That’s how children — all U.S. citizens — and their parents described their treatment by federal immigration agents in accounts delivered in Washington, D.C., Tuesday at a joint House and Senate hearing. 

The teens told lawmakers these encounters have left them unable to sleep, concentrate on school, plan for their future or feel safe in any setting.

“Whenever I hear sirens or I see an officer, my heart starts racing,” said Arnoldo Bazan, 16, who described a violent incident with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Oct. 23, 2025. “I don’t even know when I’ll see my father again. This is not the America I know.”

Neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency, replied to requests for comment. A Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said they would need more time to respond.

Bazan said he was assaulted by ICE agents on his way to school with his father last fall when they stopped at a McDonald’s to celebrate him making a varsity team. Just then, Bazan said, a car with tinted windows and flashing lights pulled them over. 

Soon, multiple unmarked vehicles approached. 

“Armed men with masks jumped out and started banging on the windows,” Bazan said. “They never identified themselves or explained why we were stopped. We didn’t know who these men were. I started recording on my phone. One of the unmarked cars rammed into our car multiple times. I even felt our car lift.”

Agents grabbed his father and Bazan ran to help. 

“One officer put me in a choke hold and told me, ‘You’re done,’” the boy said, taking short breaks to compose himself. “His grip was so tight, I wondered if I would even make it out alive. With all of my strength, I screamed that I was underage and from the United States. When the officers finally stopped, I began telling everybody who could hear me that these officers had tried to flip our car, and that I had proof of my phone.”

Federal agents confiscated his cell, he testified. 

“The officer put me and my dad in the car,” Bazan said. “They mocked us. They told me that I was gay for crying, an illegal, an illegal idiot, a border hopper, and other demeaning words.”

Bazan said the officers drove them to his house where he and his father, who was subsequently deported to Mexico, “prayed for one last time. I tried to hug him, but he couldn’t hug me back because he was handcuffed.”

He said his backpack was returned but not his phone and when he traced it, it turned up inside a kiosk that sells electronics. Bazan said local police told him they couldn’t take any action against federal officers.

Bazan, who suffered a neck injury, was taken to the hospital that day and given morphine for his pain, he said. He told the committee his body ached after the incident, that he couldn’t sleep and missed school.

He was one of three teens who spoke at the forum called by Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, ranking member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. 

“Our efforts to document and elevate the stories of this regime’s heartless actions against children will continue, and we know that there are thousands more stories to be told,” Blumenthal said at the start, thanking the students and their parents for speaking and remarking on their bravery.  

The lawmakers released a minority staff report Tuesday entitled , saying it documents the cases of “128 children who have been injured, left unattended, or otherwise put at direct risk of harm due to operations of the Department of Homeland Security.”

Their action comes amid Democrats’ ongoing campaign to curtail federal immigration agents. They’re refusing to fund DHS, which is now in the second month of a partial government shutdown, until reforms and greater public accountability are put in place.

An 18-year-old, who used the pseudonym Fernando Hernández García, said he has been living on his own for more than a year after his parents were deported to Mexico — taking his medically fragile U.S.-born sister with them. The girl cannot access treatment there because she is not a Mexican citizen, her brother said.��

Garcia, recalling their apprehension, said it all began when the little girl woke up and said her head hurt. 

“My parents took this very seriously because the year before, she had an emergency surgery to remove a tumor,” Garcia said. “My parents and my five siblings got in the car and drove from South Texas to Houston so she could see a specialist at Texas Children’s Hospital. On the way, government officials stopped them at a checkpoint and deported everyone — even though my parents told them about my sister’s condition, even though my siblings are U.S. citizens.”

Garcia wasn’t with them, but his family had made this same trip many times before President Donald Trump took office for the second time and had no problems, he said: They’d present the girl’s proof of citizenship and a letter from the hospital explaining her medical needs and would be on their way. 

“When I heard the news I couldn’t breathe,” the teen said. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. My mom worried about me returning to our home in South Texas alone, but I had to finish high school and I wanted to make sure I could do everything in my power to stay on top of the bills and keep the home my mom and dad had sacrificed so much for.”

Garcia had planned to attend college but instead spends all of his time working.

“I can’t think about the things my peers are doing because I honestly can’t relate,” he said. “The situation is a nightmare that I can’t wake up from.”

His family already missed his high school graduation, a milestone he thought they’d share.  

“If my parents were still here, they would have pushed me to go to college, to dream big, and they would have helped me to make it happen,” he said. 

Michelle Ramirez Sanan, 18 and from Chelsea, Massachusetts, plans to attend college in the fall, but said Tuesday that memories of her family’s ICE encounter have left her shaken and distracted. 

Sanan was restrained by federal agents after her mother and autistic 13-year-old brother, also a U.S. citizen, were dragged from their car while in their neighborhood and detained Sept. 26, 2025. 

Officers arrested Sanan’s 50-year old mother, who has legal status and has lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years. The teen, in her emotional testimony, recalled coming upon the scene. 

“My brother was crying next to my mom who was being pushed against the fence in handcuffs,” she said. “Most ICE officers were wearing masks. I could see they had guns.”

Sanan said she tried to run to them but was stopped by a federal agent. 

“My brother doesn’t speak very much because of his disability,” she said. “He doesn’t know how to explain that he’s an American citizen. I tried to protect him by yelling out, ‘My brother has autism’, but instead of helping him, the ICE officer kept blocking me and told me to shut up.”

Sanan, who has asthma, said she had trouble breathing. 

“Since that day, I have had a harder time focusing in school, taking care of myself, and managing my anxiety,” she said. “I have had trouble sleeping and headaches. I was so excited to enjoy my senior year before starting a new chapter in college. But now I spend so much of my time wondering why this happened to us.”

Educators recognize students’ pain. Zena Stenvik is the superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools, which serves 3,400 children just north of Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

Among her charges is 5-year-old , who galvanized national opposition to Trump’s immigration crackdown after he was photographed in a blue bunny hat, wearing a Spiderman backpack, being detained by federal agents in January with his father.  

Liam languished in Texas’s for more than a week before he was released. He and his family, who hail from Ecuador, had their asylum claims denied this month and are now on a . 

The impact of DHS’s Operation Metro Surge on her students has been profound, Stenvik said: Seven have been detained, including at Dilley, and all six who have returned came back sick — and emotionally frayed. 

“We are seeing increased separation anxiety with students struggling to be apart from their parents during the school day,” she said. “We’re seeing heightened difficulty with transitions: One student who was detained in Texas now experiences distress when leaving the classroom to go to art or gym class. He reported that separation from their trusted teacher and classroom removes a sense of safety. We’re also seeing increased stress responses, such as fight, flight, freeze among students who experienced direct or indirect trauma.”

Some of the impacted children, one parent said, are very young. Anabel Romero, a mother of four who was born and raised in Idaho, described a shocking attack on Hispanic residents in Wilder, Idaho, on . 

Romero, her stepson and her three children, ages 14, 8 and 6, were among hundreds of people watching horse races that Sunday when they spotted a helicopter in the sky. A medical worker, Romero thought someone had been injured and it was there to help. 

“But then I saw people running and screaming, terrified,” she said. “Men in military style gear stormed in with weapons at the ready. The first thing I did was call my daughter and tell her not to get out of the truck and to take care of her brother and sister. I ran and hid in one of the horse stalls.” 

