Pandemic Impacts on Mental, Physical and Educational Outcomes for American Children: Panel Discussion

KRISTEN BROADY: I know that break was short, and I'm sorry, but I'm also very excited to introduce our panel and moderator. So we have Dr. Shavon Davis Louis, Head of Middle School at the University School of Nashville. Sofoklis Goulas is Fellow at the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. Dr. Donna Simpson Leak, Vice Chair of the Board, Illinois State Board of Education and Superintendent of Community Consolidated School District 168.

Dr. Dana Weiner, who we heard from before and who is rushing, but it's OK. [CHUCKLES] Senior Policy Fellow at Chapin Hall and Director of Children's Behavioral Health Transformation for the state of Illinois. And I've been saying this for weeks and months, but I am excited to introduce Stacey Vanek Smith, Senior Story Editor with Bloomberg.

STACEY VANEK SMITH: Excellent. Thank you so much. This has been such a fascinating day. And I know Kristen had promised that we would be focused on solutions for this last panel, but we're very lucky to have some educators with us right now.

And so before we focus on solutions, which we will do, I did want to talk about-- we've been hearing a lot about all the different stresses and issues caused by the pandemic, from academic to health to social to everything. And I'm wondering, for our educators, what you saw some of the effects of COVID as being and what your experience was like.

SHAVON DAVIS LOUIS: Thank you, Stacey. Definitely saw stressors. I won't downplay that in the least. Some of those stressors included- - yes, we've talked a lot about the learning loss today, and that's definitely something that is prevalent and that we want to own.

But I think about Maslow's. Before a child can learn, all of their needs have to be taken care of. And those were the pressing stressors that I would like to highlight. That mental piece-- you talk about social anxiety, isolation. Those stressors were the outliers that were probably of greater concern over learning loss for me.

Also, other things that have been mentioned today, along with food anxieties, health anxieties. Someone described it earlier-- the school is the hub. The school is the hub of a lot of communities. And when that hub shut down, it exacerbated many stressors.

While learning loss was a detriment, and we saw that, the school that I was at, it wasn't the most prevalent thing. It was very minor in the grand scheme of things. We did not test initially, so we didn't see that initial learning loss. And lots of the recommendations that have been made here were put into place. But the things that really impacted our students more than anything else was that mental health aspect and seeing those pieces.

DONNA SIMPSON LEAK: And I just want to add to that. So I am a superintendent of a school district that's in the south suburbs of Chicago.But I also sit on the State Board of Education for the state of Illinois. So I get to see both lenses.

And so I think one of the things that we really saw was the-- when we moved to online learning, there was such a discrepancy across the state in terms of the access for that for students and in terms of their parents even knowing what to do. And I'll just say, in Illinois, we shut down on Friday afternoon. March 13 of 2020 at 2:30 PM, the governor had a press conference and said, on Monday afternoon, on March 16, you will put everybody home.

And I will also say, the only reason that he didn't shut us down that afternoon is because, with my seat on the State Board, I called the governor's office and said, you can't do that to us. You can't send us home at 2:30 on Friday afternoon without any provisions to be ready for students to be at home.

And watching what happened with our young people-- and my district in particular, we happened to be ready because-- maybe it's just me. I had been watching it on the news for, I don't know, 6, 7, 8 months, and I saw it coming. I kept saying that this is going to come, so let's be ready.

So we already had set up social workers who were online. We already had our psychologists doing online. We had little robot social workers in the building just in case. And as soon as we shut down-- and we also had computers that we had sent home. We also had to make sure there was internet access, so we had to have hotspots.

So when you think about all of those provisions that had to be in place before you say, this is where we are, that's tremendous. It's not just the academic part. Because the academics-- we had already moved to a lot of curriculum online just in preparation just in case. But when I saw my students at home that were struggling because their parents were saying, I don't know how to do this, I don't know what you're-- I can't help you.

So some of the things-- as you talked about, the food insecurity, and talked about the Maslow's-- we had to have a plan for food pickups in the community. Literally, we moved our buses to food pickup services. Even our food service company was out with food. They had-- I have to give it to them. They had really good food during the pandemic. I don't know how they did it, but they had like barbecued chicken, and it was amazing.

But at the end of the day, some of the things that we had to deal with was-- also, we had children who we knew-- we had called DCFS before the pandemic hit. And so how did we address those young people? How do we make sure that-- I can't even tell you what some of my teachers saw online as they were just watching.

And as the state, we were fighting the fight of those who said, put all the kids in school, we don't care, versus those who said, let's figure out how do we do this together. So that wears on children. It wears on families, if you can imagine every day you're looking at this on TV and you're watching your five-year-old trying to get through a lesson on their computer.

