated her career to supporting and advancing efforts in schools around the country, allowing her a bird’s-eye view of how the most successful programs work.

Minnesota, with its long history of supporting school-based mental health, is a national leader in the work, as this series has shown, with kids in the majority of the state’s public schools having access to care.

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Different schools and districts have taken individualized approaches, but whatever the specific model, Lever has found that the most effective programs all have a few things in common.

The first, and perhaps the most important, Lever said, is a strong sense of partnership between school staff and members of the community. “The whole point of school-based mental health is it’s a wonderful model where people work together to create a system to make sure all youth mental health needs are being met,” she said. “The most successful models are going to have some level of family-school-community collaboration.”

Successful school-based mental health programs also acknowledge the central role played by existing school staff, even when community-based partners are brought in to provide additional mental health services for students, Lever said. This helps to build buy-in and integration and to keep programs running smoothly. “School employees — staff, social workers, school psychologists, counselors — are, to me, at the center of these programs.”

Then there are the teachers, whose collaboration with mental health programs is also essential. Classroom teachers often have the most interaction with students, and because of this they are able to observe behavioral changes that may indicate developing mental health concerns. Schools with effective mental health programs, Lever said, have developed an environment in which teachers feel comfortable reaching out to and collaborating with mental health staff, and building connections to parents.

“You want to be in a system that when you ask, ‘Who makes the most referrals?’ most often it is the educators, because they are at the front line,” Lever said. “They are the ones who are going to notice the kids who need the help.”

While including these elements in a school-based mental health program is essential for success, Lever said this still leaves room for innovation and adaptation to meet the unique needs of a community.

“It’s not a cookie-cutter approach,” she said, pointing to the Los Angeles Unified School District, which has, over the years, “done a lot of good work around trauma.” In Colorado, she said, school-based mental health has been supported by funds gained from marijuana taxes. Wisconsin’s program is supported by “strong leaders from their public instruction department,” Lever said, and Massachusetts “had a local champion who did amazing work.”

In Minnesota, Mark Sander, Hennepin County’s director of school mental health, has been one of those local champions. Decades ago, he cut his teeth as a post-doctoral fellow at the National Center for School Mental Health, working closely with founder and then-director Mark Weist. When he moved to Minnesota in 2003, Sander said he “stumbled into” an opportunity to start the school-based mental health program in Minneapolis and later in Hennepin County.

He brought what he learned in Maryland and adapted it to fit the needs of the state and the children who attend its public schools. That included creating a funding model in Minnesota that captured potential funding from students’ health insurance and made sure clinicians could be paid for time they spent in schools doing work beyond one-on-one counseling — an essential element that he and his colleagues believed was missing from some grant funding for school-based mental health.

“I wanted to make sure there is protected time for clinicians to take time to chat with teachers, and understand the schools and be part of the culture,” Sander said.

This 360-view, combined with an emphasis on building a holistic culture that embeds mental health providers in the inner workings of schools, helped the state to create a highly regarded school-based mental health program that has been emulated by other states, Weist said. “Minnesota is one of the leaders in the nation on this work.”

Baltimore: Here for good

School-based mental health providers in Baltimore work hard to make their presence known.

“In our model, we advertise widely,” said Jennifer Lease, a school-based mental health provider at the city’s Thomas Jefferson Elementary/Middle School. “Throughout the year, members of our administrative staff are continually asking us, ‘How are you getting yourself out there? How are you making sure that everyone knows who you are?’”

With those questions in mind, Lease said that she and her colleagues in the school use a range of approaches to remind everyone — from students to teachers to parents to staff — that they are there to provide mental health support. “We’re doing classroom presentations with every class in the school. We’re posting on the social media platforms with QR codes that people can use to refer themselves to us. We’re holding events focused on mental health. We’re trying to get that message spread far and wide.”

This emphasis on establishing a presence in the school is a response, in part, Lease said, to larger societal concerns about young people’s mental health.

“Everybody is really being encouraged to make sure the people know about these services, especially after some feedback in the past that particularly centered on the topic of children’s mental health in the news, with a lot of doom and gloom about how things are getting so much worse. And then there were children who were saying, ‘I didn’t know there was a therapist at my school,’ or, ‘I didn’t know how to access those supports.’”

Lease, employed by the and contracted to work with students at Thomas Jefferson, said she and her colleagues don’t want to fade into the background. “We put a lot of focus and attention toward making sure people know how to find us, know who we are, that we’re integrated into the school community, even though we are technically not school-system employees.”

For school-based mental health providers, especially those who, like Lease and her colleagues, are employed by community-based partner agencies, getting out there and establishing yourself as an essential part of the school community is key. If the goal is to reach all kids who need mental health services, this  approach is a proven winner.

“We try to be seen as members of the school community, and really for those relationships, because it allows people to know how to find us and how to access services,” Lease said. “It reduces stigma if we’re seen as another member of the school community, whether you are a parent coming to pick a kid up from school, or a kid just swinging by our office.”

Maryland’s school-based mental health program has a long history, said Nikita Parson, associate director and trainee coordinator at the University of Maryland’s School Mental Health Program. As far back as 1989, staff in school-based health centers began noticing rising numbers of students complaining of physical ailments, including, Parson recalled, “somatic symptoms like headaches and stomachaches.” After taking a deeper look, school staff determined that the issues students were talking about were, she explained, “more social-emotional related for those kiddos rather than physical.”

Health center staff made referrals for visits with mental health providers, but the follow-up rate was low, Parson said. Barriers like a lack of reliable transportation, childcare needs for other siblings and stigma within their community kept families from getting kids to the appointments.

In response, a team from the University of Maryland, led then by Weist, helped to expand mental health services in Baltimore’s school-based health centers. The idea was that if kids could get the mental health care they needed at school, they were far more likely to get parental support and show up for appointments, Parson explained. The model was built on the idea that rather than asking school employees like psychologists, social workers and guidance counselors to take on more responsibility for mental health care, schools would contract with credentialed community-based providers to come into the school and provide mental health care for students there.

Lever said the approach of boosting mental health care services in the schools rather than relying on outside locations was key to the program’s success. “If you want to work with children, you have to go where they are,” she said.

‘When it’s done well, it works.‘

If Baltimore’s visible, integrated approach to school-based mental health seems similar to Minnesota’s approach, that’s not an accident, Sander said. Many of the leaders of the school-based mental health movement in the United States, himself included, have worked together to develop models that can best serve students who would otherwise lack access. Their programs’ approaches mirror one another.

“There’s a reason school-based mental health often operates that way,” Sander said. “That’s because when it’s done well, it works.” It’s not a cut-and-paste approach, he said, because the needs are unique in each school district. But at the core, most successful school-based mental health programs lean heavily into the model that was developed in the late 1980s by Weist and his colleagues at the University of Maryland and successfully put into practice in states like Minnesota.

Just as in Baltimore, Sander said that an intentional integration of mental health clinicians in the school ecosystem in Minnesota has helped to normalize the idea of seeking mental health care. That support has been evident since the programs were founded in the state nearly 25 years ago.

Support for school-based mental health grew organically, Sander said, as children and adults around the state began to see the benefits of easy access to care. In the state Legislature, lawmakers from across the political spectrum, driven by personal experience and constituent requests, began to approve funding for these programs.

It got to the point where legislators wanted to make sure that school mental health was available in every county in the state, Sander said. Voters told their elected officials that they wanted these services available for their children, and the programs grew. Lawmakers, he said, “all wanted to make sure they had school mental health in their district. It took off in a good way, and it’s just grown from there.” Today, Minnesota’s school-based mental health programs are funded by a combination of private and public insurance as well as $20 million in state funding.

Lever can’t help but feel heartened by the state’s support for school-based mental health programs.

“I love what Minnesota’s doing,” she said. “They were part of our national quality initiative. We gave them some background, and they just took it and ran with it and brought it to a higher level. It’s a real accomplishment that truly benefits all the children of the state.”

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Families and schools play a crucial role in recognizing when a young person needs help and providing or connecting them with it, but they cannot possibly do it all. Fortunately, there is an untapped opportunity to expand support: the community-based organizations and out-of-school-time programs where young people already spend time, form trusting relationships, and feel a sense of safety and belonging.

Summer camps, youth mentoring, sports leagues, after-school clubs and countless other experiences — these are spaces where trusted relationships are built, often over years. Reaching young people through the organizations they already trust is crucial to broadening and strengthening the mental health safety net. With the right tools and training, they can become powerful front-line hubs for mental health support. But that requires real investment in partnerships, resources, and staff training.

Let’s be clear: This is not about turning after-school programs into clinics. It’s about embedding a layer of basic mental health support into places where young people already feel a sense of belonging. We can equip nonprofit staff to recognize, respond to and refer youth in need to professionals when necessary — ensuring the young people they serve are seen, supported and connected with the help they need. 

Today’s young people are more open than ever about mental health. Research from our organizations, (JED) and (APA), among others, shows that this generation is more self-aware and ready to advocate for emotional well-being than any before. And they are looking for support in familiar spaces where they already spend time: APA’s 2024 report found that more than 80% of young people recommend schools and community‑based organizations expand individual counseling services.

But openness alone isn’t enough. Support needs to meet them where they are.

Everyone who is part of a young person’s life is on the front lines of addressing young people’s urgent mental health needs. Rather than putting the burden on youth themselves to find support, we can build mental health expertise in the places they already are. 

The 150 organizations in APA’s Alliance Community, for example, collectively serve 31 million young people each year. Through these and so many other organizations, youth are already forming close bonds with the tutors, coaches and counselors they interact with at nonprofit organizations — putting these caring adults in an ideal position to recognize and respond to early signs of distress.

For many organizations it is not a big leap from their existing programming to supporting youth mental health. Sports, arts and crafts, being outside in nature, socializing with others, and so many other activities common to nonprofit youth programs – these are all key components to boosting well-being.

All of this presents an important opportunity to equip youth-serving staff with the tools and training they need to consistently and effectively support young people’s mental health.

Any community-based leader or staff member will tell you that providing mental health support is already part of the job. The reality is that they are often called upon, day or night, to help youth navigate urgent needs, typically under significant resource constraints – and too often without appropriate training or the institutional infrastructure for addressing and escalating mental health issues and crises. 

That is not sustainable, and does a disservice to both the young people and staff members. If we want to truly support youth, we have to support the people who support them by investing in training and mental health infrastructure that is effective and sustainable.