Armed men grabbed and beat Romero, she said, punching her in the head and kicking her. 

“One of them threatened to blow my head off,” she testified. “I couldn’t breathe, and they zip tied me in the back. After that, they brought me up and I told them I needed to get to my children. One of them actually laughed and said they were taking better care of them than I was.”

Her eldest daughter was also thrown on the ground, zip tied and suffered bruises all along her sides. Her two youngest were taken from the truck at gunpoint, she said. 

“They were alone and terrified,” Romero said. “When my children were with me, I couldn’t comfort them. They were crying and I was still zip tied in the back with no answers for why I was being detained.”

Her oldest daughter started having a panic attack, she said. 

“I feared she might hurt herself if she fainted,” Romero said. “I asked them to zip tie her in the front. They did, but she was still having a panic attack. We waited like that zip tied and scared for three hours… They herded us like cattle and tied us up so that ICE could check everyone’s immigration status. Hundreds of people were at this family event — grandparents, infants.”

Her children are still suffering, Romero said.  

“That day completely changed our lives,” she said. “Our sense of safety and security was demolished.”

The committee heard, too, from Adreina Mejia from Arleta, California. She and her special needs 15-year-old son were separated, held at gunpoint and handcuffed by immigration agents outside of a local high school.

The agents had mistaken her boy for another child, she said. 

“The person who was with me just told my son, ‘Oh, we just confused you with somebody else, but look at the bright side, you’re gonna have an exciting story to tell your friends when you go back to school,’” she said. 

The incident has not left her son, Mejia said. 

“He will wake up crying,” his mother said. “He sees cars with tinted windows and he’s scared. He told me, ‘Mom, is it them?’” 

Ann’s three young boys had been through a lot already. Her marriage to their father was marked by violence, and a divorce was followed by multiple violations of a protective order, she said. While their father sat in prison in North Dakota, she moved the family to the Twin Cities.

But while the move gave them distance, it didn’t solve their problems, said Ann, who asked to be identified by her middle name to protect her children’s privacy. Her sons, especially the two youngest, suffered mental health issues including , and anxiety. Her middle son was diagnosed with , characterized by angry and sometimes violent outbursts.

“I had 13 police calls within a nine-month period to my house,” Ann said. When a police officer handed her a domestic violence information card, she knew things had to change.

Ann’s middle son had been enrolled in public school in a suburb of St. Paul, but after being removed from his mainstream classroom due to his behaviors, he wasn’t receiving the support he needed academically or emotionally.

A social worker told her about , located in Minneapolis Public Schools’ Wilder Complex and offering intensive supports to children in grades K-8 struggling with mental illness. Despite her nerves, Ann scheduled a visit. In one of her first interactions, an intake person said, “‘Because you’re here looking for help, you’re more advanced than most adults,’” Ann recalled. “I knew at that moment we were in the right place.”

A trauma-informed approach for kids

Jessica Dreischmeier, Catholic Charities Children’s Day Treatment Program director, said that her program is a good match for children like Ann’s sons. Staff not only understand the impact that early childhood trauma can have on mental health, but the program’s approach helps them make progress with kids deemed unfixable by other schools.

“I would say a majority of the youth that come here for treatment have experienced some type of trauma,” Dreischmeier said. “We know that those symptoms can manifest themselves in a number of ways, including depression, aggression, anxiety, ADHD — and we have deep experience working with those kinds of kids.”

With the right approach, she said, most kids can recover from mental illness.

“One day might be hard, but over time we get there with pretty much everybody — which is awesome.”

A long and loyal legacy

Catholic Charities Children’s Day Treatment was founded in 1968 as an extension of , founded in 1869 as a residential shelter for orphans. The day treatment program was created to provide an alternative option for children at St. Joseph’s who needed extra mental health support.

St. Joseph’s Home closed in 2020, but the day treatment program continued. Enrollment is capped at 40 students who work with 17 full-time staff members. Students come from around the metro area but enroll in through a partnership with the district. Mental health services are billed through health insurance.

Many staff members have worked at the center for decades. Karen Johnson, a mental health practitioner who has been employed by the program for 24 years, said she feels a deep connection to the children in her care.

“I should have retired five years ago,” Johnson said. “Each time I have that thought, another kid comes through the door, and  I’m like, ‘Now I have to stay until they finish the program.’ Then another kid comes.”

A focus on parent connection and long-term success for kids

According to the Minnesota Department of Human Services, there are . Still, Dreischmeier said that Catholic Charities’ program remains in high demand.

“The need for mental health services for youth and children in Minnesota has been going up for a while,” she said, “but especially after Covid, it’s particularly evident.”

A typical day for students includes two three-hour blocks – one for academics and the other for mental health therapy and treatment.

Mental health support is delivered in individual and group settings with a focus on parent and guardian involvement, Dreischmeier said. Families are taught how to build strong connections with their child and to reinforce strategies they’re practicing at school.

The kids work on setting goals for their life beyond the program. While students’ individual goals look different, the overall aim is a return to home life and a less restrictive school setting. “We’re hoping our intervention helps kids stay in their home and with their family and not have an out-of-home placement,” Dreischmeier said.

‘We’re not going to leave anybody behind.’

For parents like Ann, the transition to day treatment often comes amid deep distrust of past educational settings. Families arrive feeling guarded, Dreischmeier said. They wonder: “‘Are you going to perceive my child as a problem?’ ‘Will you only see them for the behaviors they are having when they are having a hard time, or will you see my whole child?’”

The kids often wonder the same thing, Johnson said. “A lot of these kids come here with no hope. They think, ‘People say I’m bad so I’m never going to be nothing.’ I try to change that narrative.”

Dreischmeier said that her staff remains undaunted even by the students’ most challenging behaviors.

“If something is hard, we’re going to all come together and work on it and talk about it,” she said. We’re going to move forward all together. We’re not going to leave anybody behind.”

Academically, the aim is not just to keep students on track, but to move them ahead. In traditional school settings with larger class sizes and fewer supports, children with serious mental health issues are often separated from their peers and fall behind.

Dreischmeier said things are run differently at Children’s Day Treatment, where the ratio of adults to students is much higher – often three adults to every six or seven students. “Students are really able to focus in and learn,” she said.

On average, students participate in the program for a year to a year and a half, Dreischmeier said. Most then move back to their local community school. Some are recommended for further services, including residential and outpatient mental health programs.

Surprised by hope

After two years at Children’s Day Treatment, Ann’s middle son graduated  last year. Though he struggled in the beginning, she said, he eventually settled in and found success.

“His graduation was the most incredible thing,” Ann recalled. “Staff said he’d emerged as a leader. We did not know that about my son. To hear his peers get up and give their testimonies about him – there was not a dry eye in the room.”

Today, he’s enrolled at a school in her home district – something she never thought possible – where he continues to receive special education support. Ann’s youngest son enrolled at Children’s Day Treatment in the fall. She’s optimistic: “I’m just grateful for people like them who want to help children like mine.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Almost 20 years ago a San Diego nonprofit created a preschool to focus on the “little guys” — children who experience domestic violence and other  before kindergarten. 

Today,  and it’s something of a model in showing other schools how to address childhood trauma.

Mi Escuelita provides services for kids in a single location that for most other families would require intricate coordination among multiple health care providers, educators and social programs. 

The children learn in a classroom that is always staffed with at least one therapist, they participate in one-on-one therapy, and join group therapy sessions. Their parents take part in special classes, too, where they learn ways to support their children.