So all of that, that academic learning loss-- we refer to it now as, we do academic acceleration. But we had a learning experience that you can never, ever take back. We learned a lot about our young people, about our families. My staff said they felt more connected to families because they saw them in a different environment. They saw them sitting at the kitchen table. They saw them as they were walking around trying to make lunch for their child who was sitting on the computer. So it was a different experience.

And I would say-- I would never, ever want to do it again, ever, ever. However, the lessons that we learned have put us in a whole different space than we would have been prior to this. And it does include making sure that we are shoring up the entire family, because we got to see our families in their homes, which is a whole different experience than we had before. Sorry. You know I could talk all day about it. [CHUCKLES]

STACEY VANEK SMITH: No, this is so fascinating. In fact, I wanted to ask a little more about this. Because everything that you are both talking about requires resources, but also innovation and anticipating what could help, anticipating different strange needs that cropped up as the pandemic unfolded and things changed.

And what we've been hearing about all day is that the impact of COVID on education was not equally spread across communities. It hit lower-income communities harder. It hit communities that had greater racial-- were more racially or ethnically diverse, harder. And I'm wondering if that tracks with what you observed and experienced, and maybe why you think that happened, why the effects have been bigger.

SHAVON DAVIS LOUIS: Definitely. I was in-- during this time, I was an executive principal in one of the largest urban school districts in the United States of America, the third or the fourth largest-- I think 85,000 children that were impacted.

As I said, school was the hub. I and the school-- I was responsible for 1,000 children and about 200 faculty and staff. Of those 1,000 children, there were 32 different languages that were represented. These were African- American students, Hispanic students. But imagine with 32 different languages, the variety of kids that were impacted.

These are multigenerational homes under one roof, but these were also working parents. These were working parents that were essential workers. My parents were workers that were the cleaning crew at the hospital. They were the janitorial staff. Even though they may have not been doctors and lawyers and police officers, they were still very much essential, and their job was not on hold.

So these children-- while we talk about those lack of resources and we had to adapt quickly for remote learning-- and my district did a wonderful job of that, just as you described. Each child ended up with a laptop, and each child ended up with a hotspot. We started a refrigerator food pantry. So not only was it perishable foods, we wanted to make sure that kids were getting access to vegetables and to milk and to things like that. We also had the busing services, and our cafeterias opened up.

However, even with all of these amazing resources employed and the innovation for amazing superintendents-- just as the one sitting next to me, my superintendent was one who was innovative and who was ready and thought ahead. And we had the backing of the mayor of the city also to give us that funding.

And our families were still hit. We were-- you had these red-- these maps out there that showed the heat spots where COVID was. My school was constantly red, but that was because-- it was continuously red. That was because death was very much impacting, because these families couldn't shut down and they couldn't isolate and they couldn't stop going to work in order to take care of their peoples.

So our students started to deal with depression. They started to deal with anxiety. They became the primary caretakers for their younger siblings. They didn't necessarily have a quiet space to do the work. They had the computer, and they had the hotspot, but they didn't have their own bedroom, or they didn't have an office to go to for the learning.

So everything that's happening in their world, in their home, that kitchen table-- Granny was cooking at the kitchen while learning was taking place. Dad's going in and out, making sure that the house is taken care of. The TV is on in the background if someone is there. So all of this was still impacting them, even on top of the resources.

And we saw so much tragedy taking place inside of those homes, so we were dealing with the social-emotional toll and that mental health on top of-- so while, yes, learning loss is very much an important topic, it was not central. It wasn't the key. It wasn't the core. We had to take care of much greater needs before we could even tackle that learning loss.

STACEY VANEK SMITH: We saw some really compelling research that I actually was really surprised about-- just how strongly the correlation between in-person learning and increased test scores was. I was wondering if that was consistent with your experiences, your research in how people learned and how-- I guess how strongly correlated people's ability to learn and absorb information and be in a classroom in person was.

SOFOKLIS GOULAS: There is something I can add to this. First of all, where people are is not random. So the people who are in places where there was more in-person instruction might also have other characteristics going on. And this is why it's important to account for pre-pandemic trends. This is why it's important to evaluate the impact of the pandemic in terms of the loss of progress, meaning that we account for where people were before COVID started.

So this distinction between achievement and progress is crucial in evaluating the impact of COVID and understanding how to recover. Because when you have some students suffering greater learning losses, it means that not only they lose ground relative to where they would have been had the pandemic not started, it means that the achievement gap with other students gets larger.

So they have this double disadvantage. They didn't progress-- as some people, some students that might have suffered greater learning losses. So they have this one disadvantage, plus the achievement gap grows.

So even if the other-- some more privileged student group learned nothing over that year, they would still lack because of the learning losses. So it's not that the achievement-- it's not only an achievement impact, it's a progress impact.