Many funders have longstanding relationships with youth-serving organizations, presenting an opportunity to extend their philanthropy to an area that can truly change lives: the mental health and emotional well-being of the young people who participate in these cherished programs. 

What does that look like in practice?

• Help organizations create strategic plans for how they will support the mental health of the youth they serve, including building basic infrastructure such as protocols, resource directories and safety nets to take pressure off individual staff members
• Fund staff training so youth workers know how to recognize emotional distress and respond appropriately
• Support partnerships between community-based organizations and mental health providers, including warm referral systems and local collaboration
• Invest in the well-being of frontline workers, many of whom are navigating secondary stress and burnout without support

Community-based organizations are uniquely positioned to meet the moment by providing critical support that can complement and extend school-based efforts. By now — and fostering stronger collaboration across every corner of the youth-serving ecosystem — we can build a more cohesive, responsive, and resilient network to support young people.

Mental health care services are available in more than 80% of Minnesota’s public school districts. That figure represents , though persistent gaps remain.

While most student mental health support is provided by a combination of school staff and school-based mental health practitioners employed by outside agencies, other nonprofit programs also spend time in the state’s schools, offering unique types of care. These services include peer support for students living with addiction, or culturally specific support groups and activities designed to meet the unique needs of students from immigrant and refugee communities.

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One of these nonprofit programs is Know the Truth, an independent offshoot of the Twin Cities-based Minnesota Adult and Teen Challenge. Know the Truth was created in 2006 as a prevention program designed to bring young people who had recently completed addiction treatment into schools to talk to teens about their own experiences.

Sadie Brown, Know the Truth director of prevention and community engagement, said that her organization started as a “grassroots effort going into schools,” providing guest speakers to add context to information that students were already learning in health class units on drug and alcohol use. Eventually, Know the Truth expanded to provide peer recovery services, developing partnerships with a number of Minnesota public school districts, including Anoka-Hennepin and District 916, which provides alternative programming to students in the northeast metro area.

Know the Truth provides expansive supports related to substance use, Brown said. “Not only are we meeting with students who are actively using now, we are also hearing from students who have use present in their home, say with mom, dad or siblings. And we are meeting with students who are in recovery and want to explore recovery — like how do they navigate that and find like-minded students who are also on a recovery path.”

Another nonprofit, St. Paul-based Restoration for All, focuses on supporting the mental health of the state’s African immigrant and refugee community. It also has also brought mental health-focused programs into public schools. Founder Tolulope Ola, a Nigerian immigrant and community activist, explained that she and her colleagues decided to expand their mental health supports to refugee and immigrant youth because they felt that not all teachers and staff understood their unique culture and experiences.

“We saw that students from our community were struggling,” Ola said. “We were concerned they were being misunderstood, and we knew we were best equipped to support them and explain to others where they were coming from.”

Working with youth is work with ‘purpose’ 

Every morning, Tiffany White wakes up knowing she’s doing a job she was born to do. As a youth peer support specialist for , White spends her days talking to young people in schools about drug and alcohol use.

Peer support specialists rely on their personal histories of addiction and recovery. White, now four years sober, is more than willing to talk about her long and painful journey with alcohol abuse. “I talk about my life every single day,” she said. “I tell the young people everything I went through because I want to help them. My life is no secret.”

In her teens, White avoided substances, but by the time she turned 21, she started drinking alcohol. “It seemed OK to drink because it was legal. I fell into it,” she said, explaining that she wasn’t “an instant alcoholic.” Within a few years, White’s dependence on alcohol had accelerated, and what at first felt like fun lost its luster.

“I started to get some real-life consequences,” she said. “I spiraled into depression and suicidal ideation. I got to a place where I didn’t care if I lived or died.” She drank so much, she said, that, “I started to have and . I’ve been in the hospital, in jail, but hallucinating really scared me.” For White, that crossed a line. “I thought,” she recalled, “‘If I’m not going to drink myself to death, I’m going to go to treatment.’”

White checked herself into a 13-month-long residential program at , a faith-based addiction treatment and recovery program with locations around the state. After completing the program, she took a job doing urinalysis tests for program participants. Then, someone told White about Know the Truth, a secular offshoot of Adult and Teen Challenge. She signed up to do a presentation for a local high school health class, where she and others shared personal stories of addiction and answered student questions.

The experience was significant.

After the presentation, a girl came up to White. “She was crying. She said, ‘I didn’t think anyone did the same things my mom did until I heard you speak.’ I saw I could use my own experience to help her. I thought, ‘This is what I’m supposed to do with my life.’”

During the academic year, White works out of three Twin Cities public schools (, in Little Canada and ), where she meets with individuals and groups. But her work isn’t limited to school hours: She also provides peer support services for students in the community and she regularly attends public events, like , a training and education program for young people on probation in Ramsey County.

If a student is assessed by a school social worker or psychologist and approved for peer support services, White can meet with them outside of school. In those cases, she selects spaces where teens feel comfortable. “We go to events, for walks, to the movies,” she said. “Sometimes we just ride around for two hours and talk.”

White also gives the young people — many of whom are struggling with their own or their family members’ addictions — her phone number. “I tell them they can text or call me anytime.”

Always being on duty suits White just fine. “This is what it is like to work out your purpose,” she said. “I work a lot. I don’t take time off, because it’s my passion. It doesn’t feel like work to me.“

One size does not fit all

The way young people think and talk about their mental health is influenced largely by their cultural background. founder Tolulope Ola understands this at her core.

A Nigerian immigrant and community activist, she saw that members of her community — especially young people who straddled between their family’s traditional culture and that of their U.S.-raised peers — struggled with their mental health. The adults in their schools often misinterpreted what they were trying to say, or failed to see that they were hurting.

These misunderstandings arose from a lack of cultural knowledge, Ola said: “Most of the organizations working in the schools don’t have what it takes to work with immigrant and refugee families.”

These gaps include a lack of personal understanding of the immigrant and refugee experience. “Many of these kids spent a foundational part of their lives in refugee camps,” Ola explained, where they learned survival skills often at odds with American behavioral expectations. When they surface in everyday interactions, these survival skills can be misinterpreted by school staff, and students can end up with diagnoses that aren’t accurate.

To address this issue, Ola said that she and her Restoration for All team have visited schools to hold workshops with school staff. They share information with educators about the traumas that many young people and their parents endured on their journeys to the United States, and they offer concrete examples of how best to interact with students when speaking about their mental health.

“Instead of asking kids, ‘What is wrong with you?’” Ola said, “we want educators and other adults to instead ask the question, ‘What happened to you?’ These children have lived through so much. The body holds the score.”

Ruth Ezeagwula, Restoration for All mental health and suicide prevention coordinator, said many young people from African immigrant and refugee communities feel like they have to switch behaviors and ways of speaking between school and home, especially when it comes to discussions about mental health. While immigrant and refugee kids are taught about the importance of speaking up about mental health concerns at school, many of their families avoid or even discourage talking about these issues at home, Ezeagwula said.

“Mental health wasn’t a thing that was talked about among the older immigrant and refugee population. It was mostly just, ‘Suck it up,’” she said. “Trying to bridge that gap is hard.”

In 2023, Restoration for All was awarded a four-year, $400,000  from the  (MDH), allowing them to expand the services to young people. This feels particularly important, Ola said, because there has been an among young people in the state’s African immigrant and refugee community.

“We are providing services for children, like mental health screening groups and individual therapy as well as suicidal monitoring,” Ola said. “We also do African mind-body practices to get them grounded. Sometimes they respond more to therapy when it is grounded in their cultural practices.”

Another MHD grant has funded Restoration for All’s work in schools in the Twin Cities, St. Cloud and Rochester “in connection with another organization called , as well as working in communities on [substance use disorder] and building peer support,” Ola said. “Though these issues cut across generations, our focus is on youth.”

In the trenches

On a late spring afternoon at St. Anthony Middle School, White is having a slow day. On the days she’s assigned to the school, she holds open hours in her basement office and schedules one-on-one appointments with students looking for addiction and mental health services. She also hosts support group meetings in the school library.

“It ebbs and flows,” White said of student visits. “Sometimes I’ll have a full load of kids. Sometimes it’s quiet.” Sometimes, concerned teachers send students to her. Other times, kids stop by for a quick check-in on their own.

While she wants young people to avoid using substances, White understands that many teens already drink or use illegal drugs or tobacco. She also believes that schools underreport substance use among students. “They might say only 2% use, but from what I hear it’s actually more like 70% of students use,” she said. “Schools turn a blind eye.”

Because of widespread use, White chooses to take a gentle-handed approach to her work. She believes accepting reality is the best way to actually help young people quit. “My goal is harm reduction,” she said. “I want these students to make educated decisions. That wasn’t available when I was young. I’ll just say, ‘Don’t do it for a day.’ They’ll come back and say, ‘I didn’t do it for a whole week.’ It’s a kind of reverse psychology.”

White’s work in schools is paid for by contracts and grants awarded to Know the Truth, not by individual insurance. Partway through the school year, she learned that her contract at Hastings High School was eliminated due to federal funding cuts. Not having a peer support counselor at the school has been a blow to some of the kids she saw there, White said. “They are really struggling. They’ll text me and say, ‘I wish you were here.’”

While cutbacks like this are discouraging, White tries to focus on the inroads she’s made with students at Quora, an alternative learning center for students with behavioral health needs in Little Canada.

For her first year in the building, White said that students didn’t trust her and it was nearly impossible to make inroads. “It was too chaotic,” she said, adding that the chaos made it impossible to hold support groups. But with time and patience, things changed: “It took me a year to get the students to trust me. But they trust me now. They are like night and day. They are asking me questions, talking to me. It feels pretty successful.”

White credits much of her success to what she calls her “genuine approach.”

“The kids call me Auntie,” White said. “They know I am an authority, but they want to hear what I’ve got to say because I have a friendly demeanor. I tell them, ‘I’m not here to judge you. I don’t care what you do. I just want to help.’ Saying that kind of stuff to them, that breaks the ice, and together we can make a change.”

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In the winter, students can snowshoe, icefish or bust out new snowtubes at a nearby hill as their classmates calculate speed and acceleration. 

Pandemic era funding allowed schools to get creative with bringing students back to the classroom. At Limestone, led to the formation of an outdoor science program, principal Ben Lothrop said.

“Everything is connected to the curriculum,” Lothrop said. “They’re certainly having fun and they’re learning lifelong skills, but they’re actually learning about math and science too.”