Researchers from UC San Diego have paid close attention to Mi Escuelita and followed how its graduates fared after leaving the preschool. The university also works with the school to evaluate outcomes from each cohort of students. Here are four takeaways from those reports.

The kids leave ready for kindergarten

Students who graduate from Mi Escuelia outperform or do at least well as their peers in kindergarten, according to a UC San Diego analysis of their scores in reading and math tests.

It looked at kindergarten students in the Chula Vista Elementary School District from 2007 to 2013 and found a higher percentage of Mi Escuelita met math, reading and writing standards than the district’s general population.

That’s not a given because research shows that children exposed to domestic violence have  than their peers, which can set them back in school. 

And they do well for years

The length of UC San Diego’s study allowed its team to follow Mi Escuelita graduates through fifth grade. The results suggested that their preschool experience helped the kids throughout their childhoods. 

Their average scores on several standardized tests exceeded those of the general population at Chula Vista Elementary School District, especially in math.

“Taken together, the Mi Escuelita program demonstrates clear benefits to children who may otherwise fall quickly and unsparingly behind with regard to school readiness,” the UC San Diego researchers wrote. 

Better relationships at home

Some families turn to Mi Escuelita in moments of distress, such as after experiencing domestic violence. The preschool provides counseling for parents and students alike, which may contribute to behavioral improvements at home.

Over the past five years, 64% of the families in the program reported sensing fewer conflicts and 83% of them noticed an increase in closeness. 

“Families reported that children’s communication, behavior, and listening skills improved both at home and at school,” a UC San Diego team wrote in an evaluation of student and parent surveys that spanned 2020 to 2024. 

It takes a village

Running Mi Escuelita costs about $1.3 million a year, a sum that nonprofit South Bay Community Services raises through a mix of donations and government funding. That cost — along with the challenge of hiring trained educators and therapists — makes the program difficult to replicate. 

But, other schools and government agencies are watching Mi Escuelita to see what kind of services they can carry over to other venues. 

“We can spend less later on intervention programs and alternative facilities,” said Hilaria Bauer, chief early learning services officer at , a Bay Area nonprofit childcare provider. “There will be less truancy, less big behaviors or expulsions or alternative programs, and all of those ‘fix’ initiatives if we really focus on the time in the life of a child that really makes a change.”

The world is a messy place. Most of us figure this out by the time we hit adulthood: However compelling our convictions, however good our intentions, humans are constantly tripping into one another. What looks like virtuous, upstanding behavior through our eyes — always looks different to others. Worse yet, sometimes the Good Thing to Do in a moment can be all but impossible to discern. Do you tell the truth now, even if that causes your friend pain? Do you tell them later, even if your delay hurts many more people? Do you turn to violence to stop the violence of others — and if so, how much? 

Pretty much every moral tradition is clear that harm to children is among the gravest misdeeds. This isn’t complicated. Children merit unique protective cushions because of their enormous potential. How they develop now will shape their — and our — future. Further, children cannot deserve harm. They’re morally blameless — . As messy as the world is, it’s obvious that adults shouldn’t hurt children. Further, systems that are somehow violating this — bombing them, shooting them, starving them, injuring them — are also fundamentally wrong. There are no legitimate excuses. End of discussion. 

Hold that close to your heart as you reflect on the Trump administration’s recent decision to open K–12 campuses to armed enforcement actions. For 14 years, the U.S. federal government had recommended that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents should steer clear of “” like schools, but also churches, hospitals and other community centers. Immediately after taking power, , opening schools across the country to immigration raids. 

To understand the behind this change, it’s worth understanding why officials ever avoided conducting enforcement at these locations. It’s not that federal leaders were reluctant to carry out U.S. laws, rather, it’s that they wanted to separate the potentially dangerous, complex work of immigration enforcement activity from disrupting children’s daily lives. 

As , “We can accomplish our law enforcement mission without denying individuals access to needed medical care, children access to their schools, the displaced access to food and shelter, people of faith access to their places of worship, and more. Adherence to this principle is a bedrock of our stature as public servants.”

Again: Protecting kids is a paramount moral concern. And in 2025, it’s clear that U.S. adults have collectively failed in that task. Today’s K–12 students have weathered the academic and social strains of a deadly global pandemic. They attend school in an era when campus shootings are regularly in the news and natural disasters amplified by climate change have decimated their communities and shuttered their classrooms in places like , and . They’ve watched violent assaults on representative government being not just normalized as part of U.S. politics — but excused and even celebrated by the leaders of one of our major political parties. Is it any wonder that children’s mental health ?

The kids are not all right. This is a terrible moment to introduce more uncertainty and instability into their lives. At least one major district is pushing back. Denver Public Schools this week to keep ICE agents out of schools, with the school board president noting, “Scared children can’t learn.”

Obviously, the Trump administration’s new ICE-in-Your- Classrooms policy could be stressful for children of immigrants, who are uniquely sensitive to the possible consequences of these raids. Research has that increased immigration enforcement activity around children of immigrants . In the weeks since Trump’s order, , regardless of the specific state of their family’s documentation, . 

And yet, this new policy affects all children. , “This administration is breaking with the idea that schools should be an accepting and reassuring space for young people.” Children don’t have to have an immigrant parent to struggle with this moment. It’s hard to imagine how armed law enforcement activity on campus could help them feel safer or help them learn more, especially as the most recent round of math and reading scores have confirmed that the country’s students are falling further off pace, academically speaking. 

Of course, that’s perhaps the point. The new administration’s K–12 education plans are thin (at best) when it comes to proposals for improving how schools support children’s academic achievement. , Trump and his deputies are and . 

This won’t make communities safer or improve kids’ academic performance. Research , shows that are major to their . It also has found that culturally and linguistically diverse kids are some of U.S. schools’ best students, whose presence appears to academic achievement . 

If this debate still seems complicated: remember that the world’s messy. U.S. immigration laws, , should be enforced. Meanwhile, our kids — currently overcoming generationally awful obstacles — deserve to feel safe and secure enough to focus on learning. 

But anyone who reflects on those two public priorities and concludes that children’s well-being is of secondary importance is betraying the depravity of their moral compass. They are showing that they do not, however much they protest, understand what it means to put students first. 

Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a Founding Partner at the Children’s Equity Project, and a father to three public school students. These views are his alone and do not reflect his employers or any organizations with which he may be affiliated. 

In this interview, Hydon, who serves as the director of the School and Educational Settings specialization program at USC’s Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, shares insights on the impact of secondary trauma on educators. Hydon, who has also been a consultant for the U.S. Department of Education, served as president of the American Council on School Work, and led the co-development of an on secondary traumatic stress with other experts in the field. He’s traveled across the country and world to train schools on secondary traumatic stress, many of which were impacted by natural disasters. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What is secondary trauma, and how have you seen it manifest in teachers? 

Secondary traumatic stress is like PTSD, but it’s not your trauma. It’s the trauma of someone that you’re working with. In this case, students. Teachers might hear about neglect, abuse, food insecurity, and they’re exposed to it every day. And so they start to show symptoms that are kind of PTSD symptoms. They can’t sleep, or they avoid certain areas or they’re hyper-vigilant. Sometimes it can make them question whether or not they can stay in the profession.  

I’ve had teachers say to me, “I just don’t think I can do this anymore.”  

What can teachers do to take care of themselves when experiencing secondary trauma?