And this is crucial when we talk about mitigation strategies. In order to start talking about achievement, we need to start with progress, meaning that we need to find ways to accelerate learning, how fast students learn in a year. So this distinction between achievement and progress is crucial.

STACEY VANEK SMITH: I'm wondering why there is such a huge gap between in-person learning and online learning. Do we know?

DANA WEINER: So I'm just going to add another thought here.

STACEY VANEK SMITH: Yes, please.

DANA WEINER: I don't know that I have the answer to that question, but we're talking about it as if the kids are going through this massive shock, and the people teaching them are just the same people doing their same thing. The people teaching these kids were also freaking out, and some of them were in classrooms. They don't-- they can't see the people they're teaching.

I think a lot of kids-- sorry, it gets me all excited because I remember what it was like. But I think that a lot of kids who are driven by the expectations of the adults and the fact that the adults are watching them and the adults are going to see whether they're doing their work or not-- a lot of these kids had their cameras off.

You talked about teachers seeing into the-- in some classrooms, the policy was, well, we don't want to expose inequities on screen. People want their privacy. We'll leave the cameras off. That meant some of these kids are in bed. And when you know that you can go through school from bed and nobody really is going to call you on it, it takes away the umph for a lot of students to even be motivated to do the independent learning part.

So I just think there's a lot of subtleties to the dynamic of what happened to the kids when the adults were also struggling-- that we can't measure those things. But I think that's partly what made online learning really difficult, is because there's something-- the special sauce is in the interaction between those.

SHAVON DAVIS LOUIS: I think reduced engagement was definitely one of the main reasons for the disparity between virtual learning and in-person learning. But I also think we go back to lack of training. Yes, we were innovative in so many districts, and we had the tools readily available, and we deployed them, and we got the things in the hands.

And that step that's often missing is we have to remember that our teacher ed programs did not prepare our teachers to be online teachers. That's a special, nuanced training to teach virtually, to be-- even there's a-- even when you're applying for adjunct jobs to be an online teacher, they're looking for a special skill set.

But we asked our amazing teachers, and they always rise to the occasion to go from classroom teachers to being online professionals. And I think that was really part of it. But so training-- the lack of engagement that you're bringing up.

I also think the training for the adults-- and I go back to, we were in the middle of a pandemic that was really impacting people mentally. That wasn't-- it's hard to learn when your brain is focused or worn out by so much other stuff that's happening. Whether we're talking about the food insecurities, whether we're talking about the ADHD that's being triggered, because now we're in front of the screen nonstop in order-- or whatever the rationale or the reason is.

It's hard to learn when you're not at your best. It's hard to be a top notch student when people are dying around you, when you're now a caretaker. When we're thinking about those disparities, you become-- many middle school kids became-- and younger-- became caretakers for their siblings because their parents still had to go to work. They still had to make a living.

So I think that it's so many things. I don't have the research or the science behind it, but there are so many things that played into why that disparity happened. If you're in the classroom, as you said, the engagement, your focus, that one-to-one feedback, that teacher loving on you, giving you what you need in the moment. And not that they didn't attempt to do that, but were they able to do it as well virtually as they could just--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

DONNA SIMPSON LEAK: I just want to add this, too. Remember this. A lot of our teachers had children themselves. So not only were they trying to be a teacher, but then they had their children on another screen somewhere else in the house trying to have them participate as well. So we were asking a great deal of our educational staff, and not just our teachers, but our paraprofessionals.

They had to also-- for us, they had to pipe into the classroom to do small groups from the teacher. And you're right-- some of my teachers were amazing with-- put you on the breakout. We did the $5 million Zoom whatever. But that's how much it felt like. But whatever it was, we were like, everybody's going to have unlimited so you can get your students up. We tried to do the Google Classroom.

But at the end of the day, the other part of it, too, is-- I don't know about you, but our teachers lived in about a 50-mile radius of the school district, which meant if their internet went down, to have my tech team try to help them was almost impossible. So it'd be-- so there was a lot of other pieces. And as a teacher, I know if I'm-- think about it. If you're in a Zoom and you start-- all of a sudden, you're like underwater talking, blah blah, blah, you get frustrated.

And so that was happening with children, too. They were getting frustrated from that. Teachers were. So there was a lot of dynamics. At the end of the day, though, one of the things that we do not talk about at all from the pandemic is learning loss. I won't talk about it, because--

SHAVON DAVIS LOUIS: Same.

DONNA SIMPSON LEAK: --in my mind, that is about loss of being able to take a standardized test. There were so many things that we gained that we would not have gained if we had not had this that we learned through that process. Yes, maybe their standardized test score is not what it would have been.

At the end of the day, though, that doesn't define the children that we represent. And so I struggle with that, and my staff knows. We talk about-- when they came back, we talk about-- we'll accelerate your learning for standards.