About four hours away, Maine Academy of Natural Sciences’ outdoor programming is the school’s “bread and butter,” said Evan Coleman, the school’s director of curriculum and instruction. The high school campus in central Maine is host to several greenhouses, a collection of beehives and a sugar shack, outdoor programs that have been expanded through COVID funding.

In the years since the pandemic, however, the purpose of spending time outdoors — or “green time” — has become a possible next step toward reengaging students and boosting mental health and academics — the same goal behind a growing movement of cell phone bans and restrictions. Schools are also being seen as key in closing the “nature gap,” where low-income communities have less access to green space than wealthier families.

“You don’t need a giant swath of green space or forest to get a lot of these mental and physical health benefits,” said Lincoln Larson, an associate professor at North Carolina State University’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management. “Sometimes just a tree on the sidewalk can yield a lot of the same benefits, or a little pocket park. It doesn’t have to be this giant well-planned thing.”

Some barriers exist, including in the most extreme cases where urban schools are located on – areas that lack green space and absorb heat. For other schools that may not be as limited by environmental factors, large outdoor programming has slowed down because of the expiration of school COVID relief money in Sept. 2024. Holding classes outside can even be challenging sometimes as schools navigate teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms and limited flexibility with curriculum. 

Research shows a correlation between time spent outside and students’ , skills and academic and , so although “technology isn’t going away” and “much of it is really important for learning,” said Page Nichols, the chief innovation officer at the Maine Department of Education, time outdoors “really speaks for itself and how it’s supporting a student holistically.”

Local have pushed for the importance of incorporating green space on school campuses. Earlier this year, and joined state and in signing laws aimed at establishing more outdoor programs for students. 

By early 2026, Maine’s education department plans to issue outside learning recommendations to schools to help them expand programs that may boost student well-being with little to no cost and where they may have limited outdoor space.

The hope is that the work means outdoor time won’t have to become “this big extra lift because it’s really a part of the [school] day,” Nichols said. It may be a model for other states to follow, “but, it takes a while to get there.”

Schools as an equity bridge for the ‘nature gap’ 

Getting a child outside isn’t always as easy as it sounds as dedicated outdoor space is changing quickly. 

Jenny Rowland-Shea, the director for public lands at the , said the United States is losing natural land at a rate of a football field every 30 seconds and “it is disproportionately affecting communities of color and low-income communities.”

Communities of color are three times more likely, at 74%, than white communities (23%) to live in nature deprived areas, defined as places with less nature than the state average. About 70% of low-income communities live in nature-deprived areas, which is 20% higher than those with higher economic stability, according to a Rowland-Shea conducted. 

“We’re also finding that families with children are more likely to live in these areas that are nature deprived,” Rowland-Shea said. “That’s only compounded when we look at families with children who are people of color and that are low income.” 

There’s a hope that schools may be able to bridge the “nature gap.”

“Kids may not have a park in their backyard or that’s walkable in their neighborhood, but pretty much all kids go to schools and they spend a lot of time there, so the idea is that if you can have green school yards, then that’s a way to provide equitable access to nature for all,” said Kathryn Stevenson, an associate professor at the College of Natural Resources at North Carolina State University. 

Just 10, 15 minutes helps

While children are spending less time outdoors, they’re also spending over seven hours in front of cellphones and computers, to the National Recreation and Park Association.

It’s a mental health double-whammy as studies show that excessive screen time and heightens stress reactions while time outside has the on the brain.

The and theories are “two prevailing” proposals that explain the benefits of outdoor time on the human body, Larson said.

The theories suggest “that when we’re constantly bombarded by electronic stimuli … our minds are just frantic,” Larson said. But, time outdoors has a natural effect on the brains that lowers stress levels. For students specifically, this means better memory, concentration, mood and overall well-being.

“Nature gives us space, gives us time and gives our brains just an opportunity to reset – to restore our attention – so that we can deeply engage with things,” Larson said. “You could stare at a tree and your mind slowly calms down.” 

An appetite for the outdoors from students and educators

Like many other states, Maine signed that requires schools to have policies around cell phone use by 2026. 

Administrators at both Limestone Community School and Maine Academy of Natural Sciences have not implemented full bell-to-bell bans, but allow students to have access to their phones during lunch. They say their programming has helped keep students off their phones naturally.

 “I won’t say the problem is gone across the board, but kids got on board really quickly, especially when they’re doing things that they’re engaged in,” said Coleman of the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences. “Bringing back the joy of that type of learning in the physical world is something … that keeps students interested in what we do as a school.”

Since establishing their outdoor science program , Limestone principal Lothrop, said he’s seen an increase in attendance and improvement in classroom behavior.

“The kids want to be here,” Lothrop said. “They don’t want to miss anything. They know today we might be making syrup, or they know in English class they might be reading this book that they’ve gotten into.”

Tracy Larson, a former teacher who now works at , a Minnesota based nonprofit that provides outdoor programming to schools, said from her experience, outdoor education has also become a way to fill the opportunity gap affecting low income students. 

“For students who are not intrinsically motivated to learn in the classroom when they go outside …,” Larson said, “you start to see them tapping into their curiosity, wanting to connect with others and maybe finding that this is really where they thrive.”

The appetite for outdoor learning extends across the country and is something students have expressed interest in for years.

In September 2020, researchers at the University of Michigan to 14-24 year olds that asked the youth to respond with their thoughts on time spent in nature and well-being. 

With over 1,000 respondents, the study found nearly 90% wanted to spend more time in nature, over 50% said nature made them feel calm and 22% said it reduced stress and anxiety. About 22% of responses also said there were barriers toward spending more time outside, including busy schedules, the pandemic and their environment. 

“A big takeaway was that the youth did see nature as like a real resource that could support mental and physical health,” said Astrid Zamora, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University School of Medicine and a coauthor of the report, “but accessing it wasn’t always an option.”

This girl just can’t seem to settle. Like a bird in search of a worm, she flits from spot to spot in Yolonda Rogers’ office — a desk, a couple of chairs and a beanbag in the corner of a multipurpose room at , a Minneapolis public high school. Rogers, a mental health specialist tasked with providing mental health care to students in six of the district’s schools, is patient. She’s seen this kind of behavior before.

The girl keeps moving around the room, alighting briefly before taking out her cell phone and answering a call. When Rogers asks her a question, the girl’s answers are short and clipped, and her face is turned away. She doesn’t seem interested in talking, but it also seems like she doesn’t want to leave.

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Then the girl spies a large plastic bag stuffed with snack-sized chips that Rogers keeps on a shelf near her desk. She pulls out a pack, and starts to eat. Still pacing the room, she begins talking about issues with her mother. Rogers listens, nods, asks a few more questions, and the girl finally sits down. Still not making eye contact, she tells Rogers she’s thinking about withdrawing from Heritage, how she’s gone to schools all over the state, how she’s been fighting with other students.

The conversation slowly warms up. Despite the rocky beginning, the girl somehow seems comfortable with Rogers, and their conversation becomes easy, even relaxed.

Later, Rogers explains that most of the students who come to her office have never seen a mental health therapist, and most of their parents are unlikely to have the time or financial resources to get them to a therapy appointment. Because Rogers, who holds a master’s degree in clinical social work, is at Heritage one day a week and is a known presence in the school, students feel comfortable just stopping by her office, and teachers and administrators know they can refer struggling students for a visit.

“It helps with their mental well-being to have me here,” Rogers said of her students. “I’m part of the community, and many of them find it easy to talk to me about what’s on their mind.”

Making mental health treatment as easy as going to the school nurse is a key component of Minnesota’s decades-long goal of providing low- or no-cost mental health care to all public school students. In a state with a lamentable history of racial and economic inequality, this clear commitment to easy access to mental health care stands out.

In the wake of the global COVID pandemic, much attention has been paid to kids’ mental health, but children in the United States have struggled for decades trying to access counseling and therapy. In the past, children in Minnesota’s public schools largely got mental health care from school social workers or psychologists, but that approach had shortcomings, including staffing problems and budget limitations that meant kids who really needed to talk to someone about their mental health often had to wait for months.

In the early 2000s, in recognition of growing rates of mental illness among children, the state began expanding access to mental health care in public schools by contracting with outside agencies, bringing licensed mental health care providers into schools where they could become a regular part of the educational ecosystem. Supported by the state Legislature, the (MDE) and (DHS) approved funding for these efforts, from $4.7 million in 2008 to over $20 million today, and slowly the number of mental health providers in the state’s public schools began to grow.

Mark Sander, Hennepin County director of school mental health, has been involved in the effort since the beginning. “If we go back to 2005,” he said, “we had therapists in five schools. Now, just in Hennepin County alone, we have 22 different agencies doing this work. There are over 230 therapists in over 220 schools just in Hennepin County serving about 7,000 students a year.”

This work hasn’t gone unnoticed. Kris Lofgren, DHS school behavioral health program coordinator, said that during the pandemic, Minnesota’s efforts to expand mental health care to public schools was highlighted in a U.S. Department of Education report.

“It brought national attention to what’s being done in the state,” Lofgren said. “People figured out that we have been doing a lot of important work around bringing mental health services to where kids are. It identified Minnesota as a leader.”

Sander has witnessed this expansion — and the impact it has had on kids — first hand. He said he’s proud of Minnesota’s support for children’s mental health and grateful for the many advocates who’ve made it possible. Easy access to free- and reduced-cost mental health care is not a given in public schools nationwide, but today it is available in 82% of Minnesota’s public school districts and in 61% of the state’s 2,661 public schools, a reality he does not take lightly.

“I’ll be honest,” Sander said. “Minnesota has crushed it.”

Part of the furniture

To Sander’s mind, the ideal school-based mental health provider wears a camouflage of sorts, blending into the background like part of the landscape of the regular school day. When kids have to leave school to see a therapist, he said, the experience can be much more intimidating, making mental health treatment feel onerous or even threatening.

“One of the things that’s been really beautiful is when you bring these mental health services into the schools it doesn’t seem like a big deal,” Sander said. When a therapist is based in school, kids and parents see them in the hallway or the lunchroom. They see kids interacting with their peers, observe behaviors and connect with teachers, he added. “The therapist can then talk to a teacher or another adult in the building and really help integrate their work, saying, ‘Tommy is working on his anxiety and so if you see him starting to get a little bit anxious, just touch him on his shoulder. Nobody else needs to know, but it’s your thing.’”