Self-care is so important, but sometimes it’s hard for teachers because they’re givers. They’re taking care of their students, their families, and sometimes it’s hard to take care of themselves.  

We know that taking care of well-being across life domains — environmental, social, financial, cognitive and spiritual wellbeing can help mitigate the impact of secondary traumatic stress. Taking advantage of vacation, taking your lunch breaks, actually enjoying a good meal, going for a walk outside, making sure you’re checking in–all those things can help remind us that we’re going to be okay. And yes, I might have experienced secondary trauma, but it too will pass.

One thing I’ve seen work really well is groups of teachers coming together for support. In Joppa, Missouri, they had [what they called] The Breakfast Club, where they walked together before school, wore comfortable shoes, and made a rule that they couldn’t talk about work. They’d talk about dinner plans, their weekends—things that weren’t work-related.  

It’s also about finding little moments in the day. Taking a breath. Stepping outside. Even just having a quiet moment to yourself can help. Teachers need to give themselves permission to take a break, even if it’s just for five minutes.  

What can schools do to better support teachers? 

There’s a concept out there called trauma-informed or trauma-responsive schools. It is that everybody in the school is aware of how trauma can impact us. So it’s teachers, it’s bus drivers, coaches. It’s the custodial staff. Everybody in that school knows that trauma can impact all of us in certain ways, and so to be trauma-responsive is to understand that, “Hey, trauma happens. It’s inevitable. It’s going to happen. It’s happened in the past, and it’s going to happen in the future. So let’s be ready. Let’s be understanding. Let’s be gentle. Let’s be aware. Let’s have spaces to bring people together to talk about something.”

Is there anything else you think people should know about secondary trauma among teachers in areas affected by the Palisades, Eaton, and other fires? 

The districts I work with, whether they’re local or regional or national, they’ve been fantastic. When I think of the districts over here—Pasadena, South Pasadena, and LA Unified—I mean, these districts understand crisis response and emergency response and trauma. They’re trained, they’re good at it and they know what they’re doing.  

We should feel safe that our students are going to be taken care of, and that’s important, especially as we see these fires pop up in other places.  

I know that the Santa Monica Malibu School District—it’s a fantastic school district, and the social workers there are awesome. And so we’ve got good people on these grounds and they’re doing good things.

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

“I’m directing the members of my cabinet to return to me within 110 days with resources and information for schools to improve active-shooter drills, minimize this harm, create age-appropriate content and communicate with parents before and after these drills happen,” Biden said during a Thursday afternoon White House event. “We just have to do better and we can do better.” 

Students nationwide participate in active-shooter drills, between school districts and have received mixed reviews as to their effectiveness from students, parents and educators. In some states, including New York, lawmakers have sought to scale back routine drills amid concerns they’ve exacerbated the youth mental health crisis. A approved this summer bans realistic drills that use props and actors to mimic real-world school shooting scenarios. 

Biden also ordered on Thursday the creation of a new task force to assess the threat of conversion kits that allow semi-automatic guns to be modified into fully automatic weapons, so-called “ghost guns” without serial numbers and weapons created with 3D printers. 

The efforts fit into the president’s agenda to toughen gun laws and prevent mass shootings. The Rose Garden announcement also featured Vice President Kamala Harris, who in a tight presidential race against Republican Donald Trump has positioned herself as a gun owning-Democrat in favor of stricter firearms restrictions. Trump has the endorsement of the National Rifle Association.  

“It is a false choice to suggest you are either in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away,” Harris said. “I am in favor of the Second Amendment and I believe we need to reinstate the assault weapons ban and pass universal background checks, safe storage laws and red flag laws.” 

Active shooter drills have become routine in schools nationwide although a White House fact sheet notes there is “very limited research on how to design and deploy” them in a way that’s effective without becoming harmful in themselves. Though the executive order doesn’t mandate the drills or specific strategies on how to conduct them, it directs the U.S. Education Department and the Department of Homeland Security to publish a report outlining the existing research on their efficacy, how to design them in ways that are age-appropriate and “how to prevent students and educators from experiencing trauma or psychological stress associated with these drills.” 

Rob Wilcox, the deputy director of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, told The 74 on Wednesday that the variation in how drills are being conducted presents a need for federal officials to analyze their usefulness and provide guidance around the best path forward. 

Along with “traditional lockdown drills” where students are instructed to shelter in place behind closed doors, he said the Biden administration has been warned about the psychological harms of “unannounced simulations” where “fake guns, fake blood, fake gunshots” and a militarized police response are used to portray real-world assaults. 

“The president and vice president have heard from parents and students across the country about the need to know more about these drills and the need to really understand what our kids are going through,” Wilcox said. “What is the effective way to do it and what are the harmful ways?”

Traumatizing — or empowering? 

Teachers are split on the value of active-shooter drills, according to released this month. Fewer than half of educators said the drills have prepared them for a school shooting. More than two-thirds said they have had no impact on their perceptions of campus safety and just a fifth said they made them feel more safe.

A Pew Research Center survey found that a quarter of teachers experienced lockdowns in the 2022-23 school year because of gun incidents at their campuses. While 39% of teachers gave their schools a fair or poor job of training them to deal with active assailants, a smaller share — 30% — gave their school leadership an excellent or very good rating.

About two-thirds of parents of K-12 students say that children should be required to participate in at least one active-shooter drill per year and 83% were confident their kids’ schools were well equipped to keep them safe, released last fall. While 80% of respondents said the drill should be “evidence-based and age-appropriate,” just 36% said they should feature the sounds of guns or gunshots. 

that active-shooter drills , but other researchers have sought to combat that narrative. A in the peer-reviewed Journal of School Violence found children exposed to gun violence feel safer after undergoing lockdown drills. 

Research into the psychological impact of active-shooter drills and lockdown drills has generally treated all procedures as one in the same, said Jaclyn Schildkraut, the lead author of the Journal of School Violence report and executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at New York’s Rockefeller Institute of Government. Given that schools have deployed a range of drills — and because some efforts may be more effective than others — she said it’s “very important that we do have very clear guidance about what schools are being asked to do.”

Drills that seek to mimic active shootings have, in particular, become a point of controversy. In one in 2019, teachers reported injuries after they were shot with pellet guns during a mock shooting simulation at their elementary school. While some drills have taught kids to shelter in place during a shooting, others have instructed kids to use school supplies as makeshift weapons and fight back against an armed assailant. In some communities, schools have and as a solution to help kids defend themselves. 

But the drills, including those criticized for traumatizing kids, have been credited with saving lives during campus shootings, which remain statistically rare but have reached record highs in the last several years. During a shooting at Michigan’s Oxford High School in 2021, a 16-year-old student was reportedly shot as he charged at the assailant — an act that cost the star running back his life but the county sheriff said likely saved his classmates. 

“We don’t light schools on fire to practice a fire drill, yet we know that some schools are simulating active-shooter situations to practice for an active shooter,” Schildkraut said. 

The effects of conducting realistic shooting scenarios, she said, should not be conflicted with the impacts of less-invasive emergency preparation like lockdowns. 

Keeping guns locked

Thursday’s executive order coincided with the release of a new Education Department tool designed to encourage families to keep their guns at home behind lock and key. 

