PPSD in schools

 PPSD in Schools

 

Last week students at Annapolis High School got into a knife fight in the morning of a school day.  Things were serious enough that two students were hospitalized and seven were arrested for fighting and disrupting the school day.  The school was put on lock down, no one in and no one out of the building.   Parents were advised not to try and pick up their children because they would not be admitted.

What is going on in our schools?  For the last 18 months kids have lived their social lives mainly online.  They have been texting and emailing words and images they might not have done in person.  Now they are in person and back in the school building and many of these inappropriate online behaviors have transferred into the schools.

There are other upticks in inappropriate behaviors.  Kids have shorter tempers than usual.  They are trashing bathrooms, fighting over social media posts and/or running out of classrooms when they are frustrated.   Other children are moving inwards, heads on desks, not talking to others.  Returning to in-person learning means there is much less downtime to recharge and much less flexibility.

Some children in some communities have experienced greater loss from the pandemic.  For economically disadvantaged communities more jobs have been lost and more people in their close circle have died or been very sick.

The chronic stress and anxiety of the pandemic have triggered the “fight or flight” survival aspects of our brains.  Some people will want to retreat and hide away.  Others are on high alert and an infraction like a nudge in the hallway that would usually be ignored becomes a reason for a very big reaction.

Staff are more exhausted as well.   They, too, getting back in buildings where there is more structure and less flexibility than online teaching.  They do not have the energy to keep the tight reins on behavior that they might usually have.

It seems all that talk about socialization skills particularly in the earlier grades is true.  Teachers of young children are reporting socialization skills that are at least two years behind expectation.  Older kids seem to have forgotten how to socialize while younger ones have yet to learn. 

Some students are fearful of catching the virus in schools.

Kids want to be back in school.  School is their place to be with friends, to learn and to have a structure to their lives.  We just need to realize that just opening the schoolhouse isn't going to be easy or enough to manage the post-pandemic stress disorder that kids and staff are suffering.