Take Rogers, for example. Students and staff flow in and out of her office, stopping to chat, grab a bag of chips, check in on their day, or to introduce a friend and refer them for services. When school-based therapists are easily accessible and available like this, Sander said, word starts to spread. “Youth feel comfortable coming to a therapist or a social worker and saying, ‘Hey: I’ve got a concern,’ or, ‘I’ve got a concern about my friend.’ We as a team can help figure out what’s the best place for them to start getting support.”

While going to therapy can be commonplace for kids in higher-income groups, many children from immigrant and refugee communities often have little or no background seeking mental health support. This is the case with students in many of the state’s public schools.

Jill Johnson, executive director of , a nonprofit provider of school-based mental health care in Minnesota schools, said that when therapists are located in a school, kids are highly likely to get care. “There is a that says for kids from low-income families, if they need mental health care, there is only a 13% chance they will access services, but when mental health care is available in schools it is something like a 96% chance.”

Sander has seen that in action. “Half of the students that are supported by school-based mental health in Hennepin County have never had mental health services before,” he said. “Of those that are getting it for the first time, 40% have really significant mental health issues.” This lack of access isn’t due to parental neglect, Sander added. “Parents want to get their kids the stuff they need. It was just that they couldn’t get them there or didn’t know how to make it happen. Having it in the school allows them to get their kids that support.”

There are many reasons why getting a kid to therapy, even when parents are on board, can be difficult. Sander recalled a meeting he and parent had several years ago with then-U.S. Sen. Al Franken. “This parent said. ‘I’ve got a job and I was worried about losing my job because of having to take my young person to therapy,’ The fact that they could get that support at school was a game-changer. For the parent, it really lessened their own anxiety.”

Few and far between

While Minnesota’s commitment to providing mental health care to kids in public schools has received national praise, there are still some parts of Greater Minnesota where a scattered population and the limits of geography can make that access spotty at best.

Johnson, whose nonprofit supplies mental health providers to schools across the metro area, said she’s all-too familiar with the state’s rural/urban divide.

“School-based mental health services look very different in St. Paul and Minneapolis vs. in rural Minnesota,” she said. “I know some districts in rural Minnesota where the whole district might share only one or two clinicians. It is different in Minneapolis or St. Paul, where we have a clinician in almost every school.”

In Grand Marais, two hours north of Duluth on Lake Superior’s North Shore, Lisa Sater works as an early childhood therapist and clinical supervisor for the . The district, which covers some 3,340 square miles, has about 430 kids from pre-school to 12^th grade.

A couple of years ago, Sater, who has lived north of Brainerd since 1982, decided to fulfill her dream of living just about as far north as you can get when she and her husband decided to pull up stakes and move to Grand Marais. She’d been working as a child therapist for decades, employed as a school therapist through , a Willmar-based nonprofit providing in-home and school-based mental health services to children and families outside of the Twin Cities. Aware that her skills were in high demand, she reached out to Chris Lindholm, Cook County Public Schools superintendent.

“I emailed Chris and said, ‘Could you use a mental health therapist in your school?’” Sater recalled. “He said, immediately, ‘Yes. Yes. We really need someone to come,’ My next email was to my boss. I said, ‘Would you support me in moving my work to Grand Marais?’ He said, ‘Yes. Of course.’”

Sater understands it takes a certain type of person to want to live in Grand Marais. While the town — population 1,352 — is nestled into an undeniably beautiful harbor on a majestic lake, the isolation that makes it precious can also be a source of struggle when a kid is in need of mental health care.

“It is very hard for parents to come in and to therapy with their kids,” Sater said. “About 30% of our student population are Native American. Some go to school on the reservation in Grand Portage. It is a good school, but some kids from there also come here.” The trip from Grand Portage to Grand Marais is about 35 miles one way, and parents often have a hard time making it to school, let alone to town for a visit with a therapist.

“A lot of people can’t afford the gas,” Sater said. “There is limited public transportation. That’s one of the problems. Another one is a lot of people have to work more than one job. It is an expensive place to live.”

When he moved to town in July 2021, Lindholm described what felt like a children’s mental health desert. “I saw a huge need here for children’s mental health services. There were two providers in the whole county and not near enough horsepower. Basically, mental health services in all of Cook county in general were drastically lacking. The county itself called it out as a big problem.”

Though they are far removed from the pressures of city living, Lindholm said that kids in his district struggle with many of the same issues as their urban counterparts. “Over half of our kids are in poverty, there are lots of visible mental health struggles. Teachers tell me the mental health needs are incredible. In 2022, for instance, nearly half of our junior class was being treated for mental health of some kind.”

Sater’s email felt like an amazing boon, Lindholm said. The need for her services was clearly there, even in his “tiny” district. “She went to a full caseload in the county almost immediately.” The district has enough funding to employ a second school-based therapist, and  it  has posted the position for two years with no takers.

What makes the region beautiful also makes it a hard sell. “It is two hours to everything. A trip to the eye doctor is a full-day trip.”

At the state Capitol, there have been efforts to make providing mental health services to kids in Greater Minnesota more appealing, like providing loan forgiveness and tuition support to mental health providers who agree to practice in rural areas.

Unless, like Sater, another provider drops from the sky, Lindholm fears that it will always be a struggle to fully attend to the mental  health of all  students.

All day every day

At in St. Paul, mental health care is integrated into nearly every aspect of the school. In June, members of Como’s mental health team gathered for an end-of-year wrap-up meeting, led by Christy McCoy, one of five of the school’s social workers. The group, made up of social workers, an intern, therapists and a psychologist, described the many ways they work to seamlessly wrap their services into the daily lives of students, teachers and administrators.

McCoy talked about her work co-facilitating a group of male students who’d been chronically absent from class, but actually spending time in the school building. “I thought,” she said, “‘Let’s build this community to not just focus on academics, but let’s get to some of the root causes of why they’re not coming to class.’” The group provides mental health support for the students  in a way that feels comfortable to them.

“We talk about everything in there,” McCoy said. “We talk about culture. We talk about our strengths, how to use those strengths to empower us and to channel those strengths to help us with things like advocacy, like how do we develop some of those social skills to be able to articulate what we need, what we want.”

That approach works with group members, McCoy said, who have jumped on board with a surprising enthusiasm. “They said they wanted to have a group next year,” McCoy told her colleagues. “They want to do some community service. They want to give back. They want to be able to come into the classrooms and share about why it is important to take care of yourself. These are all ideas focused on mental health, and these are all ideas they generated.”

Back at Heritage STEM Academy, Rogers’ approach to mental health treatment also feels student-led. She always tries to start her sessions on comfortable footing. “I first start getting to know the student,” she said. “I explain my role and say, ‘I’m here to support you as a student. We can talk about mental health. We can talk about life. For many students it is helpful that I am African American. I also tell them I am a Minneapolis Public School alumni. It speaks to my cultural context, helps them open up.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

New research has found that rural LGBTQ+ teens experience significant challenges in their communities and turn to the internet for support.

The from Hopelab and the looked at what more than 1,200 LGBTQ+ teens faced and compared the experiences of those in rural communities with those of teens in suburban and urban communities. The research found that rural teens are more likely to give and receive support through their online communities and friends than via their in-person relationships.

“The rural young people we’re seeing were reporting having a lot less support in their homes, in their communities, and their schools,” Mike Parent, a principal researcher at Hopelab, said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “They weren’t doing too well in terms of feeling supported in the places they were living, though they were feeling supported online.”

However, the research found that rural LGBTQ+ teens had the same sense of pride in who they were as suburban and urban teens.

“The parallel, interesting finding was that we didn’t see differences in their internal sense of pride, which you might kind of expect if they feel all less supported,” he said. “What was surprising, in a very good way, was that indication of resilience or being able to feel a strong sense of their internal selves despite this kind of harsh environment they might be in.”

Researchers recruited young people between the ages of 15 and 24 who identified as LGBTQ+ through targeted ads on social media. After surveying the respondents during August and September of last year, the researchers also followed up some of the surveys with interviews, Parent said.

According to the study, rural teens were more likely than their urban and suburban counterparts to find support online. Of the rural respondents, 56% of rural young people reported receiving support from others online several times a month compared to 51% of urban and suburban respondents, and 76% reported giving support online, compared to 70% of urban and suburban respondents.

Conversely, only 28% of rural respondents reported feeling supported by their schools, compared to 49% of urban and suburban respondents, the study found, and 13% of rural respondents felt supported by their communities, compared to 35% of urban and suburban respondents.

Rural LGBTQ+ young people are significantly more likely to suffer mental health issues because of the lack of support where they live, researchers said. Rural LGBTQ+ young people were more likely to meet the threshold for depression (57% compared to 45%), and more likely to report less flourishing than their suburban/urban counterparts (43% to 52%).

The study found that those LGBTQ+ young people who received support from those they lived with, regardless of where they live, are more likely to report flourishing (50% compared to 35%) and less likely to meet the threshold for depression (52% compared to 63%).

One respondent said the impact of lack of support impacted every aspect of their lives.

“Not being able to be who you truly are around the people that you love most or the communities that you’re in is going to make somebody depressed or give them mental issues,” they said in survey interviews, according to Hopelab. “Because if you can’t be who you are around the people that you love most and people who surround you, you’re not gonna be able to feel the best about your well-being.”

Respondents said connecting with those online communities saved their lives.

“Throughout my entire life, I have been bullied relentlessly. However, when I’m online, I find that it is easier to make friends… I met my best friend through role play [games],” one teen told researchers. “Without it, I wouldn’t be here today. So, in the long run, it’s the friendships I’ve made online that have kept me alive all these years.”

Having support in rural areas, especially, can provide rural LGBTQ+ teens with a feeling of belonging, researchers said.

“Our findings highlight the urgent need for safe, affirming in-person spaces and the importance of including young people in shaping the solutions,” Claudia-Santi F. Fernandes, vice president of research and evaluation at Born This Way Foundation, said in a statement. “If we want to improve outcomes, especially for LGBTQ+ young people in rural communities, their voices–and scientific evidence–must guide the work.”

Parent said the survey respondents stressed the importance of having safe spaces for LGBTQ+ young people to gather in their own communities.

“I think most of the participants recognize that you can’t do a lot to change your family if they’re not supportive,” he said. “What they were saying was that finding ways for schools to be supportive and for communities to be supportive in terms of physical spaces (that allowed them) to express themselves safely (and) having places where they can gather and feel safe, uh, were really important to them.”