But look at all these amazing things you learned about being creative, about being a problem solver. If you're a caregiver for your little brother, little sister, do you understand what that means as a lifelong lesson for you? So we took the things that they learned, and we made that the center of who you are now.

And we'll work on the pieces that are connected to standardized tests, but I won't take-- because if you think about this, 2021 was the year that a lot of people were home. If I was in kindergarten, I'm in the fourth grade right now. I'm nine. So you can't tell me that I lost because I'm only nine years old. So you have to help me gain what it is that I have to showcase to the world to show who I am, but at the same time showcase what I know, showcase what I learned, showcase who I am.

So that's part of the struggle that we have, is there's this dichotomy of, we want to talk about our test, our standardized test, but at the same time, these are children. They're children. We have to make sure that we build them up from who they are, the experiences they've been through, and make them feel like, this is a way for me to grow and experience my life in a different way than the people did before me.

SHAVON DAVIS LOUIS: And I think if we're talking about-- this is a policy-- a room full of people who think about policy. And I'm an educator, so policy is typically in the back of my mind, but my students and my teachers are typically at the front of my mind.

And when I think about-- if I'm thinking about this from a policy standpoint, learning loss wasn't something that was new. That gap that he just mentioned, achievement versus-- we call it growth in the state of Tennessee, or progress, whichever word you want to use. That was an issue before COVID, and that's an issue that needs an equity conversation around it.

I think, like you talk about, to mitigate that gap, some of the things like-- yes, I agree wholeheartedly that learning loss is not something that I ever like to talk about in the school, in the classroom, in the building, because we've got to-- that issue wasn't new.

It wasn't something that was new for my students and my clientele for equity reasons, not just because of the pandemic. The pandemic brought a new light to it and this new research to it, but it wasn't something that was new, and it's not something that we-- we've been thinking about that every day in this role and in this seat.

And so that targeted tutoring and that targeted intervention and those targeted high quality summer programs-- the funding became available that we did not have before, readily available. It was almost being thrown at us. Hey, use this money, use this money.

And we did. We used that money to not only do tutoring and summer programming, but high quality tutoring and summer programming, smaller class sizes, training the teachers to be excellent practitioners at their staff. And those are the things that, in my district, we saw that-- when we finally got back to the test, we actually became an award school.

And in my state, that means that we met all of the levers because we were closing more than one year of progress, or more than one year of growth. But the funding was there to help alleviate the inequities that, before, the funding had not been there.

So what the pandemic did was afford us funding in order to do the necessary work to help close that achievement gap. And that's why I think we saw less learning loss compared to the standardized testing, because we had what we needed to give the students and the teachers what they needed in order to close that gap.

STACEY VANEK SMITH: That is so interesting. I guess with that in mind, maybe what are some possible policy solutions that could help close the gap that was there before the pandemic and maybe some of the progress gap that we also experienced since the pandemic [INAUDIBLE]?

SHAVON DAVIS LOUIS: To make connections to the previous speaker, you talked about pulling the right coattails for those policies. Fund us! When you fund it-- we saw, in the district where I am, when we got the funding we needed, we got the data that showed that learning loss was not an issue. That's because we had the money to put it where it needed to be so that our students and our teachers and our community got everything that they needed.

DONNA SIMPSON LEAK And I just want to add to that-- the funding is even greater in this respect. We have a huge teacher shortage across this country.

SHAVON DAVIS LOUIS: Got bigger.

DONNA SIMPSON LEAK: And it got even greater during the pandemic because, for example, we had to-- we couldn't necessarily keep all the parapros who decided to go to work for Amazon. So we lost people who potentially could have gone into the pipeline because they saw something that was better, and they stayed there. At the end of the day, we don't treat education, policy and funding wise, the way that we expect it to produce. And so--

SHAVON DAVIS LOUIS: Yes. Clap. [CHUCKLES]

DONNA SIMPSON LEAK: You can clap for that. And so you can't tell us, even with the money-- so as of yesterday, all of our ESSER dollars are done-- gone, done. Cliff is done. You got to figure out how do you keep going.

So how do we say to a nation, hey, we want to make sure we have the best and the brightest coming out of our schools, but we refuse to actually fund our schools the way they should be funded so that our staff can get paid? I'm in negotiations right now. I only have a discrete amount of money. But if I was in a private organization that has the budget that I have, the people I pay would get paid a lot more. I don't have the capacity to do it.

And so if we are saying this is where we want our country to go, we have to-- policy wise-- and as I said, I sit on the State Board of Education. We did this evidence-based funding to try to shore up what was happening with the inequities.

