As schools in Pima County head into their second semester back with in-person learning since early 2020, educators said students are having a more challenging time adapting to in-person school and the social interactions that come with it.
A normal transition into a new school year or returning from break is already a challenging time as students learn to communicate with their peers and adjust to school expectations. But the pandemic has made those periods even more difficult and longer, local educators said.
As a result, students are exhibiting more behavioral issues — including aggressive behaviors and shorter attention spans — across all grade levels in some of the county’s largest school districts.
“We’re definitely seeing an increase in overall behavioral issues in our schools,” said Julie Shivanonda, the social-emotional learning director for the Tucson Unified School District. Her position with TUSD, she noted, was created this school year as the district focused on students’ mental health.
“We’re seeing that students are struggling to get reacclimated to the socialization of being back on campus … and being able to focus and attend in classrooms because they’ve been so used to just being online,” she said.
At the Sunnyside Unified School District, the chief student services officer said he has noticed a similar trend among students during the first half of the school year.
Jose Gastelum said staffers have seen more aggressive behaviors throughout all age groups, though particularly among eighth and ninth grade students.
During the first quarter of the 2019-2020 school year — measured from August to October, and just a few months before the pandemic forced schools to go online — Sunnyside recorded 159 behavioral incidents among eighth graders and 78 incidents among ninth graders.
This year, the district recorded 58 more incidents among eighth graders for a total of 217 incidents during August to October. In the ninth grade, the number increased by 37 more incidents for a total of 115.
Tough transitions
Gastelum said he believed one of the main factors driving those numbers up is that students didn’t get to experience the important in-person interactions that help them transition more smoothly from one grade level to the next.
“The kid that missed his seventh and eighth grade years, is now a freshman,” he said. “Those transitions are difficult, as is, without the pandemic … All of a sudden, you go from a school of 700-800 kids and now you’re in a school full of 2,200 kids and so you’re going to get pulled in different directions.”
Sarah Taouil, a school social worker at Donaldson Elementary in the Amphitheater district, said she has also seen younger students struggling more this year due to missing out on important social interactions.
Taouil said she usually expects to see an adjustment period during the first couple of months of every school year, as well as the days before and after vacation breaks. But, she said, this year has been different.
“Transition periods are becoming longer and more challenging. Even just getting kids to separate from families, getting them out of the car and into the classroom and making that transition go smoothly is taking longer,” she said.
School counselor Tara Carmody of TUSD’s Roberts Naylor K-8 School said the younger elementary-aged kids are barely getting to learn the overall school and class time expectations because they’ve spent more time in online learning than on campus.
She said many of the bad behavioral issues she’s seeing this year are similar to pre-pandemic years, but some are more exaggerated and are showing up among older grade levels than usual.
For example, while she used to work on improving social skills mainly with first-graders, she’s now focusing on those skills with the third- and fourth-graders.
“And then our first-graders spent their whole first year in the school system remotely, so not only are they facing learning deficits, but they’re just learning how to be in a school, developing social skills and working on their attention spans,” Carmody said.
Attention spans getting shorter
Carmody and Taouil said many students easily opted out of class at times throughout the day during remote learning by turning off the camera when they got bored.
But when they can no longer do that in person, the kids’ frustration and fatigue begins to show inside the classroom.
“That’s when we’re seeing more anxious behaviors. In the real little guys, we see it kind of with the outbursts, the crying, not being able to continue on a task and needing to take a break,” Taouil said. “And even in the older kids with the shutting down and avoidance, all the way up to panic attacks.”
In the middle and high schools, Shivanonda of TUSD said, students forgot a great portion of their social skills during their time away from campus.
She said that students have become so accustomed to building relationships through online platforms that they are now struggling to interact with their peers face to face. So, Shivanonda said, students are increasing their cellphone usage during class time.
Understanding emotions, trauma
School personnel say they knew they would need to focus a lot more on students’ mental health as they emerged from distance learning, given the trauma of being isolated at home and the loss that might’ve affected some families.
“Our students, they’ve experienced loss due to the pandemic. They’ve had some life-changing events happen, whether it’s the loss of a parent, grandparent, a family member,” Gastelum said. “So now, more than ever, there needs to be that whole approach in terms of providing mental health support.”
Some of those efforts have included using additional state funding to bring on additional school counselors for schools across Southern Arizona.
Last month, the Pima County Health Department also announced that it received a $6.9 million grant to help minimize the impacts of the pandemic on K-12 students, families and teachers, with an emphasis on providing mental health services.
For their part, Carmody and Taouil said that their efforts include teaching a social-emotional learning class to students once a week, while also working with them in smaller groups to connect as much as possible with each student.
Carmody said while she already has a set curriculum, she often adapts it to meet the students’ needs based on recent behavior inside the classroom or on the playground.
And one bright side to the situation, Carmody said, is that students are really learning and becoming comfortable with asking for help.
“One thing I have noticed is that a lot of our students are not scared to ask for help,” she said. “They seek it out, they let their teachers and me know that they want the support from the adults at our school.”