Hopelab seeks to address mental health in young people through evidence-based innovation, according to its organizers. The Born This Way Foundation was co-founded by Lady Gaga and her mother, West Virginia native Cynthia Bisset Germanotta.

The organization is focused on ending bullying and building up communities, while using research, programming, grants, and partnerships to engage young people and connect them to mental health resources, according to the foundation’s website.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Mia Palacio felt like she lost a piece of herself after wildfires destroyed much of her hometown of Lahaina in 2023. 

Palacio struggled to deal with the grief of losing her town and home. She isolated herself from her loved ones and often felt angry — that her family didn’t have a permanent place to stay, that more people weren’t able to evacuate the night of Aug. 8, that she was moving between high schools where she didn’t feel welcomed. 

The pain only intensified as the months wore on and, finally, nearing the first anniversary of the fires, Palacio reached out for help.

Hundreds of students like Palacio have struggled mentally since the fires and not all have received the help they need. The Hawaiʻi Department of Education estimates more than a third of Maui students lost a family member, sustained a serious injury or had a parent lose a job after the fires, which killed 102 people and damaged more than 3,300 properties in Lahaina. 

Two years later, many in Lahaina are ready to return to normal. But therapists say students’ mental health challenges continue to mount. 

That’s common after a disaster, especially at the two-year mark, when adrenaline wears off and stress remains high, said Christopher Knightsbridge, one of several researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi who has studied the well-being of Lahaina fire survivors. While kids may feel numb immediately following a disaster, after two years, they’re facing the toll of constant uncertainty and change, he said.  

It’s a phenomenon seen wherever schooling has been disrupted by natural disasters, reporting by Honolulu Civil Beat, The Associated Press and several other news outlets shows. But a couple years after the disaster, schools are not always prepared with extra mental health supports. On Maui, for instance, the island is dealing with an ongoing shortage of specialists. In the past few years, the number of psychiatrists serving youth has dropped from four to two, even as demand has grown.

“The crisis isn’t over,” Knightsbridge said. 

Two Years In 

Palacio made progress with the help of a school counselor and then a local organization that supports teens’ mental health through outdoor activities and adventures. Now, the senior at Lahainaluna High School said she’s more comfortable confiding in others and controlling her emotions, and she takes pride in mentoring younger students who have also struggled since the fires. 

But two years in, many kids still wrestle with depression and anxiety.

DayJahiah Valdivia, a senior at Kīhei Charter School, said her stress levels still spike when there’s strong winds or small brush fires on Maui. Valdivia lives in Upcountry Maui, which also faced wildfires that burned over a thousand acres of land on the same day as the 2023 Lahaina fires. Her home was spared, but it took months for her family to return because their property was covered in soot and needed professional cleaning. 

She feels less anxious now that her family has discussed their escape plan for future disasters. But a summer fire near a friend’s home in Central Maui renewed her fears about her loved ones’ safety. 

“The anxiety never really wore off,” she said, adding it was especially difficult to concentrate in class or feel safe on windy days during the first year after the fires. 

In a  conducted in 2024, just over half of children reported symptoms of depression, and 30% were likely facing an anxiety disorder. Nearly half of kids in the study, ages 10 to 17, were experiencing PTSD. 

Children in disaster-torn towns across the U.S. can relate. 

In Paradise, California, where the 2018 Camp Fire took 85 lives, a protracted period of disillusionment followed what some called the “hero phase,” where the community pulled together and vowed to resurrect their town. Both Lahaina and Paradise had housing shortages after their fires, so families had to move away or live with friends to go to school or work in the area. In general, students who don’t have a permanent living arrangement tend to struggle more academically and have more behavioral challenges,  shows. 

Many Paradise students still cope with anxiety and grief, seven years later, making it difficult to fully engage in school. A year after the Camp Fire, 17% of students were homeless, and the suspension rate was 7.4%, compared to 2.5% statewide. The suspension rate remained nearly triple the state average last year, and more than 26% were . 

Aryah Berkowitz, who lost her home, two dogs and her family’s business in the Paradise blaze, dealt with lingering behavioral challenges following the disaster. For nearly a year afterward, her family of seven, plus a pair of surviving pitbull-labrador mixes, lived with a friend in nearby Chico, sharing two bedrooms and a bathroom. Berkowitz, then in sixth grade, slept on the couch.

“I was having to help my family a lot and wasn’t able to handle it,” said Berkowitz, a once-high-achieving student who was suspended twice after the fire. “I was holding it inside and took it out on other people. Some days I’d just walk out of class.”

Back on Maui, many students similarly disengaged from school.  In a DOE survey of Maui students in the first year after the fires, roughly half of kids said they were having trouble focusing in class or felt upset when they were reminded of the wildfires.   

Some have found it difficult to retain class material or simply stopped attending in-person classes as they moved between hotel rooms and temporary housing, according to Lahainaluna High teacher Jarrett Chapin. A few moved to online learning as their families faced continued instability. 

“They just sort of vanished,” Chapin said. 

A Shortage Of Specialists

Maui has long dealt with medical workforce challenges. Even before the fires, Maui faced a shortage of mental health professionals because of the state’s high cost of living and housing shortage.

The fires brought burnout and greater economic obstacles, only exacerbating the issue. Since then, Hawaii’s education department has tried to bulk up Maui’s mental health staff, first by bringing in providers from neighbor islands and the mainland and then by using a $2 million federal grant to support students’ well-being and academics. 

But hiring mental health staff has been so difficult that even the federal money hasn’t made much of a dent: In the first nine months of the grant, the state education department primarily used the money to  nearly an hour to Lahaina schools from other parts of the island.

The state has now used the money to hire five part-time mental health providers working with students and staff, including one specialist who works in the evenings with students who live on Lahainaluna’s campus as boarders, said Kimberly Lessard, a Department of Education district specialist.

Still, two of the six behavioral health specialist positions in Lahaina schools remained unfilled as of this summer and have been for years, Lessard said. 

Valdivia, who still deals with anxiety from the Upcountry Maui fires, has seen the impacts of the provider shortage firsthand. She’s on a two- to three-month waiting list to see a psychiatrist on Maui, and she’s seeing an Oʻahu-based therapist via telehealth because there aren’t enough providers who can meet with her in person. 

While she’s grateful to have connected with a therapist who can make their virtual meetings work, it’s frustrating to go through such a lengthy process to get help, Valdivia said. 

“Even just to get evaluated (by a psychiatrist), it’s literally months,” she said. “I just think that’s crazy.”

It’s common for disaster-torn communities to struggle with shortages of psychological staff, often because of burnout and a lack of resources. 

In Puerto Rico, which has suffered from a series of disasters since Hurricane Maria struck in 2017, students have experienced high rates of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. 

Yet despite legislation in 2000 to create more school psychologist positions, it wasn’t until the pandemic that the commonwealth’s Education Department dedicated money to hire them. 

The school psychologists “can’t keep up,” said Nellie Zambrana, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras. Those who are working are overstretched, according to a study by the university’s Psychological Research Institute. One psychologist, the study said, was assigned to more than 100 students at three schools. 

New Ways To Help

On a Tuesday afternoon in June, Loren Lapow wasn’t deterred by the storm clouds gathering over D.T. Fleming Beach on Maui. The social worker helped teens carry an inflatable paddleboard to the water’s edge, cheering them on as they swam. 

Amid the fun, Lapow directed the teens to reflect on their fears and losses, asking them how they feel when they smell smoke in the air or think about Lahaina’s Front Street, most of which was destroyed in the blaze. 

“Places are like a friend to us,” Lapow said. “When you lose places, it hurts.” 

Lapow founded the Maui Hero Project, which  describes as “adventure-based counseling services.” The eight-week program Lapow started just over 25 years ago teaches kids basic disaster preparedness skills and immerses them in outdoor activities. It’s also a form of mental health support. Healing from trauma comes in many forms, Lapow said, whether it’s helping kids create new friendships or leading small group discussions about the mental toll of the fires.  

“We need to create a culture of healing and resiliency,” Lapow said.

Lapow’s approach has become a common strategy for nonprofits and therapists trying to reach kids who have balked at discussing their mental health since the fires. But those efforts aren’t always reaching kids who need the most help. 

There’s a strong stigma around seeking mental health services, particularly in Filipino and Latino communities that make up a large portion of Lahaina’s population, said Ruben Juarez, a professor at UH who led the research study on fire survivors. Families may see counseling as a sign of weakness, he said, and children may be reluctant to open up to therapists out of fear of being judged or scrutinized.

Yet in the study, Latino teens reported the highest rates of severe depressive and PTSD symptoms. Filipino teens reported some of the highest rates of anxiety. Similar cultural trends are seen in communities across the U.S.

Moving forward, Juarez said, kids’ mental health needs to be at the forefront of recovery plans. 

The state is hoping struggling students will open up to their peers.  A new Oregon-based program called YouthLine will train Hawaiʻi teens to respond to crisis calls, said Keli Acquaro, the administrator for the Department of Health’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Division. In addition to providing kids with real-time support from people their own age, Acquaro said, it will hopefully strengthen the pipeline of local students considering careers in mental health. 

Keakealani Cashman, who graduated from Kamehameha Schools Maui in 2024, is hoping to be part of the state’s solution to provide more mental health support to the next generation of children. 

After losing her home to the fires, Cashman spent her senior year talking to Native Hawaiian practitioners and researching how cultural values, like connections to the land and her ancestors, could help her community heal from the trauma of the fires. The project improved her own mental health, said Cashman, who regularly met with her school’s behavioral health specialist. 

Now, Cashman is entering her second year at Brigham Young University Hawaii and hopes to work as a behavioral health specialist in Hawaiian immersion schools.  

“This horrible, horrible thing happened to me and my family, but I don’t have to let it kill the rest of my life,” Cashman said. “I can really help my family, my community in school, and just make an impact in what I know how to do.” 

Social media platforms have begun to respond.

TikTok, for instance, is partnering with the through the , a network of healthcare influencers dedicated to raising good health content and fighting misinformation, to amplify credible health voices. This includes redirecting online searches for topics like depression and post traumatic stress disorder to trustworthy sources like the National Institute of Mental Health and the Cleveland Clinic. These steps show what is possible when platforms and public health align.