But even that is not-- it's not enough. If we're going to do it right, then let's have policies that declare we will do it right. We will fund it. It's just not acceptable. Because it depends-- in our state, Illinois, dependent on the ZIP code where you live dictates the quality of education because of the people we can hire.

So we're out there doing-- when I tell you I feel sometimes like I'm working miracles, like you gave me two fish and I just fed 5,000 people-- I feel like we're working miracles, but we shouldn't have to feel that way. This should be a profession. Because nobody can be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, an economist if you didn't go to school with a teacher. So why are we not able to pay-- set policy that we can pay teachers what they should make to produce the rest of this country?

DANA WEINER: I'm sorry.

STACEY VANEK SMITH: Don't be sorry.

DONNA SIMPSON LEAK: That's just my passions.

STACEY VANEK SMITH: I just want to add, on the question of policies, I think we heard a lot of things today to encourage us to think about promoting policies that promote equitable access to the social determinants of health, to health care, to healthy food. My favorite quote from today-- I wrote down a lot of them-- was "poverty is a policy choice."

SHAVON DAVIS LOUIS: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

STACEY VANEK SMITH: Did you say that? I think you did. Yeah. Yeah. But I also wanted to extend-- and I said this to you out in the hall-- the work that you presented, because we also saw that the Child Tax Credit and the direct cash payments reduced child welfare system involvement. To bring it back to what we were talking about, this morning, where we know that a lot of what gets reported is poverty that gets misreported as neglect and then sends kids down a different trajectory. Those strategies worked for reducing child welfare system involvement, as well as for promoting health and for promoting learning. So I'm agreeing with you. Seems like a no-brainer. Why wouldn't we want to keep doing-- ultimately, it's cheaper for us to do those things than it is to deal with the consequences of not doing them.

DONNA SIMPSON LEAK: Absolutely.

SOFOKLIS GOULAS: I can only echo what has already been said, that there are supply side limitations to scaling approaches that we know work. We already said that we need to use approaches that accelerate learning. And we need to use approaches that provide more personalized learning to meet students where they are.

But to scale successful approaches, we need the key ingredient here, which is human capital, which is people. That is why some approaches may be easier to scales, for instance, resources that are available online to teachers to make them more effective. But maybe they're not as effective as individualized tutoring, of course.

So trying to navigate this labyrinth requires us to understand the limitations, which are very local, very local. So maybe there is not a silver bullet here, but trying to figure out a specific calculus for each district-- what is available, what is the local labor market like, and what resources are available? What can I scale across the district?

STACEY VANEK SMITH: I wanted to pivot now to maybe some of the social and emotional development issues that came up around COVID. Obviously, the academic ones are very measurable and very valuable for that reason. But also, I think we all experienced emotional impacts, social impacts from COVID. And I would love to hear what you all observed in that area.

DANA WEINER: So I'll start on this one, because I want to flag something we haven't talked about. We did hear about the increased anxiety, particularly among teenage girls, in returning to school. But I think there's another thing that happened. I would call it development loss. In addition to social-emotional, in addition to learning, child development teaches us there's a sequence of things that happen at different ages.

And those things couldn't happen. You couldn't get socialized if you were a young kid at the time that we know it's best for kids to learn to be around other kids and play and negotiate projects or activities or games with other kids. For the teenagers, separation, individuation is supposed to happen when you're like 15, 16, 17. Those kids were locked in the house-- or not locked in, but they were stuck in the house with the rest of us.

So what that means, I think, and what we have to give them a lot of permission to do, is that they're still going to go through those stages, but not at the right age. So when I see my 21-year-old acting like a 17-year-old, I have to be like, oh, this is not about this relationship. This kid didn't go through this before, and so she has to go through it now.

And the same for the little kids. If they seem like their behavior is out of control in school, well, they're going to learn-- when a kid-- normally they would have learned in kindergarten. So I think that-- and we haven't been talking a lot about that development loss, which I just think is putting everyone like-- we have to adjust our expectations for these kids and figure out what do we need to teach them and support them to help them through.

SHAVON DAVIS LOUIS: I think what you-- that last statement-- I think what we call developmentally appropriate is being adjusted. It's no longer-- the old developmentally appropriate is becoming a new developmentally appropriate. The social anxiety, the reduced ability to communicate. I was talking last night at dinner about-- I'm teaching kids how to do recess, and these are middle schoolers.

I'm the director of a middle school, and they are-- like, I am talking to the principal and to the teachers about, we have to slow down. And just like we teach reading, math, and English, we have to teach behaviors and appropriate behaviors. Those things were skipped. They were missed. They're struggling with self-regulation. They don't know how to emotionally respond anymore.