The outlines state safe-storage and child-access prevention laws, which have been adopted in 31 states and penalize gun owners who fail to lock their weapons or who provide access to them to an unsupervised child. Though no such laws exist at the federal level, the Education Department website says the state-based efforts are an “important step towards keeping our youth, schools, and communities safe.”

The website also features examples of community and school district measures to promote firearm storage, including by the Cincinnati, Ohio, school district and a campaign at Colorado’s Cherry Creek School District, which distributed several hundred gun locks to families for free last year.

“When school administrators communicate with parents about safe storage of firearms in their homes, it motivates parents to act,” Biden said Thursday. 

About three-quarters of school shooters get their guns from a parent or another close relative, according to . In about half of cases, the guns had been readily accessible.

Prosecutors have increasingly turned to the actions — and inactions — of the parents of school shooters, who are . 

Earlier this month, a 54-year-old father from Georgia was arrested on murder charges after his 14-year-old son was accused of carrying out a shooting at Apalachee High School that left two of his classmates and two math teachers dead. The boy was given an AR-15-style rifle as a holiday gift last year.

In April, Michigan parents Jennifer and James Crumbley were each given decade-long prison sentences in first-of-their-kind convictions after their son, who was 15 years old at the time, killed four students in the 2021 Oxford High School shooting. The parents gave their son the 9-millimeter handgun used in the assault as a Christmas gift and stored it in an unlocked drawer in their bedroom despite warning signs the teenager planned to act violently. 

“After current events, especially in Georgia, it’s beyond clear that safe storage in the home is essential,” Wilcox, the White House gun prevention office deputy director, told The 74. “Fourteen-year-olds should not have access to assault weapons.” 

Each day after his shift as a machine operator, Eliberto Ortega used to walk through the front door of his east Houston home, take off his steel-toed work boots and call out, “¿Quién es la princesa de Papá?” meaning, “Who’s Papa’s princess?”

His daughter would holler back her own name, bolting into his arms. Ortega would scoop up his little girl and, after the hug, she would ask to carry his lunchbox into the kitchen.

It’s been over two years since Ortega’s daughter, now 8 and a third-grader at Houston ISD’s J.R. Harris Elementary School, has felt her father’s embrace.

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Ortega died of cardiac arrest while sick with the coronavirus in July 2021. Since then, there’s been a father-sized hole in the lives of Ortega’s daughter and her younger brother, who is 7. His daughter still struggles at times to sleep at night, as swirling memories of her dad occupy her thoughts. His son has become more reserved, listening to music about loss and longing.

“We still have an invisible string to him all the way up to heaven,” said Ortega’s daughter, whose name is being withheld by the Houston Landing due to the sensitive nature of discussing her mental health. “He’s with you. It’s connected with you but you cannot see the string.”

In Harris County, thousands of students continue to grapple with the long shadow of grief cast by the deaths of parents and caregivers from COVID-19. Yet today, with federal stimulus funding for schools drawing to an end and state lawmakers dedicating virtually no additional money for public schools during the 2023 legislative session, education leaders are starting to make tough choices about whether to maintain mental health support for children like the Ortegas.

Their decisions will have lifelong effects for students quietly struggling with their anguish. Researchers have found the sudden loss of a parent when it comes to impact on academic performance.

“​​Those kids who don’t want to think about or talk about what happened tend to struggle longer,” said Julie Kaplow, executive director of the Trauma and Grief Center at the Texas-based Hackett Center for Mental Health. Professionals trained in trauma-informed care — including those placed at schools — can help children process their grief in a healthy way, she said.

No government agency has tallied the number of pandemic-bereaved children in the Houston area, but the number might reach about 5,000. An estimated 41,000 Texas children lost a caregiver to the virus, according to a maintained by the Imperial College of London, and about 12 percent of the state’s coronavirus deaths occurred in Harris County, Texas Health and Human Services show.

A 5,000-person estimate could understate the magnitude of the losses because parent deaths due to reasons other than infection, such as drug overdoses and other health issues, also increased nationwide during the pandemic.

A family man

In the Ortega family, before the virus that changed everything, Sundays meant time with Dad.

It was the one free day in Eliberto’s six-day work week, said Laura Ortega, his widow. After going to Mass in the morning, the afternoon would become an adventure of his design. Many weeks, the family would enjoy a bite to eat, then head to a flea market. The four would peruse the multicolored stalls and his daughter would ask to go on rides that her younger brother was still scared of. Eliberto, relishing the chance to spoil his daughter a little, would always say yes, Laura said.

The husband and wife met at a Houston nightclub when Laura was 19, him coaxing her onto the dance floor. After that, the couple dated for several years, at first only meeting up at parks to swing on the swing sets, then later watching Eliberto’s favorite Spanish telenovelas and dancing together to música norteña. Eventually, they married.

Both dreamed of becoming parents, but Laura struggled to get pregnant. Several years later, when her belly started to swell, it felt like a miracle. A second child followed a year afterward. It felt like everything was falling into place.

But one evening in 2021 shattered the future Laura had pictured. Eliberto, who had tested positive for the coronavirus earlier that day, took a rapid turn for the worse. As his children slept in the same room, his breathing became raspy, his lungs closing in on themselves. His eyes rolled back into his head as he slumped in his chair. A trickle of blood slid down from his nose.

Desperately, Laura tried speaking to him. She got no response.

“I literally felt at that moment like he took his last breath in my face,” Laura said. “Because after that, I didn’t feel his heartbeat. I didn’t feel nothing.”

Emergency medical staff arrived at the home to perform CPR and transport Eliberto to the hospital. But hours later, doctors pronounced Eliberto dead.

The next day, the kids arose to an alternate universe. As the news sunk in, the brother and sister spent the following days alternating between bewildered silences and hysterics.

It was late July, just a few weeks before the first day of school. The return to classes would inevitably mean classmates and teachers asking her kids how their summers had gone. Laura decided she had to get them help from a counselor.

Mental health needs mount

Across Texas, schools saw a surge of demand for the sort of services Laura was seeking.

The Texas Education Agency’s School Mental Health Task Force found a “staggering increase” in the rates of students experiencing depression, anxiety and other mental health concerns since the pandemic, according to its 2023 report. About half of roughly 750 school districts surveyed by the task force reported rising rates of “distress related to trauma and grief.”

Sean Ricks, senior manager of HISD’s crisis intervention team, said he saw a surge in student psychological challenges during and after lockdown. The district launched a 24/7 crisis hotline that fielded about 600 calls, according to HISD.

“If I can just use the Richter scale … we were used to tremors of 2.5 or 3,” Ricks said. “At the return of the students to school, I would say it was probably a 5.5 or 6.”

A shortage of psychological support for students has long plagued Texas public schools. For nearly a decade, zero districts in the state had all the recommended ratios of counselors, nurses, psychologists and social workers, a .

But facing never-before-seen levels of psychological distress among students amid the pandemic, and simultaneously flush with cash thanks to the passage of a federal stimulus package that sent billions to Texas campuses, districts began investing in mental health.

As of 2022, Texas schools had spent $64 million in pandemic relief grants on student mental health needs, according to data the TEA provided to the Landing. All told, districts planned to devote over $300 million to the issue, according to a , the most recent available. The vast majority of the spending went to bringing on new staff, the TEA data show.

The investments spurred tangible, though modest, increases in the number of adults that students struggling with their mental health could turn to.