Pinterest has banned all weight loss ads and promotes body-neutral inspiration boards. YouTube collaborates with health nonprofits to highlight verified content and redirect viewers to professional help.  Instagram offers content break tools and resource prompts when certain hashtags are used, such as #selfcare, #mentalhealth, and #takeabreak. These efforts show that platforms can evolve when they listen to the public.

We are not just online. We are alive in these spaces. Many of us take care of each other when institutions fall short. From WhatsApp support groups to creators addressing burnout, we’ve built a vast, informal support system. It’s powerful. It shouldn’t be our only one.

That’s why I joined the , a group created to bring youth voices into the center of global health decision-making. We share with WHO leadership the realities of youth digital experiences, including mental health and taboo topics.

For example, we’ve highlighted how young people turn to digital platforms like Instagram or WhatsApp to discuss sensitive issues such as depression or sexual health, often because offline support is inaccessible or stigmatized. These insights help WHO leaders understand where young people are seeking help, what barriers they face, and how health information actually circulates among us.

The council’s Health, Education and Literacy Working Group specifically focuses on making WHO’s health information more youth-friendly, adapting technical guidance into formats and languages that resonate with young people.

Despite our efforts, evidence-based health information often struggles to compete with viral trends, memes, and misinformation. Even when good content exists, it can get buried. Many young people continue to face stigma, lack of access, and language barriers when trying to find answers to personal health questions online.

Our recent , developed and launched by young people, calls for equitable health education, accessible healthcare, and youth leadership in decision-making. It places digital literacy and mental health at the center of these efforts.

WHO’s Fides Network, launched in 2020, plays a big role. The network includes more than 1,300 creators globally who together, have posted hundreds — if not thousands — of videos across platforms in support of WHO’s broader public health mission. The mental health campaign with TikTok began in May 2024 and is just one part of the broader Fides initiative.

Fides doesn’t throw lectures at us. It gives professionals the tools and space to meet young people where we are, with content that feels real, trustworthy, and doable. Since 2024, more than 55 creators across 10 countries have shared 282 videos. These have reached 850 million people and been viewed over 1.3 billion times.

These creators — doctors, nurses, scientists, and public health professionals — share short, evidence-based content tailored for platforms like TikTok and YouTube. This work does more than inform; it helps rebuild trust.

Creators like , a psychologist who now reaches people through short videos, are helping shift how we talk about health. They do this not with clinical jargon but with honesty and clarity.

What we need now is action, not just acknowledgment. Public health leaders must move beyond issuing statements and begin working directly with young people to create real, lasting solutions. That includes deeper partnerships with digital platforms to increase access to evidence-based health advice and tackle misinformation.

These platforms are not temporary. They are part of our everyday lives and will continue to shape future generations. Their improvement depends on informed, empowered users who are not afraid to speak up and demand better.

My vision for youth leadership in digital public health is bold: I want to see young people not just as messengers, but as architects of the systems that shape our wellbeing online. Imagine a world where mental health campaigns are designed by youth creators and clinicians working together, where social media algorithms aim to promote empathy and accurate information, and where youth-led digital health innovations receive real, sustained funding — not just token support.

Right now, less than 2% of global health funding is directed toward adolescent mental health, and even less reaches youth-led digital initiatives, . That needs to change if we’re serious about empowering young people.

That means ensuring three things:

•  Trust: A world where a 17-year-old feels safer asking about anxiety or depression from a WHO-verified youth creator than from an anonymous internet search. 
•  Equity: Local language and culturally relevant content must be the foundation, not an afterthought, in digital health communication. 
• Resilience: Young people need to feel equipped, not overwhelmed, when sharing health content online. That means providing training, safeguarding, and mental health support for youth creators.

If, in five years, young people are co-leading WHO communication labs, influencing digital platform guidelines, and shaping national mental health plans from the inside out —
I would call that real success.

We were born on social platforms. We want to grow up informed, resilient, and healthy. Let us lead the way toward a better internet, one where health information is trusted, clear, and built for everyone, not just the loudest voices.

As Texas schools face at least $600 million in federal funding cuts, multiple mental health programs, particularly those implemented in response to the pandemic and mass shootings, are at risk of losing funding.

School programs focused on chronic absenteeism, mental wellness and crisis services that were created in response to the Uvalde school shooting, as well as social workers and counselors, could all be on the chopping block.

Texas schools rely heavily on federal funding to support mental health programs. Data shows that two federal programs that are of being cut or account for 86% of the school mental health funding for more than 2,500 campuses statewide, according to Mental Health America of Greater Houston.

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Bracing also for the impending expiration of COVID-19 relief funding, school districts and advocacy groups this legislative session had pushed for more money through a dedicated funding source for school mental health, but lawmakers did not approve it.

Currently, such funding is combined with school safety in the so-called school safety allotment in the state school funding formula, and school districts tend to prioritize the allotment on school security.

“I don’t want to get into a situation where I am asking, do I hire a police officer or do I hire a counselor? I want them both,” said Adrian Johnson, superintendent for the Hearne school district.

The funding cuts and lack of progress on getting a statewide dedicated funding stream for mental health comes at a time when g. The special legislative session starts July 21, but Gov. Greg Abbott has not assigned school mental health as a directive to lawmakers.

The funding crisis

Created in response to Uvalde, the federal helps fund two grant programs in Texas, the and the . The former implements mental health training and support in 60 high-needs districts and the latter helps 98 public school districts with case management tools that identify struggling students, as well as mental health personnel.

Almost three years later, the Safer Communities Act is losing over $1 billion spread across the country. Funds that were supposed to last until 2027 are expected to dry up by the end of this year.

This cut puts programs like , which deploys evidence-based mental health resources in three Central Texas school districts, at risk. The state homed in on those school districts because of their higher rates of community impacts from the pandemic and high rates of population growth.

The cut to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is just one in a series of proposed changes to federal funding for public education that will impact how mental health is addressed in schools.

According to an analysis from the , the freezing of five other federal programs that support public schools are expected to result in the withholding of approximately $600 million from Texas, more than 16.1% of the state’s federal K-12 funding. These funds have been used for a variety of services such as English language instruction and literacy, but also after school programs and summer programs focused on mental wellness.

Medicaid and CHIP are also facing cuts in the federal spending bill passed earlier this month, and both provide each year to school districts and local mental health authorities, enabling them to hire and retain mental health providers, offer preventive mental health screenings, and support students with disabilities using specialized services.

Separately, COVID-19 funds are set to expire this year t, forcing some smaller schools to lay off staff or find alternative ways to keep the social workers and counselors hired during the pandemic.

The confluence of these cuts come as Texas lawmakers missed opportunities to properly fund school mental health this year.

During the legislative session that ended in June, Texas lawmakers agreed on a robust that adds $8.5 billion to the state’s public school system. However, most of it has been earmarked for teacher pay; with roughly $250 million being set aside for school support staff and mental health support staff are not necessarily included in the pay raise.

Over 70% of the schools that sustainable funding for school-based mental health staff and professional school counselors was the main barrier to having adequate resources to address student mental health needs, according to a survey of 2,690 schools by the .

“We are hopeful that this will translate to more dollars for mental health. But without any legislation currently earmarking those dollars, that is not a guarantee,” Rebecca Fowler, the director of public policy and government affairs at Mental Health America of Greater Houston, said about the new school funding.

In 2023, wrote to the Texas Legislature, urging the creation and funding of a separate “student mental health allotment” because programs were not reaching enough students.

Only 13% of schools used the school safety allotment for mental health supports, according to the

by Rep. , D-Dallas, attempted to secure dedicated mental health funds, but it did not pass this year.

“Uncertainty around different funding streams makes it hard to navigate these conversations about the future of mental health and young people,” said Kate Murphy, director of child protection policy for Texans Care for Children.

Changing conversations

After the devastating school shootings in Uvalde and Santa Fe compelled lawmakers to prioritize mental health, such support has waned in the last few years. Mental health advocates have pointed the blame at the culture war happening in the Capitol, namely that lawmakers have suggested mental health programs in schools are diagnosing children and reinforcing LGBTQ identities without parental consent.

For example, by Sen. , R-Brenham, would have required parental consent for any psychological or psychiatric examination, testing, or treatment conducted on a student by a school employee. The bill had eight senators as sponsors, and although it died in the less conservative Texas House, it demonstrates the shift in the legislative conversation surrounding school mental health.

“I don’t think there is a uniform understanding of the role of behavioral health in public schools. Who should be providing support? When should support happen?” Seth Winick, director of the , said.

Johnson, the Hearne superintendent, said he understands parents’ concerns but says schools are the best place to address mental health issues for Texas families who might not have the income or time to schedule mental health services. Until a better solution is proposed, school mental health needs support, he said.

“We have students pre-K through 12 sitting in the school system for 180 plus days a year, and we should take advantage of that by not only giving them a strong educational foundation but a strong mental health foundation,” he said.

What does the future hold?

Without federal funding support, school districts will have to get creative in addressing mental wellness within their walls.

Johnson said his school district is focusing on partnerships not only with local mental health authorities and health agencies, but also with other school districts. He said his district shares staff and cut costs by joining in on a special education cooperative with four other districts and can be modeled in other parts of the state.

“We have 700 kids, a neighboring district might have 600 kids, and another district may have 150; we have to learn to work together to help lower some of the costs during these budget cuts.”

Collaboration is necessary, Johnson said, but even that is at risk under current funding restrictions.

Some schools are unable to expand partnerships with programs like , which directly works with students to provide mental health support and address chronic absenteeism.

“CIS is currently serving two campuses in our district, but we would definitely expand to have CIS serve all of our campuses if we had a state funded allotment that would help the district provide the matching funding that is needed to partner with CIS,” Chris Smith, superintendent of the Brownfield school district, said. “We just don’t have the funding available.”

Rural and smaller schools also face laying off social workers and psychologists hired during the pandemic and eliminating programs to ensure they can retain teachers through raises instead.

“We are adopting a budget this year that’s probably going to have a $2 million deficit. We are dedicated to making sure mental health services are available and luckily have been able to sustain through partnerships, but it has been tough times with the economy, and schools are struggling to keep up with costs,” Smith said.

The endless loop of putting mental health on the back burner until tragedy hits is unsustainable, according to education advocates, who say it’s time for funding dedicated to school mental health.

“I would like to have funding similar to what they said with police officers. You have to have a police officer on every campus, but that costs money yearly, and they provide. We should be doing the same with social workers and psychologists,” Johnson said.

Disclosure: Texans Care for Children 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 .