And so these-- this is the impact that I'm more concerned about than the standardized test score. I'm more concerned about a middle schooler not being able to separate teams for the soccer game without throwing a tantrum. Those are the greater concerns. You're talking about seeing a 21-year-old who's acting like a 17-year- old. It's that self-regulation. It's the ability to get your moods under control. It's the ability to play together, students learning how to play, learning how to talk, learning how to do group work.

While we made athletic-- sports packets and we made art packets and we gave them the resources that they needed so they could take part in the learning, they were still doing it alone. They were doing it at that kitchen table or on that bed with the-- even with their monitors off, as you said. They were doing it alone. And so that ability to do cooperative learning or to do group work-- it really went out the window.

And things that parents would normally assist teachers in doing, they were at work. Or when they got home from work, they were tired. They were exhausted, and they were about to go back to work. And so I think about anxiety, reduced communication skills, difficulty with your peers, just learning how to play, for lack of a better term. Those are big concerns in the school setting.

DONNA SIMPSON LEAK: And I'll go back to what I said earlier. 2021-- those kindergartners are now in the fourth grade. And not only did they not learn about how to be together in a social setting, how to raise your hand, how to talk quietly, how to work together, how to do crafts. Their parents also missed that experience. Their parents missed it.

So if I'm the parent of a fourth grader right now, I didn't have the traditional kindergarten boo-hoo breakfast where I take you and I see you off and I learn who your teacher is and I come to the parent-teacher conference and I'm a room mom. They didn't have that experience.

And I think sometimes we forget that that's how we bond with our families. And so that bonding with our families at the very start has been crippled in many ways. Because right now, I have a parent coffee every month. I have parents today saying, hey, doc, what do we do? I want to be a room mom. I don't know how to do that. Because you start that bonding early on.

So we're having to adjust what-- like right now, we have Mommies on a Mission and Daddies on Duty to help teach our parents who are third, fourth, and fifth grade parents who didn't have any of those experiences when their children were in kindergarten or first grade.

So it's a societal concept. It's not just the children and not only our parents, but even our community. We have massive events for our community. Our community is still struggling with, how do we help? What does it look like at the library? What are we supposed to do?

And it feels like, well, we are adults. We should know that. We have to learn with the children every time it happens every year. So those-- we're seeing that show up. I just had-- one of my principals was like, these sixth graders-- I don't know what we're going to do with-- and we tracked them back and said, OK, they were in second grade. So let's talk about the socialization skills that they missed.

Because she was ready to pull all of her hair out. She's like, Dr. Leak, I don't know what to do. And I said, we are going to figure it out. But again, we're still feeling those repercussions from that window of time that we lost that camaraderie, that-- what school looks and feels like. We teach that as educators. It doesn't just happen.

But I also-- there was something that I just had to speak to earlier about just how we connect our students-- and I heard the research about the Medicaid, et cetera. That's another piece that we missed. Because what started happening is we were getting all of this money, and you got to figure out what to do with it like this.

And even with the Medicaid and making sure we're connecting which child is it, the list we were getting from the state, from the feds didn't match what we saw every day. And that also became another issue for the schools is, how do we figure that out while we're also figuring out all the rest of this?

I will say-- I don't know about anybody else, but I didn't learn any of this when I was in school. [CHUCKLES] Didn't learn any of this. So it was that-- just trying to figure it out as you go and pivot in the right direction and figure out, if I didn't pivot right, then let's figure out how to pivot to get it back where it needs to be. So there was just a lot of moving pieces connected to all of that.

SOFOKLIS GOULAS: One thing I want to say is that there is a limitation in economic research. We pay attention to where the light is. So we often look at test scores because that's all we have.

DONNA SIMPSON LEAK: Right. Right. That's right.

SOFOKLIS GOULAS: So even though socioeconomic-- socioemotional, excuse me-- socioemotional development is so important and so crucial, especially later on in life, we lack good measurements. And if I could wish for better data, for any data on this, it would be amazing to have them. So we need more discussions on this, more stories. Because in lack of data, it's at least important to acknowledge that this is an important goal for schools and teachers to have.

STACEY VANEK SMITH: Wait, how are we time-wise? Are we still OK?11 minutes? OK, good. We've got some time to get into a couple things. Because one of the really interesting topics that came up was around learning and behavioral differences and ADHD specifically. And I would really love to hear-- that seems to be where maybe test scores and some of the emotional and social setbacks that we experienced during the pandemic come together in a way. Would love to hear maybe what we have found there, maybe what some solutions are, any observations.

DONNA SIMPSON LEAK: I don't know [INAUDIBLE].

SHAVON DAVIS LOUIS: Neither do I.

DONNA SIMPSON LEAK: Well, I can talk about it, but I can--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

DANA WEINER: I mean I don't want to regurgitate what's already been said. But I think we need to put into place-- and we were talking about it at lunch, too.

DONNA SIMPSON LEAK: Yes.

