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Oct 17, 2024

Suicide threats. Kids flipping furniture. Evacuated classrooms. The student mental health crisis is taking its toll on Rhode Island schools

In the next couple of days, the Rhode Island Department of Education will take an extraordinary step in its attempt to address what superintendents, principals, and teachers are calling the biggest

In the next couple of days, the Rhode Island Department of Education will take an extraordinary step in its attempt to address what superintendents, principals, and teachers are calling the biggest crisis facing students and families right now.

No, I’m not talking about poor test scores or high absenteeism rates. Those are merely symptoms of the actual problem:

The fragile mental health of our children.

The state has reached an agreement with California-based Hazel Health to offer free telehealth services to all public school students and their families in Rhode Island for at least the next year, part of an effort to provide mental health support in a faster, more efficient way.

Details are still being finalized, but Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green worked with former US representative Patrick Kennedy, one of the nation’s leading mental health advocates, to bring Hazel Health to the state. The company, which bills itself as “the nation’s leading K-12 telehealth provider,” is offering its services free of charge this year, and if the results are anything close to what we’ve seen in other states, Infante-Green said she’ll do everything she can to keep it free to families in the future.

But you don’t need to read a happy quote from Infante-Green or Kennedy or some clinician at Hazel Health.

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You need to know why these services are so desperately needed in Rhode Island.

Last Friday, I sat down with a dozen educators from districts across the state — Burrillville, Cranston, Scituate, Chariho, Johnston, and Woonsocket — to learn firsthand about what they’re experiencing in the schools every single day.

What they’re seeing is a devastating mix of a lack of social skills in students created in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, an addiction to social media, a massive shortage in clinicians and counselors in schools, a scarcity in crucial medicine like Adderall, student placement challenges, and budget cuts to behavior interventionists and other specialists that, when combined, is contributing to a mental health crisis that feels insurmountable.

“I’m not in classrooms as an educational leader anymore, unfortunately,” said Cathy Carvallo, the principal at Pothier-Citizens’ Elementary School in Woonsocket.

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And now?

“Always behavior,” Carvallo said.

The most shocking thing is how similar the stories are from community to community.

Like the elementary school student in one Rhode Island district who became so unregulated while playing with their classmates on an obstacle course that they began charging at other students, hitting adults, and tearing their clothes. The principal at the school was so concerned about the situation that she considered calling 911.

Or another elementary school where leaders had to evacuate three classrooms recently because a student was flipping over classroom furniture, endangering their classmates, and ultimately needed to be physically restrained.

In another school, a child became so irate when they were cut in the lunch line that they hit another student over the head with a lunchbox.

And those are incidents that occurred at elementary schools in different communities just over the last few weeks. We’re not talking about temper tantrums from kids who don’t get their way, these educators say.

“We were watching a mental health crisis,” said Courtney Francis, the principal at Steere Farm Elementary School in Burrillville, when describing an incident that occurred at her school.

As students get older, the challenges can be much larger.

A 2023 survey of Rhode Island youth found more than 20 percent of middle school students and 15.7 percent of high school students said they seriously considered attempting suicide within the previous 12 months. Nearly 30 percent of middle schoolers and 36 percent of high school students said they felt so sad or hopeless over a two-week period that they stopped doing their usual activities.

Johnston Superintendent Bernard DiLullo Jr. said his district contracts with a company that monitors social media activity of students on school computers and they’ve found examples of teenagers searching for ways to commit suicide or getting ideas for how to be violent toward others. There has even been an increase in cutting behavior, he said.

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Mike Hassell, the principal at Scituate High School, and Andrea Drake, who runs Chariho High School, said they’ve seen a spike in threat assessments, with students warning they’re going to harm themselves, others, or their entire school.

“We have eliminated cellphones during instructional time, and it takes that pressure off of kids to respond in the moment to social media,” Drake said. “But don’t get me wrong. It is their lives.”

Near the end of our conversation, I told the educators that I was feeling my own level of anxiety. As optimistic as they were trying to be — “We have to find the wins every day,” Cheri Sacco, the principal at Orchard Farms Elementary School in Cranston said — the reality is things could get worse before they get better.

Budget cuts are devastating districts throughout the country now that federal COVID relief funds are drying up — and the first thing to go is often the extra support. At Carvallo’s school in Woonsocket, that meant dropping from four behavior interventionists last school year to one this year. Providence, the state’s largest school district, has made significant cuts, and is threatening even more later in the school year.

Even when you do secure the money for a new school psychologist or social worker, “You just can’t find the bodies,” Burrillville Superintendent Michael Sollitto said.

Kyle Quadros, who oversees social emotional learning in Woonsocket, put it best:

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“We need more of a paradigm shift in terms of how we’re thinking about an educational ecosystem because keeping the same ecosystem that we had many years ago and just simply trying to add different pieces to it isn’t actually alleviating any of the stress for the adults doing the work,” Quadros said.

Bringing in Hazel Health will be a good first step, but Quadros is right. A broader conversation about the future of education is needed, and the mental health of students should take center stage.

It’s ironic Rhode Island is launching its partnership with Hazel Health the same month it will release another underwhelming round of RICAS test scores. We spend a lot of time worrying about whether students are academically prepared for college and the workforce, but leaving the mental health crisis unchecked could produce much more dire consequences in the future.

Dan McGowan can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @danmcgowan.