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

Will they have setbacks without the structure and resources that many schools provide, like healthy lunches and guidance counselors? Will they spend more time than usual on their phone? Will they get enough sleep? Too much? 

Raising kids in these modern times means grappling with countless questions, many of which intensify around this time of year.

As parents, it’s our job to keep our kids safe and happy, and that can feel like a tall order at a time when the state of youth mental health is declining. The shows that two in five high school students reported feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness, and one in five seriously considered attempting suicide. We must look at these somber numbers not as a data set, but as an urgent call to action. 

According to from the Coalition to Empower our Future –- an organization  we help lead –- parents across the country are worried about the state of youth mental health. Nearly 60% consider it “very or somewhat poor,” and only one in four believe it will be better in the next six months. This is not the future that we should settle on for our kids.

Luckily, there’s a promising starting point for tackling the youth mental health challenge, and it begins with using a broad lens. To have a chance at improving things for our children, we need to consider the many factors that impact their mental health.

We know each child’s experience and situation is different. This is true even across different kids in the same households. Competitive sports may provide a healthy outlet for one but may overwhelm another. The child in rural Texas facing food and housing insecurity will have different anxieties than the child in Los Angeles being bullied at school. One teen may suffer from too much time on social media, while on those same platforms, his brother may find a meaningful community that makes him feel less alone. 

So, it makes sense that parents surveyed in our coalition’s research see youth mental health as a complex and multifaceted issue. As one parent in Texas put it, “Even if you find a solution, it may work for a little while or for some children, but then if anxiety or a new issue crops up, then you may have to find a different solution. [The approach] has to stay pretty fluid.” We surveyed 2,320 parents in April, including 600 each in California, Texas and New York.

Furthermore, nearly eight in 10 people surveyed believe a comprehensive approach to tackling the youth mental health challenge is better than a narrow one focused on one singular cause, such as phones and similar devices. As former public servants, we know that overly narrow solutions can’t solve such complex problems effectively. And as parents, we also know that what may work for one child, family or community may not work for another. 

Parents aren’t the only ones who see a comprehensive approach as the best means of addressing youth mental health challenges. In a separate of more than 1,400 clinicians, the majority said there isn’t one simple solution to the youth mental health challenge and urged policymakers to make multiple investments and reforms to solve it.

We must meet this issue’s nuance with an equally nuanced mindset for problem-solving. That requires a serious dialogue about how we support parents and kids in navigating these challenges.

Despite a difficult environment, many parents are doing their best to serve as safe spaces and advocates for their kids. Our coalition’s research shows that they rely on a broad range of resources and people — mental health professionals, family members, friends, religious organizations and teachers — to help them support their children’s mental health. Schools are an essential part of this effort. We need increased collaboration among parents, community leaders, educators, and policymakers to better support our kids. 

Parents are understandably frustrated by how challenging it is to find the right tools and resources to support their kids, and they want youth mental health to be more affordable and accessible. Communities must identify ways to increase access to care through multiple avenues like telehealth, group sessions, community-based care, and more. We can’t solve this problem without every voice at the table.

As partners in a coalition working to convene a broad conversation about youth mental health, we see the power of bringing disparate perspectives together to discuss the challenge from a variety of angles. Our coalition includes organizations focused on afterschool programs, media literacy, mental and physical health conditions, homelessness, LGBTQ youth, Jewish families and child welfare, among others. 

As former public servants and parents ourselves, we know there is a widespread and bipartisan consensus around the urgency of solving this generational challenge.

We have a chance to make meaningful change – we should take it. Our kids deserve the very best. 

 The three authors serve on the board of directors of the Coalition to Empower our Future.

The Supreme Court on Monday allowed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to move ahead with firing more than 1,300 employees at the U.S. Department of Education as the Trump administration aims to eliminate the federal agency. 

While the states that sued and the government’s lawyers will continue to argue the case in the lower courts, McMahon said the opinion shows that the president “has the ultimate authority to make decisions about staffing levels, administrative organization and day-to-day operations of federal agencies.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, dissented with the ruling.

“As Congress mandated, the department plays a vital role in this nation’s education system, safeguarding equal access to learning and channeling billions of dollars to schools and students across the country each year,” Sotomayor wrote. “When the executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it.”

When a white teacher at Decatur High School used the , students walked out and marched in protest. But Reyes Le wanted to do more.

Until he graduated from the Atlanta-area school this year, he co-led its equity team. He organized walking tours devoted to Decatur’s history as a thriving community of freed slaves after the Civil War. Stops included a statue of civil rights leader , which replaced a Confederate monument, and a historical marker recognizing the site where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was for driving with an out-of-state license.

But Le feared his efforts would collapse in the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion. An existing state law against “divisive concepts” meant students already had to get parent permission to go on the tour. Then the district threw out two non-discrimination policies April 15. 

“I felt that the work we were doing wouldn’t be approved going into the future,” Le said.

Decatur got snared by the U.S. Department of Education’s to pull millions of dollars in federal funding from states and districts that employed DEI policies. In response, several organizations sued the department, calling its guidance vague and in violation of constitutional provisions that favor local control. Within weeks, three federal judges, including one Trump appointee, Education Secretary Linda McMahon from enforcing the directives, and Decatur promptly .

The reversal offers a glimpse into the courts’ role in thwarting — or at least slowing down — the Trump education juggernaut. States, districts, unions, civil rights groups and parents sued McMahon, and multiple courts the department skirted the law in slashing funding and staff. But some observers say the administration is playing a long game and may view such losses as temporary setbacks.

“The administration’s plan is to push on multiple fronts to test the boundaries of what they can get away with,” said Jeffrey Henig, a professor emeritus of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. “Cut personnel, but if needed, add them back later. What’s gained? Possible intimidation of ‘deep state’ employees and a chance to hire people that will be ‘a better fit.’ ”

A recent example of boundary testing: The administration nearly $7 billion for education the president already approved in March.

But the move is practically lifted from the pages of , the right-wing blueprint for Trump’s second term. In that document, Russ Vought, now Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, argues that presidents must “handcuff the bureaucracy” and that the Constitution for the White House to spend everything Congress appropriated.  

The administration blames Democrats for playing the courts. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller “radical rogue judges” of getting in the president’s way. 

The end result is often administrative chaos, leaving many districts unable to make routine purchases and displaced staff unsure whether to move on with their lives. 

While the outcome in the lower courts has been mixed, the Supreme Court — which has on much of Trump’s agenda — is expected any day to weigh in on the president’s biggest prize: whether McMahon can permanently cut half the department’s staff. 

In that case, 21 Democratic attorneys general and coalition of districts and unions sued to prevent the administration from taking a giant step toward eliminating the department.

“Everything about defunding and dismantling by the administration is in judicial limbo,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. As a supporter of eliminating the department, he lamented the “If the Supreme Court allows mass layoffs, though, I would expect more energy to return to shrinking the department.”

The odds of that increased last week when the that mass firings at other agencies could remain in effect as the parties argue the case in the lower courts.

While the lawsuits over the Education Department are separate, Johnathan Smith, chief of staff and general counsel at the National Center for Youth Law, said the ruling is “clearly not a good sign.” His case, filed in May, focuses on cuts specifically to the department’s Office for Civil Rights, but the argument is essentially the same: The administration overstepped its authority when it gutted the department without congressional approval.

Solicitor General John Sauer, in to the Supreme Court, said the states had no grounds to sue and called any fears the department couldn’t make do with a smaller staff merely “speculative.”

Even if the Supreme Court rules in McMahon’s favor, its opinion won’t affect previous rulings and other lawsuits in progress against the department.

Here’s where some of those key legal battles stand:

COVID relief funds

McMahon stunned states in late March when she said they would no longer receive more than $2 billion in reimbursements for COVID-related expenses. States would have to make a fresh case for how their costs related to the pandemic, even though the department had already approved extensions for construction projects, summer learning and tutoring. 

On June 3, a federal judge in Maryland from pulling the funds.

Despite the judicial order, not all states have been paid.

The Maryland Department of Education still had more than $400 million to spend. Cherie Duvall-Jones, a spokeswoman, said the agency hasn’t received any reimbursements even though it provided the “necessary documentation and information” federal officials requested. 

The cancellation forced Baltimore City schools to dip into a to avoid disrupting tutoring and summer school programs.

Madison Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, declined to comment on why it had yet to pay Maryland or how much the department has distributed to other states since June.

Mass firings

In the administration’s push to wind down the department, McMahon admits she still needs staff to complete what she calls her “final mission.” On May 21, she told a House appropriations subcommittee that she had rehired 74 people. Biedermann wouldn’t say whether that figure has grown, and referred a reporter to the .

“You hope that you’re just cutting fat,” McMahon testified. “Sometimes you cut a little in the muscle.” 

The next day, a federal district court her to also reinstate the more than 1,300 employees she fired in March, about half of the department’s workforce. Updating the court on progress, Chief of Staff Rachel Oglesby said in a that she’s still reviewing survey responses from laid off staffers and figuring out where they would work if they return.

But some call the department’s to bring back employees lackluster, perhaps because it’s pinning its hopes on a victory before the Supreme Court. 

“This is a court that’s been fairly aggressive in overturning lower court decisions,” said Smith, with the National Center for Youth Law. 

His group’s lawsuit is one of two challenging cuts to the Office for Civil Rights, which lost nearly 250 staffers and seven regional offices. They argue the cuts have left the department unable to thoroughly investigate complaints. Of the 5,164 civil rights complaints since March, OCR has dismissed 3,625, Oglesby .

In a case brought by the Victim Rights Law Center, a Massachusetts-based advocacy organization, a federal district court McMahon to reinstate OCR employees. 

Even if the case is not reversed on appeal, there’s another potential problem: Not all former staffers are eager to return.

“I have applied for other jobs, but I’d prefer to have certainty about my employment with OCR before making a transition,” said Andy Artz, who was a supervising attorney in OCR’s New York City office until the layoffs. “I feel committed to the mission of the agency and I’d like to be part of maintaining it if reinstated.”

DEI

An aspect of that mission, nurtured under the Biden administration, was to discourage discipline policies that result in higher suspension and expulsion rates for minority students. A warned that discrimination in discipline could have “devastating long-term consequences on students and their future opportunities.”