DANA WEINER: We need to put into place not only universal screening, but more tools and supports and training for teachers to respond to the types of mental health issues that they're seeing, whether it be ADHD or depression or anxiety, or being able to tell the difference between trauma and a disciplinary problem.

I think we need to support-- and we were talking at lunch about treading this fine line between putting it all on teachers, because they don't need more to do, and making them feel prepared and supported. And I think the answer to that is giving them not only the tools to discern what they're seeing in kids, but also something to do about it so that they-- oh, and there was one other thing I wanted to mention. Because I talked about the technological tools that we're building to put in their hands, like resource referral information.

The other thing we're trying to do is rebuild community networks. Because once upon a time in Illinois, like in a lot of other places, we had the state divided up into local area networks. And people from the school, people from all the state agencies, and families would come to the LAN meeting. They would come to the local area network meeting, and everyone knew what the providers were in the community, what they had, what the emerging priorities were.

And the state kind of divested from the LANs. And so in their place have arisen a bunch of different kinds of community networks. Some are 708 boards or SOC grants. Some are still LANs that are still functioning. And some are what we call organic networks, where a local hospital or a church or some other entity has built a community network, meaning a place for everyone to come together to say, oh, my God, we have so many kids with this problem. What can we bring to bear as a solution? I think we need to build those community networks so that the school personnel know that they have a safety net, another place to go.

SHAVON DAVIS LOUIS: And so I think collaboration.

DANA WEINER: Yeah, [INAUDIBLE].

SHAVON DAVIS LOUIS: I think collaboration is very much the key for this mental health piece, ADHD and no matter what it is. But I go back to that policy, and the big word is "funding." We need more school psychologists, we need more school social workers, we need more special ed teachers, and we need appropriate training.

I was just talking at lunch about-- I have four degrees. And if did not-- none of my teacher ed programming prepared me to be able to support a student's mental health. I had to seek that training out separate from any teacher ed program that I've gone through.

And so that's number one. Teachers are not being trained to-- we're being trained to teach pedagogy. We're not being trained to tackle these very, very nuanced and important problems that our students are bringing to the classroom each and every day. But school psychologists are. Special education teachers are. Social workers are. And in a school with 1,000 children, I had a part-time social worker that I shared with four schools.

When I was in a public school setting, I had a thousand-- I want to repeat that-- 1,000 children, and I had a part- time school social worker and a part-time school psychologist. She was responsible for all of the testing. When a teacher said, I think little Johnny needs testing, she was responsible for my 1,000 children, plus four other schools. That's a funding issue. That's a policy issue. My social worker-- if I did not figure out a way in my budget to get her full time in my building, I had her a third of the time, and I shared her with three other schools. It is impossible.

So we need additional people. I think the answer is collaboration, these outside sources, but we need the inequities funded appropriately. I grew up-- I mean-- not I grew up. I could talk about that, too, if you want to.

[LAUGHTER]

But no, that's a whole 'nother conference we need to talk about. But I think about this school district, this urban school district with some of the highest poverty in Tennessee. And I shared these incredible resources with three and four other schools. That's a policy issue, that's a funding issues, and that is putting more on the teachers, because teachers aren't going to let little Johnny flounder, because they care.

They go into it for the calling, and so they're figuring it out, but they're punishing themselves. Something is going to falter when they are giving more to little Johnny's mental health than they are giving to reading, writing, and arithmetic.

DANA WEINER: Well-- oh, yes, please.

DONNA SIMPSON LEAK: I just want to add to that. So in the state of Illinois, we have 852 school districts, and we are all duking it out against each other to bring in staff. And again, the whole issue of having-- so in my buildings, I believe we have to have at least two social workers per building. Do you know how hard it is to find social workers who will come and work for a school district for what we pay versus what they could go and make at a hospital?

Or nurses-- we have to have a nurse for every building. My nurses actually moonlight at the hospital because they love the school district so much. During the pandemic, they were working at the hospital and then were taking care of children for us as well. But what is happening right now, because of the policy that really-- and I'm going to go back to this funding piece again. I cannot stay away from it. We can't compete. We can't compete as school systems with what the private industry pays for nurses, for social workers, for psychologists, for counselors.

So what ends up happening is we have to go to contractors, and the contractors are ridiculous in how much they are charging us. But at the end of the day, we don't have a choice. We have to have the people in the buildings.

So I go back again and again and again. I know we just did this evidence-based funding. It's been great for the last six years. At the end of the day, though, it doesn't provide the clinicians that schools need. When we-- we just built a new preschool. We have a whole sensory room because-- I don't know if people realize this, but we are getting more and more autistic children at the ages of three and four every day-- every day.