Statewide, schools added about 820 school counselors and 230 social workers from 2019-20 to 2022-23, according to the Landing’s analysis of TEA data. The change nudged the number of students per counselor or social worker statewide from 389 down to 363. Although school counselors in Texas are required to have training in mental health support, their jobs typically also involve helping with scheduling and making plans for after graduation.

In HISD, which lags behind statewide averages in mental health resources per child, the shifts were more extreme. Over the same period, the student-to-counselor-and-social-worker ratio decreased from 793-to-1 to 547-to-1. HISD also brought on more staffers known as “wraparound specialists” meant to address students’ non-academic needs and this year that offer free psychological services.

Families like the Ortegas would finally have better access to the services they were looking for, it seemed.

‘They never call back’

That’s not exactly how the situation played out for Laura.

Before the 2021-22 year began, just weeks after the death of her husband, she spoke with leaders at her children’s elementary school. She explained what her kids had experienced and asked what counseling services might be available. To her astonishment, she learned the school did not have a counselor.

J.R. Harris Elementary, facing a tight budget, had no guidance counselor to start the 2021-22 school year, Principal Jessica Rivero confirmed during an early September community event attended by the Landing.

In the meantime, without options at her children’s campus, Laura looked for psychology practices after she enrolled in Medicaid following Eliberto’s death. Medicaid had suggested several providers, so she went down the list calling every number. It yielded nothing.

“They will just say, ‘Well, you can call this place, and you can call this place, and you can call this place,’” Laura said. “And you call them, but they never call back.”

The lag time without access to counseling meant Laura’s children spent roughly six months going to school every day, attempting to maintain a semblance of normal life, with no outlet to process their loss other than with family members who were also grieving.

That unmet need can be dangerous to children, said Bradley Smith, director of the University of Houston’s school psychology doctorate program. Young people often need therapy catered to dealing with traumatic experiences in order to process them in a healthy way, he said.

“The saying, ‘Time heals all wounds,’ that doesn’t really apply to trauma,” Smith said. “Just the passage of time doesn’t automatically take care of things. And so I think we have a lot of kids walking around that are still experiencing negative effects of the pandemic that haven’t been worked out.”

J.R. Harris Elementary ultimately added a school counselor midway through the 2021-22 school year. While the counselor was not a child psychologist, she agreed to meet regularly with Laura’s children throughout the spring semester. The school later added a second counselor.

Talking about the loss of their dad in one-on-one meetings over the course of months helped Laura’s children begin to heal, she said. Then, in mid-2023, Laura finally found a therapy practice that would accept her insurance. Her kids now attend sessions regularly.

Still, it can be hard for Laura to gauge how her children are processing their grief.

This past summer, she received a troubling report from a staffer at her son’s YMCA camp who said she saw him cutting himself with scissors on two occasions. The second time, the staffer said she asked Laura’s son what he was doing, and he said he wanted to be with his father.

The episode triggered her own memories of childhood trauma for Laura, who cut herself when she was young while struggling to find an outlet to process difficult experiences.

“I want to make sure he doesn’t go through the same thing I went through, that it was hard to get somebody to help, or to listen, to hear me out,” Laura said.

A fiscal cliff

Some of the mental health resources that Texas schools invested into supporting students’ mental health may now be in jeopardy.

The federal stimulus money that helped fund many positions will end in the fall of 2024, meaning districts will soon have to make tough choices about whether to keep or cut any recently added roles.

And state lawmakers, despite a nearly $33 billion surplus, ended their legislative sessions in 2023 without dedicating any new mental health funds to Texas public schools. One promised $100,000 or more per district for students’ psychological needs, but it died early in the legislative process. Barring an unexpected call for a special session, schools will not see significantly more funding until 2025 at the earliest.

That means school leaders likely will have to decide whether to pull money from other sources, such as teacher salaries, to pay for keeping recently added mental health services.  Those decisions will play into student learning, said Brian Woods, deputy executive director of advocacy for the Texas Association of School Administrators.

“A student with mental health needs, just like a student who’s hungry or can’t see well, is going to really struggle academically,” Woods said.

In HISD, district leaders hired seven “intensive mental health specialists” for positions that will not extend beyond the deadline to spend federal funds this year, spokesperson Joseph Sam said.

Nearby Fort Bend and Conroe independent school districts added six and 10 new mental health-related roles, respectively, thanks to stimulus funds. The positions will remain indefinitely, district officials said.

And Katy Independent School District said it has yet to decide the fate of 20 roles funded by the stimulus package, which totaled $4 million and included counselors and social workers.

Districts that decide against retaining pandemic-era mental health support fit into a troubling trend, said Kaplow, the Hackett Center grief specialist. People are eager to forget about COVID-19 and its lasting effects, she said.

“I do think it is in the rear-view mirror of most individuals,” Kaplow said. “I think that the silence around it is making it even more difficult for the children and families who are grieving.”

‘He’s watching them’

Laura does her best to erase the silence and show her children that it’s OK to talk about their father. She frequently sports the cowboy boots her husband bought for her last birthday before he died. She keeps a locket around her neck that, when the light hits it right, reveals an image of the couple stealing a kiss.

She and her kids still sleep in the same room where her husband died because there’s no extra space in the house they share with their cousins. On the wall, she hung a framed picture of her children’s father wearing a white cowboy hat and tan blazer, hands stuffed into pockets, eyes shadowed by the brim, but gaze strong and directly into the camera. A teddy bear named Eric, Eliberto’s nickname, sits on the bed.

Laura’s son said he often brings his father’s voice to mind. If he needs help staying calm, like if someone is annoying him at school, he remembers Eliberto.

“In my head, I don’t forget him,” Laura’s son said. “I know, if I forget him, I’m never going to know him anymore.”

Now, in lieu of the old rituals the family had, they have created new ones. Every Sunday after church, Laura and her children visit Eliberto’s gravesite. Most of the time, the kids race through the headstones in a game of tag or soccer.

Meanwhile, Laura sits by the stone marker, enjoying the fact her children can, once again, play in the presence of their father.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

A familiar anxiety set in. 

It wasn’t until New York City high school science teacher Joshua Modeste saw photos of the teenagers involved in the December stabbing the tension eased: He did not know her. 

A little over a year had passed since he lost his first student, , 16, shot in the stomach a few blocks away from school. Soon after, he lost another when Benji’s best friend was briefly incarcerated. Ever since, when he hears about violence involving a young person, he feels dread build in his gut.

A few hours passed before he was reminded of why. A student, hanging out in his room over lunch to do makeup work, yelled out, “What?! Oh my God,” before bolting into the hall. The Harlem victim, Saniyah, was her friend.

Modeste felt unprepared, and worn out. Within one year, he and his mostly Black and Latino students at Harlem’s Urban Assembly School of Global Commerce navigated death, prisons, racial violence, a continuing pandemic. As one of the school’s few Black male teachers he shouldered a disproportionate weight through it all, and isolation has become . 

And while the youth mental health crisis mounts, so does the toll for educators on the frontlines — especially as force teachers like Modeste to manage alone. Traction is building for student supports, but some worry teachers are being left behind — a direct hit to learning recovery.

“Nobody in the teaching department or other teacher candidates talked to us about that stuff — trauma and grief, emotions, and how to manage all of that while trying to maintain a classroom of 30 kids who are going through their own situations at home,” Modeste said of his teacher preparation program at SUNY Plattsburgh.��

(While there is no class on these topics at Plattsburgh, the curriculum has been revised since Modeste’s graduation in 2016 and “these themes are woven through many of our courses,” Maureen Squires, chair of the joint bachelor’s and master’s program, told The 74.) 

