Report: Majority of public schools saw increase in students seeking mental health services

While news of the coronavirus and its latest mutations has dominated public discourse for the last few years, there’s been another, tangential public health concern simultaneously the nation—an ongoing mental health crisis, especially in K-12 schools.

Across the board, “We’ve seen an increase in students seeking mental health services and in staff voicing concerns about students’ mental health since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which is a part of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. “The pandemic has taken a clear and significant toll on students’ mental health. This snapshot of the pandemic’s mental health impact is critical in informing the need for student mental health services.”

In a recent study published by the national education center, 70 percent of public school administrators surveyed reported an increase in the percentage of their students seeking mental health services. A little more than three-quarters of educators (76 percent) reported noticing an increase in the number of their students exhibiting symptoms such as depression, anxiety and trauma.

“Nearly all (96 percent) public schools reported providing mental health services for their students during the 2021-22 school year,” an explainer about the report’s findings says. But while almost all schools did provide some services, almost half of respondents weren’t confident at all they could meet all of their students’ needs at their current capacity, and “88 percent of public schools did not strongly agree that they could effectively provide mental health services to all students in need.”

As cities and counties move to support districts in their communities, the findings can help guide the response. For example, respondents cited an insufficient number of mental health professionals in their school, lack of access to outside services and inadequate funding as the most important resources that are currently limiting them from helping students more completely.

The findings were extrapolated from the most recent round of the School Pulse Panel, a monthly survey sent to a sampling of approximately 2,400 public elementary, middle, high and combined-grade schools. The cohort was designed to be nationally representative of public schools throughout the nation, with data collected between April 12 and April 26, 2022. A total of 830 schools participated in the April collection.

Given the crisis as outlined by respondents, the three most common ways schools nationwide are moving to meet the needs of students, is by encouraging staff members to help where they’re able to (85 percent), by providing teachers with additional professional development centered on those needs (56 percent) and by creating or expanding existing mental health programs (46 percent). 

Beyond students’s needs, the mental health crisis faced by America’s schools is also being felt by staff members, with more than two-thirds (67 percent) reporting they’ve taken new steps and approaches to address educators’ mental health needs in the last year. The three most common approaches to that end were via proactive outreach (35 percent), professional development that’s focused on mental health (35 percent) and by increasing the amount of time educators have to prepare for lessons plans (32 percent).