So at some point, there has to be a policy adjustment that says, are we going to say, yes, we need more clinicians, and we're going to pay for them? And I'm not going to pick on where we are right now, but I'm just going to say, the fact that this local school district right here that's one of the 852 is saying we have to have counselor, social worker-- where do you find them without having to contract and pay an exorbitant amount?

So there have to be some policy conversations at a much-- at, really, at the state and federal level to make these adjustments. Because you're saying that in Tennessee. I'm sitting next to you. I was born in Tennessee. I know Tennessee well, but I'm in Illinois. We're saying the same thing, exact same thing, which means it's a national policy issue.

SHAVON DAVIS LOUIS: And then just the last thing-- assistive technology is very expensive. That assistive technology is needed in so many classrooms and so many areas. It's expensive. It's costly. Oftentimes, the contracts are denied in the public school setting.

So I just wanted to throw that out there while we're talking about policy. And I think it's all connected to the larger thing that you're trying to do in Indiana. And it is also very much an issue-- the human capital, but also, the tools and the resources are very much priced out of what schools can afford to give to the kids that need them.

DONNA SIMPSON LEAK: So we need a one-to-one nurse for a student-- that means I'd have to have a nurse for that student, plus the nurse for the rest of the children. And I don't have a choice. So it just-- it's a greater policy discussion than just us at this table.

STACEY VANEK SMITH: And I'm just wondering, as a final question, just to get an idea of what the stakes are here-- I think maybe we all have a pretty good idea, but what happens if we don't address these issues with policy? What happens if we just-- the status quo goes forward as is?

SHAVON DAVIS LOUIS: I think this is where these economists play a very huge role. We will--

[LAUGHTER]

You think about how-- if you don't-- if we're not producing students that can function in society-- and I think that's the biggest thing. If your mental health-- yes, the learning loss is important. Yes, that achievement and that growth is absolutely necessary.

We need kids who can read the manual and read the instruction and fill the application out to get the job. I was reading a Forbes article that talked about Gen Z-- because of their anxiety, their lack of social skills, their drive and ambition, they're being fired two to three weeks within getting the job.

DANA WEINER: I saw that too.

SHAVON DAVIS LOUIS: You saw that article. It was alarming. I sent it to my children. I'm raising Gen Zers. Look, Mom can't take care of you forever. Let's address these. But seriously, if the Gen Zers that are now adults are being fired-- and COVID was a part of their world, but I think it's Alpha now. I'm losing track. This is who it's truly impacting. If it's already having this kind of impact on those students, what does that mean for the labor force? What does that mean for the workforce moving forward?

And so that's what I'm nervous about. Who's going to take care of me? Who's going to take care of us? Who's going to provide for us? Who's going to do this work? We're already having the Great Resignation. It has already taken place. And I think that's another conference, and there's lots of things that are going into that. And if students can't get through school, then how do they become functioning adults?

SOFOKLIS GOULAS: There is one more issue in the bigger picture of learning losses, enrollment losses-- and disengagement, this family dissatisfaction. Because what we are seeing right now is that a lot of families are choosing to pursue schooling alternatives away from traditional public schools.

And this creates room for the question, do we have too many traditional public schools right now? And maybe we need fewer of them. And then-- but the problem is that we do not know if the enrollment we see right now is the equilibrium enrollment. We do not know that whether in a couple of years we will see people coming back.

And we do not the efficacy of the alternatives families are pursuing. So we do not know if the families are pursuing homeschooling these days. So we do not know if homeschooling will turn out to be not great or not very consistent, and families will come back. So in the bigger picture, that includes learning losses, among other things. There is the question of, where is the system going?

Now, at the individual level, when we have people who do not have the scaffold needed in terms of knowledge to get into advanced material, it means that we might have fewer people with frontier skills, and this has implications about the innovation in the economy, about, of course, the labor market outcomes of these people, but even the greater capacity of the economy to grow fast. And are we going to bring in people who have these skills?

Now, at the same time, I want to come back to something said earlier about the things that the pandemic taught us, about some skills that we might have gained out of this. This new generation that has experienced-- that was a K through 12 during COVID-- something must have gained out of this-- some kind of resilience, some kind of empathy. I'm hopeful that these kids will bring-- will reflect these skills into their adulthood, into their labor market outcomes.

So on one hand, I'm worried about their knowledge and whether they will be able to get into college majors that have high returns and whether they will be able to get into grad school. But at the same time, I cannot not recognize that these kids have experience that have matured them in some ways more than the previous generations. And I don't know how these things will balance.

DONNA SIMPSON LEAK: They balance it, right.

STACEY VANEK SMITH: Well, I think we have to leave it right there. But please give a hand to our amazing panel. This was such a fascinating discussion. I feel like we could talk for another hour. But anyway, thank you so much.

[SIDE CONVERSATION]