“It was kind of like, ‘If you can’t handle this, then this is not the job for you,’” Modeste said. Still, there’s not a doubt in his mind that he should continue teaching. In fact, he’s flourishing professionally, last year among the prestigious FLAG Awardees for Teaching Excellence. 

But he is struggling. 

Teachers are for experiencing more job-related stress than any other profession. Yet help for classroom leaders is hard to come by. Mental health insurance coverage varies district to district, if visits are covered at all. Even in New York City — where teacher copays for outpatient, in-network mental health care max out at $25 — provider shortages and stigma can prevent educators from accessing care consistently.��

The demand for professional support is also growing rapidly. Anxiety and depression symptoms in teachers are on the rise, highest for early career educators and teachers of color, according to Leigh McLean, a researcher at the University of Delaware. 

Overall in the 2018-19 school year, 4,550 New York City teachers accessed services through their union, the United Federation of Teachers. Last year, the number exceeded 20,000. Daily calls to the program soared, from about 20 to 100 per day; hundreds of school social workers volunteered after school and on weekends to meet the need.��

For McLean, who has studied the impact of teacher depression for years, the reality is simple — educators have been given an impossible task. 

“Especially through COVID, we’re putting the emphasis on teachers themselves to support their own well-being. But we’ve created a system that is not supportive of their well-being,” she said.

Modeste knows this to be true. Now in his seventh year of teaching, he relied on instinct, not training, to meet Saniyah’s friend in the hall that December afternoon. 

He asked about their , whether her mom knew her too, what she might need. He told her grief surfaces in many ways, but “I can’t tell you where that starts or ends,” before offering an empty room for her to cry. 

‘My anxiety lives in my belly’

The son of Trinidadian pastors and youngest of three brothers, Modeste didn’t grow up talking about mental health. Don’t cry, give it to God in prayer. 

“Society has told me that Black men are supposed to be strong and figure things out on their own,” he said. “Black men don’t talk to me about therapy. So it doesn’t seem like something that’s normal.”

But the emotional weight was building each day. Soon after the murder, one of Modeste’s students sat visibly crying in class. Benji’s best friend. He did not know what to wear to the funeral — this would be his first. 

Entering grades at the semester’s end, Benji’s name on his roster stared at him, waiting for an entry. In November, Facebook memories brought back pictures, and emotions, at the year anniversary. The funeral was the first time he had seen many of his students cry, especially the boys.

“I thought I got through it. And then this time of the year resurfaced some stuff for me,” he said.

Psychologists dub the phenomenon or empathetic distress. Studies have mainly focused on clinical staff like social workers or therapists. Tish Jennings, an expert on teacher stress and social-emotional learning at the University of Virginia, said researchers have only recently started to explore how it affects teachers and students. 

“You need therapy when you have trauma exposure,” she told The 74. “It’s very hard these days to get good treatment, because there’s such a huge need, and there’s such a shortage of good clinicians.”

Because of the clinical shortages impacting New York City teachers, “members who cannot wait for an appointment sometimes go to a mental health provider outside the networks. These professionals often don’t take insurance and can charge what they want,” said Alison Gendar, a UFT spokesperson.

Unaware of the options provided by the union and in crisis, Modeste urgently searched for a male therapist of color last fall. He ultimately paid over $120 for a month of Talkspace sessions, but could not afford to continue treatment. The NYC Department of Education did not provide grief counseling to staff or students after losing Benji, according to Modeste.

“If you have to deal with traumatized people all the time and you don’t have the skills, you can try to numb yourself as a way to protect yourself from feeling those feelings,” Jennings explained. “You can also become kind of challenged or jaded, sarcastic as a way to protect yourself. And you can also become very overwhelmed and feel depressed and hopeless.”

Teachers’ depression is shown to — teachers plan less, , may rely on independent or group instead of the more demanding whole-class instruction, and are less warm with students. 

High stress , too; Jennings described a scenario where a teacher under extreme stress is quicker to overreact, taking a small disruption personally, “I might not realize this is normal kid behavior and become more punitive in response to that.”

Ideally, teachers should receive training or therapy to become aware of their emotional state so as to, “respond to situations thoughtfully instead of reacting automatically,” she added. 

Modeste is beginning to recognize when physical sensations pop up and articulate his needs, or to meditate — skills he picked up at a mindfulness workshop by NYC Men Teach. 

“My anxiety lives in my belly,” he said.

Experts told The 74 teaching mindfulness and compassionate is necessary, but by themselves, cannot reduce the high levels of stress teachers face. The most effective changes are system-wide, not individual: comprehensive health care packages; staff devoted to teacher well-being; professional development; and establishing .��

An invisible tax

They’re the kinds of support that teachers are craving, particularly those who serve students disproportionately impacted by poverty, homelessness, incarceration or violence. For Modeste, constant exposure to violence and death in the community and online weighs heavy on the mind. In his youth, the only time he saw dead bodies was at funerals. 

Last May during class, he confronted what he called a new “death culture:” a student watching the Buffalo grocery store massacre video on Twitch during class. He had mistaken it, like many young people, for a first-person shooter game. This fall, images of rappers Takeoff and PnB Rock’s death circulated.

“I was like, ‘No, why are you watching these things? Do you understand the impact that this stuff is having on you?’” he recalled. “I don’t know if people are processing with them, what that means for you to look at that person, someone that you looked up to or somebody that you listen to their music, to see a picture of them on the floor dead.” 

It’s also not lost on him that, for some students, he may be the only one with whom they’re comfortable talking. Researchers and those in the field refer to this as an “” on educators of color, often among the few adults in a school who represent their students’ racial identities, are more likely to share life experiences.��

Black teachers report having to discipline students of color and be liaisons to families more often because of their race, according to the Center for Black Educator Development. They may also navigate more lack of trust from administrators and colleagues.

Compared to white male teachers, Black teachers spend counseling students outside of class, about five hours per week. Modeste, for instance, shared his phone number with students when they went remote for the first time in the spring of 2020 — a way to stay connected if they needed it. And many did. 

He fielded calls throughout distance learning, while battling his own anxiety and isolation, witnessing anti-Black violence week after week. In sometimes hour-long conversations, he listened to students vent about fights they had with their mother; college applications and whether STEM could really be an option for them.��

Since returning to class, some have opened up about feeling hypersexualized, like they have to perform masculinity and some idea of what it is to be a Black man. Modeste keeps a note from one student, who was suicidal while in his class, in his desk at all times.

While the staff at Global Commerce is racially diverse, Modeste finds himself dispelling assumptions staff place on students — about how they spend their money or why their families live in nearby affordable housing projects — something no one had done for him. And like most other , Modeste is one of the longest-serving teachers.��

“It creates a situation where students feel either abandoned or they feel like they don’t have anyone to connect to … It puts an extra responsibility on me,” he said. 

The research is clear in this regard, according to McLean: “Teachers and students in these underserved contexts are really experiencing the most trauma and are the ones that need the most prioritized and targeted support.”

Modeste knew that would be his reality before beginning his career, but he’s still realizing the toll. 

In December, he briefly tried psychotherapy again through a free Betterhelp trial, offered through a teacher honor society. He had a couple sessions with a Black male therapist and wanted to continue, but the $200 per month price tag stopped him. 

