This week I was connecting with a friend and former colleague, discussing the struggles within one of the local school districts. This is a large urban district that was struggling prior to the pandemic and now is barely keeping its head above water. And at what cost?

Even the students who are very attentive and respond promptly with every request may be responding this way as a learned response from trauma. You may be very pleased with these types of students but you may not be aware of the anxiety or fear they are harboring based on a traumatic experience in their life. This child could be conditioned to make the adults around them happy because they may live with an alcoholic parent who becomes verbally and/or physically aggressive when they don’t comply.

The year begins promising and you believe this is it and things are going to start clicking for your child. Then as predicted the concerns arise like a load of bricks falling from the sky.

Educators continue to be placed in an impossible position. As I have stated in previous posts, our education system is in massive need of an overhaul and should not solely lie on the shoulders of the educators. We are asking and requiring educators to meet an insurmountable task and have to acknowledge the stress and pressure that causes. This will and has led to burnout.

When a student continues to struggle with things like day-to-day readiness in the form of understanding their assignment notebook or assignments and homework within google classroom, have we assessed or reviewed why this keeps occurring?

We also need to recognize that some of our most vulnerable students have been “lost” during the pandemic. The United States has approximately 50 million students who attend public schools and of those, around 3 million continue to be unaccounted for since the pandemic began.