But according to the department’s , efforts to reduce those gaps or raise achievement among Black and Hispanic students could fall under its definition of “impermissible” DEI practices. Officials demanded that states sign a form certifying compliance with their interpretation of the law. On April 24, three federal courts ruled that for now, the department can’t pull funding from states that didn’t sign. The department also had to temporarily shut down a website designed to gather public complaints about DEI practices. 

The cases, which McMahon has asked the courts to dismiss, will continue through the summer. In court records, the administration’s lawyers say the groups’ arguments are weak and that districts like Decatur simply overreacted. In an example cited in a complaint brought by the NAACP, the Waterloo Community School District in Iowa responded to the federal guidance by of a statewide “read-In” for Black History Month. About 3,500 first graders were expected to participate in the virtual event featuring Black authors and illustrators. 

The department said the move reflected a misunderstanding of the guidance. “Withdrawing all its students from the read-In event appears to have been a drastic overreaction by the school district and disconnected from a plain reading of the … documents,” the department said.

Desegregation 

The administration’s DEI crackdown has left many schools confused about how to teach seminal issues of American history such as the Civil Rights era.

It was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that established “desegregation centers” across the country to help districts implement court-ordered integration. 

In 2022, the Biden administration awarded $33 million in grants to what are now called equity assistance centers. But Trump’s department views such work as inseparable from DEI. When it cancelled funding to the centers, it described them as “woke” and “divisive.”

Judge Paul Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, a Clinton appointee, disagreed. He blocked McMahon from pulling roughly $4 million from the Southern Education Foundation, which houses Equity Assistance Center-South and helped finance Brown v. Board of Education over 70 years ago. His order referenced President Dwight Eisenhower and southern judges who took the ruling seriously.

“They could hardly have imagined that some future presidential administration would hinder efforts by organizations like SEF — based on some misguided understanding of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ — to fulfill Brown’s constitutional promise to students across the country to eradicate the practice of racial segregation.”

He said the center is likely to win its argument that canceling the grant was “arbitrary and capricious.”

Raymond Pierce, Southern Education Foundation president and CEO, said when he applied for the grant to run one of the centers, he emphasized its historical significance.

“My family is from Mississippi, so I remember seeing a ‘colored’ entrance sign on the back of the building as we pulled into my mother’s hometown for the holidays,” Pierce said. 

Trump’s Justice Department many of the remaining 130 desegregation orders across the South. Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, has said the orders force districts to spend money on monitoring and data collection and that it’s time to “let people off the hook” for past discrimination.

But Eshé Collins, director of Equity Assistance Center-South, said the centers are vital because their services are free to districts.

“Some of these cases haven’t had any movement,” she said. “Districts are like ‘Well, we can’t afford to do this work.’ That’s why the equity assistance center is so key.”

Her center, for example, works with the in Tennessee to recruit more Black teachers and ensure minority students get an equal chance to enroll in advanced classes. The system is still under a desegregation order from 1965, but is on track to meet the terms set by the court next year, Collins said. A week after Friedman issued the injunction in the foundation’s case, Ruth Ryder, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for policy and programs, told Collins she could once again access funds and her work resumed.

Research

As they entered the Department of Education in early February, one of the first moves made by staffers of the Department of Government Efficiency was to terminate nearly $900 million in research contracts awarded through the Institute for Education Sciences. Three lawsuits say the cuts seriously hinder efforts to conduct high-quality research on schools and students.

Kevin Gee from the University of California, Davis, was among those hit. He was in the middle of producing a practice guide for the nation on chronic absenteeism, which continues to exceed pre-pandemic levels in all states. In a , the American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus said the pandemic “took this crisis to unprecedented levels” that “warrant urgent and sustained attention.” Last year’s rate stood at nearly 24% nationally — still well above the 15% before the pandemic.

Gee was eager to fully grasp the impact of the pandemic on K-3 students. Even though young children didn’t experience school closures, many missed out on preschool and have in social and academic skills.

Westat, the contractor for the project, employed 350 staffers to collect data from more than 860 schools and conduct interviews with children about their experiences. But DOGE halted the midstream — after the department had already invested about $44 million of a $100 million contract.

“The data would’ve helped us understand, for the first time, the educational well-being of our nation’s earliest learners on a nationwide scale in the aftermath of the pandemic,” he said. 

The department has no plans to resurrect the project, according to a June . But there are other signs it is walking back some of DOGE’s original cuts. For example, it intends to reissue contracts for regional education labs, which work with districts and states on school improvement. 

“It feels like the legal pressure has succeeded, in the sense that the Department of Education is starting up some of this stuff again,” said Cara Jackson, a past president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy, which filed one of the lawsuits. “I think … there’s somebody at the department who is going through the legislation and saying, ‘Oh, we actually do need to do this.’ ”

Mental health grants 

Amid the legal machinations, even some Republicans are losing patience with McMahon’s moves to freeze spending Congress already appropriated.  

In April, she terminated $1 billion in mental health grants approved as part of a 2022 law that followed the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The department told grantees, without elaboration, that the funding no longer aligns with the administration’s policy of “prioritizing merit, fairness and excellence in education” and undermines “the students these programs are intended to help.”

The secretary told Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley in June that she would the grants, but some schools don’t want to wait. Silver Consolidated Schools in New Mexico, which lost $6 million when the grant was discontinued, sued her on June 20th. Sixteen Democrat-led states filed a second later that month.

The funds, according to , allowed it to hire seven mental health professionals and contract with two outside counseling organizations. With the extra resources, the district saw bullying reports decline by 30% and suspensions drop by a third, according to the district’s complaint. Almost 500 students used a mental health app funded by the grant.

A judge has yet to rule in either case, but Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and other members of a bipartisan task force are that she’ll open a new competition for the funds. 

“These funds were never intended to be a theoretical exercise — they were designed to confront an urgent crisis affecting millions of children,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement. “With youth mental health challenges at an all-time high, any disruption or diversion of resources threatens to reverse hard-won progress and leave communities without critical supports.”

In Florida, in elementary and middle schools, from bell to bell, recently sailed through the state Legislature.

Gov. Ron  on May 30, 2025. The same bill calls for high schools in six Florida districts to adopt the ban during the upcoming school year and produce a report on its effectiveness by Dec. 1, 2026.

But in the debate over whether phones in K-12 schools – and – .

We are experts in and who in Florida in November and December 2024 to learn how they’re using digital media and the role tech plays in their lives at home and at school. Their responses were insightful – and occasionally surprising.

Adults generally cite four reasons to ban phone use during school: to improve kids’ mental health, to strengthen academic outcomes, to reduce and to help limit kids’ overall screen time.

But as our survey shows, it may be a bit much to expect a cellphone ban to accomplish all of that.

What do kids want?

Some of the questions in our survey shine light on kids’ feelings toward banning cellphones – even though we didn’t ask that question directly.

We asked them if they feel relief when they’re in a situation where they can’t use their smartphone, and 31% said yes.

Additionally, 34% of kids agreed with the statement that social media causes more harm than good.

And kids were 1.5 to 2 times more likely to agree with those statements if they attended schools where phones are banned or confiscated for most of the school day, with use only permitted at certain times. That group covered 70% of the students we surveyed because many individual schools or in Florida have already limited students’ cellphone use.

How students use cellphones matters

Some “power users” of cellphone apps could likely use a break from them.

Twenty percent of children we surveyed said — that is, notifications from apps that pop up on the phone’s screen — are never turned off. These notifications are likely coming from the most popular apps kids reported using, like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

This 20% of children was roughly three times more likely to report experiencing anxiety than kids who rarely or never have their notifications on.

They were also nearly five times more likely to report earning mostly D’s and F’s in school than kids whose notifications are always or sometimes off.

Our survey results also suggest phone bans would likely have positive effects on grades and mental health among some of the heaviest screen users. For example, 22% of kids reported using their favorite app for six or more hours per day. These students were three times more likely to report earning mostly D’s and F’s in school than kids who spend an hour or less on their favorite app each day.

They also were six times more likely than hour-or-less users to report severe depression symptoms. These insights remained even after ruling out numerous other possible explanations for the difference — like age, household income, gender, parent’s education, race and ethnicity.

Banning students’ access to phones at school means these kids would not receive notifications for at least that seven-hour period and have fewer hours in the day to use apps.

Phones and mental health

However, other data we collected suggests that bans aren’t a universal benefit for all children.

Seventeen percent of kids who attend schools that ban or confiscate phones report severe depression symptoms, compared with just 4% among kids who keep their phones with them during the school day.

This finding held even after we ruled out other potential explanations for what we were seeing, such as the type of school students attend and other demographic factors.

We are not suggesting that our survey shows phone bans cause mental health problems.

It is possible, for instance, that the schools where kids already were struggling with their mental health simply happened to be the ones that have banned phones. Also, our survey didn’t ask kids how long phones have been banned at their schools. If the bans just launched, there may be positive effects on mental health or grades yet to come.

In order to get a better sense of the bans’ effects on mental health, we would need to examine mental health indicators before and after phone bans.

To get a long-term view on this question, we are planning to do a nationwide survey of digital media use and mental health, starting with 11- to 13-year-olds and tracking them into adulthood.

Even with the limitations of our data from this survey, however, we can conclude that banning phones in schools is unlikely to be an immediate solution to mental health problems of kids ages 11-13.

Grades up, cyberbullying down

Students at schools where phones are barred or confiscated didn’t report earning higher grades than children at schools where kids keep their phones.

This finding held for students at both private and public schools, and even after ruling out other possible explanations like differences in gender and household income, since .

There are limits to our findings here: Grades are not a perfect measure of learning, and they’re not standardized across schools. It’s possible that kids at phone-free schools are in fact learning more than those at schools where kids carry their phones around during school hours – even if they earn the same grades.

We asked kids how often in the past three months they’d experienced mistreatment online – like being called hurtful names or having lies or rumors spread about them. Kids at schools where phone use is limited during school hours actually reported enduring more cyberbullying than children at schools with less restrictive policies. This result persisted even after we considered smartphone ownership and numerous demographics as possible explanations.

We are not necessarily saying that cellphone bans cause an increase in cyberbullying. What could be at play here is that at schools where cyberbullying has been particularly bad, phones have been banned or are confiscated, and online bullying still occurs.

But based on our survey results, it does not appear that school phone bans prevent cyberbullying.

Overall, our findings suggest that banning phones in schools may not be an easy fix for students’ mental health problems, poor academic performance or cyberbullying.

That said, kids might benefit from phone-free schools in ways that we have not explored, like increased attention spans or reduced eyestrain.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .