When the Eaton and Palisades fires raged through Los Angeles, home of the second-largest school district in the country, they took lives and turned thousands of homes to ash, causing billions of dollars in damage.
Much of the devastation was immediate and visible. But some scars will emerge slowly and last for years to come.
A subtly pernicious one? Fear.
The fires further frustrated student learning when schools are still struggling to recover from the pandemic. Students in LA were forced back to online learning. After an executive order pausing residential requirements for enrollment in schools in the state, a nearby district even shut its doors to displaced students, arguing that it would be too costly to add them to classroom rolls.
Natural disasters like wildfires are becoming more frequent and devastating. It’s added to the list of challenges many students have to overcome. And over time, this threatens to exaggerate inequalities in learning for those students. In all, the fires disrupted school for 725,000 students, disproportionately affecting Hispanic students, English-learners and other disadvantaged students, according to a recent report.
But for some children, schools can help with recovery from the psychological strain that disasters cause.
School can create a safe haven, a reprieve for students from the stress of the outside world, says Vivien Villaverde, an associate teaching professor at the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work at the University of Southern California. Villaverde — a former social worker for Los Angeles Unified School District — is among those who argue that schools need proactive, trauma-informed safety protocols more than ever. She believes that more approaches to mental health, focused on catching students early, will help keep students tuned into class.
Some students have never needed so much mental health support so obviously as they do now. But with a federal administration fervently slashing expenditures to both education and to disaster preparation and relief, can schools provide needed care?
‘Psychological First Aid’
In her work helping schools to build more robust mental health services, it dawned on Villaverde that it wasn’t enough to train staff to intervene when a student is in the midst of a mental health crisis. Instead, she wanted to prepare staff within schools to notice earlier when a student is in more mild distress, catching it before it escalates.
For students and teachers, fear threatens to derail learning. Small events can set off alarm bells for those who have undergone trauma, Villaverde says. Even little, everyday occurrences can set off the fear centers of the brain, she says. The sound of a car’s screeching brakes filtering through an open window can cause fear in a student who was in a recent car accident. The smell of a janitor burning compost can remind another of a devastating fire, she adds.
After California's recent fires, her organization, Center for Safe and Resilient Schools and Workplaces, trained educators in Pasadena Unified School District, and volunteers from the Los Angeles County Office of Education, in “psychological first aid,” a disaster response adapted for schools to deal with the lingering psychological pain after a tragedy. The district had already invested in trauma-informed approaches before the tragedy, but the fires pushed them to strengthen their intervention strategies, according to Villaverde.
Of course, educators are compassionate and want to help students and know when they are struggling, Villaverde says. But without formal training, it’s difficult to grasp how trauma hinders learning. It can lead to a student’s inability to regulate their emotions being mislabeled as behavioral problems. Students themselves might not fully comprehend what’s happening inside their heads. It’s important for the adults within the school to pause, and ask what’s going on. It lets them offer immediate help, such as giving the student a minute in a corner to soothe the stress response, she says.
The goal is for students to feel connected with an adult at the school, Villaverde says. That affords them a chance to calm down before it becomes necessary to bring in school counselors or mental health staff. This approach ultimately helps to create a school environment where students feel safe, and also minimizes the number of students who end up needing more intensive care, she adds.
Villaverde says that the schools she interacts with increasingly realize the need for proactive mental health care. Absenteeism experts have also suggested that strong relationships are crucial to making sure students continue to show up to class, particularly after the rise in chronic absenteeism and student anxiety following the pandemic. But it’s unclear how much cash schools around the country will have to pay for trauma-support services in an era when districts are eager to cut costs.
The Costs of Care
Since the pandemic, schools have rushed to bring in more mental health professionals.
But many districts haven’t reached the recommended ratios of school psychologists, counselors or social workers. Without access to enough support staff, districts sometimes only provide services in the aftermath of a crisis or to special education students, according to experts.
The discrepancies between what experts recommend and what schools have can be big. For instance, professional organizations argue that schools need to maintain a school psychologist for every 500 students, before the quality of mental health services dwindles. But the national average is 1,065 students to every school psychologist. And the reality varies widely by place. California, where the Palisades and Eaton fires occurred, is relatively close to the recommended standard — and also has a large number of graduate programs, meant to train new school psychologists. But the shortage is more drastic in some other states.
For school counselors, it’s similar. Professional organizations recommend that schools have a school counselor for every 250 students, but the national average for 2023-2024 was below that. Few states have achieved that ratio. For instance, Arizona has one school counselor for every 645 students.
It’s not that school leaders don’t want to provide mental health services to students. But the lack of staff, and now federal fiscal uncertainty, can thwart that ambition.
Although federal investments boosted schools’ mental health services in recent years, districts find themselves in a tough spot, with key federal grants used by schools to supply mental health services thrown into question.
Some schools are also still reeling from the decision to rip away deadline extensions on federal pandemic relief funding. Even though districts can apply for re-approval for extensions, that doesn’t alleviate the chaos, according to Lakeisha Steele, vice president of policy for the nonprofit Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. District budgets show that they have already inked contracts and committed money for student services, she added.
Federal dollars comprise a seemingly small percentage of the overall K-12 spending, yet it is crucial for schools’ ability to offer mental health services, experts say. And ultimately, since a lot of federal funds are directed at low-income students, schools with lots of those students will be most affected, they warn.
The pell-mell is already causing trouble.
School districts are not filling mental health support vacancies and now have to cut professional development, says Kelly Vaillancourt Strobach, the director of policy and advocacy for the National Association of School Psychologists. This, too, differs by place. Some states have planned to continue with business as usual despite the uncertainty, but others — especially those heavily reliant on federal money — are preparing for the worst, Strobach says. It’s even possible that some staff will get cut as districts shuffle to adjust, she adds.
Some services have already ceased.
For instance, an entire professional development series — available for free to educators and families across South Dakota — was terminated “out of nowhere” following the changes to federal pandemic relief funds, according to Strobach.
It’s potentially devastating for students.
With schools seeing greater need for mental health services at the same time students will have reduced access to these services. “I hope it’s not a vicious cycle,” Strobach says.