Practicing gratitude. Breathwork. Talk therapy.
These are some of the strategies Long Beach Unified is embracing as it seeks to help students cope with a two-year-old pandemic that has caused immense disruption in education and beyond, among other stressors.
Mental health is definitely a crisis among local students—the U.S. Surgeon General in December issued an advisory to that effect—but Michael Gray, supervisor of a health care center at Poly High, said that’s not entirely new: “I maintain that it’s been a crisis.”
In 2018, LBUSD began establishing Family Resource Centers to provide counseling and referrals to outside resources, and there are now 32 of them on campuses in the district. Students can be referred by a parent, administrator, teacher or themselves.
In the first academic year of 2018-2019, 548 students were referred to FRCs; the following year that jumped to 771 referrals.
During the pandemic years of 2020-2021 and 2021-2022, 448 and 504 students were referred, respectively. It isn’t clear whether the decline was related to students not being on campus for parts of those years, LBUSD spokesman Chris Eftychiou said.
Gray, a teacher who supervises the Counseling, Assistance, Resource & Education (CARE) Center at Poly, said he opens the doors to the center around 7:30 a.m., and helps between 10-20 students a day.
Students are experiencing a variety of obstacles, he said, from grieving over a COVID-related death to breakups or feeling overwhelmed by school. Many of these issues, Gray said, often result in anxiety and/or depression.
Lesly, a 16-year-old junior at Cabrillo High School who requested the Post not use her last name, said she became uncomfortable in classrooms filled with other students after in person-learning returned.
LBUSD first closed all its schools on March 16, 2020, and distance learning began days later on March 23, 2020. After a year of following stay-at-home orders, elementary students began returning to classrooms in late March 2021, with the last cohort of students, those in grades 9-11, returning on April 26, 2021.
“I used to be a very sociable person, and after we had to go to virtual learning and we had to distance from everybody, I think that really affected me,” Lesly said. “I think I started to accumulate social anxiety.”
She said she sought help from a school psychologist almost every day for an hour, and “I realized that I was feeling better.”
LBUSD developed a detailed post-pandemic plan to support students in the aftermath of COVID-19 that included “social-emotional well-being,” with specific curriculum and goals expected by the end of this school year. Some of the strategies include added services for homeless students, foster youth, substance abuse and mental health.
“We know that the ongoing pandemic is impacting the wellbeing of our students and our families, and we are devoting more resources to these issues, both in the classroom and beyond,” Eftychiou said via email.
At the high school level, for example, the plan would provide a safe place on campus where students can get social-emotional support during the school day such as receiving counseling and access to other wellness resources, according to the plan.
“Some of our latest efforts include the hiring of 400 certificated staff, including teachers, counselors and social workers,” Eftychiou said.
The CARE Center at Poly, which is separate from the FRCs, sees about 1,500 students annually. Poly was the first to have its CARE Center in the ‘90s, followed by Jordan about five years ago, with the remainder established over the past year, according to the district.
Students are using the available staff to help with their mental health, and for Gray, “it feels very overwhelming.”
At the very least, the issues surrounding mental health are being discussed more openly.
“People have suffered silently way more than they do now, and we’re still barely scratching the surface of helping folks,” Gray said.