For now, Modeste and his advisory students have started role-play scenarios on setting boundaries and saying no, swapping TV shows and music that helps them cope with feeling overwhelmed. Leaning on cultural affinity groups and colleagues, he is finding ways to “reframe” the parts of his life that serve as informal therapy: journaling, writing affirmations like ‘focus’ and ‘love’ on his bathroom mirror in Expo marker and caring for his pet fish.

In his Ph.D. program at Columbia Teachers College, he’s researching ways to make science education more culturally responsive, and the experiences of male science teachers of color.��

He doesn’t hide emotions anymore, or ignore what’s happening outside of school. His default demeanor is bubbly, but on days he’s going through something, he smiles and talks less. 

“And kids will ask me like, you know, ‘Yo, Modeste are you OK?’ That’s when I open up … ‘Oh, you know, I’m going through some stuff with my family, I just need some space right now,’” he said. “I think that that shows them that when I ask them if they’re OK, the responses that I’m trying to elicit.”

A rare silence in a first grade classroom changed S. Renee Mitchell’s life. 

To learn names as a guest artist, Mitchell prompted students at Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary in Portland, Oregon to pair their intros with an adjective, something they liked about themselves: “Brave Brian”, “Kind Kyla”. A quiet pattern in body language emerged: Black students dropped and shook their heads.

“I kept seeing it over and over and it was just like, Oh, what’s happening? The Black kids are not able to identify something positive,” Mitchell said, her eyes brimming as she spoke. “I still get emotional about it. Because it reminded me of me. I was a kid who couldn’t tell you positive things about myself because I didn’t hear positive things reflected back, not even in my household.” 

At the time, Mitchell did not consider herself an educator. She’d been working with Portland schools as a way to connect with her community after leaving The Oregonian — where she worked as a Pulitzer Prize nominated . Still, that evening, the career journalist wrote what would become a semi-autobiographical children’s book: The Awakening of Sharyn: A Shy & Brown Super Gyrl. 

It’s a tale of how a young person can come to love all of themself, especially the parts others seem to disagree with. Through words, Mitchell found a way to model how to heal from pain and build a positive self image — the purpose she would dedicate her life to in the decade that followed. 

She shared a draft of her children’s book with that group of reticent first graders, hopeful they could realize their brilliance young and maybe skirt the feelings of depression and fear that she felt for so long. By talking about her own feelings of shame and isolation as a kid, she opened the door for youth to open up without fear of judgment; shed their shame. 

She then facilitated what would be the first of many ‘Superhero Awakening Ceremonies’ at a community center. The space filled with color, glitter and exclamation as children illustrated what they loved about themselves on capes, masks and paper. Parents were invited into the classroom to celebrate and sing an empowerment song: “Thank you superhero, I think you are amazing. I love you, superhero. You have so much style, you make me want to sing.” 

What would have been a lackluster introduction exercise transformed into an outpouring of love for the young people who needed to hear it. And in seeing them, and their pain, Mitchell helped them engage differently in the classroom.

It was one of many experiences Mitchell now has of prompting herself and others across generations to come together and use art as therapy. 

A self-described Creative Revolutionist, she imagines what art-inspired events or connections are possible, rather than what’s established and “allowed to happen.” She began hosting middle school poetry slams and family Write Nights, where parents and caregivers worked through prompts with their children.

“All of this for me is interconnected, it’s intergenerational. So yes, I love working with youth. It’s what I specialize in,” Mitchell said. “But it’s not the only thing that I do. Because in order to really have an effect on youth, you have to have an effect on community. And at the end of the day, I’m trying to do what was never done for me.”

Her approach — “I have an idea. Let’s just keep rolling with it till the wheels fall off,” — got her noticed by the then principal of Portland’s most diverse high school, Roosevelt. She was recruited to teach and stayed on for four years as the only Black educator. 

“I taught journalism, but it was also like, how can I mother? How can I treat these like my own children?” she said. “How would I want them to be seen in the classroom? And that’s how I behaved.”

She’d start her days sourcing leftover bagels and bananas for students who came to school hungry and carved out class time for poetry, reinforcing for young people, “you don’t have to do or present things in the way people expect.” 

Mitchell founded Roosevelt’s first Black Girl Magic Club with funding from the city’s Office of Youth Violence Prevention. Young girls gathered to dance, coexist; process their families, relationships and what it meant to be Black in Portland. She encouraged them to explore poetry as a medium — for its ability to make pain into something beautiful and allow the mind to wander. 

In 2018, three of the four winners of Stand for Children’s $16,000 were members of Black Girl Magic Club. Their applications, one of which was submitted as a poem, explored trauma and their sense of self. After some of them performed their stories at a MLK celebration, adults approached them in tears: they felt seen, wished they could be as brave, and wanted to celebrate them for their vulnerability. They were stunned that their personal stories were impacting people in ways they hadn’t imagined. 

Mitchell was determined to hone the success into something greater for more of Portland. And after four years as a teacher, she also felt more could be done to support her community outside of the traditional school system than within it. She also decided to pursue a doctorate degree in education at the University of Oregon, and began training teachers and community members about how to help Black children heal from racial trauma.

Acknowledging — not hiding from — traumatic experiences became the seedling for her youth leadership development nonprofit, I Am MORE: Making Ourselves Resilient Everyday. Founded in 2018, I Am MORE has earned three social emotional learning awards from the New York based NoVo Foundation, and Mitchell’s impact was formally recognized when the city named her their 2019 Spirit of Portland winner. Each summer, the organization hosts a paid leadership training internship where youth discuss financial literacy, colorism, toxic masculinity, racial trauma and other life issues.

“We help young people understand that they are MORE than the worst thing that has ever happened to them,” their website reads. To this day, the work mirrors Mitchell’s instincts with the shy first graders at MLK: recognize pain and create ways for young people to heal with each other and the adults around them. I Am MORE cohosts everything from open mic nights, where some teens just listen quietly, to camping trips focused on human connection. 

The impact is felt inside and outside of the classroom: young people learn to express and advocate for themselves, in classrooms, at home, or in relationships. 

“My work as an artist in the schools… helped me understand everything that I’ve done started with trauma. It was me seeing those kids, connecting that with my own trauma, and then trying to figure out — how do I make something out of that?” 

The process . She began processing her childhood, sexual assault and domestic violence through poetry and playwriting as a young adult.

The middle child of eight siblings and a miscarriage, Mitchell grew up unseen and misunderstood. Often the only Black student in her Northern California and Oregon classrooms, she was frequently isolated and bullied, including at home by her brothers. While her father, an educator and community activist himself, introduced her to Black thinkers, history and social commentary early on, he passed away suddenly when Mitchell was 11. Ever since, she yearned for a “reconnection” to the positive roots she associated with his stories, work and sprawling library. 

“When youth experience something, they feel like this is the first time this has ever happened, and it’s only happening to them. And so I was really clear about some of the trauma that I experienced and the death of my dad — how that after that I started thinking about suicide,” she said. 

“Even though I was smart, even though I was obedient, even though I was a great cleaner, even though I did everything I was supposed to do, I still was miserable and depressed and overlooked and suicidal and no one really paid attention.”

In high school, a biracial student that Mitchell tried to befriend said she had to cut ties, lest she be identified with being Black, too. The isolation and harm from predominantly white environments was an accepted reality that followed her until she attended a historically Black university. 

Though she felt liberated at Florida A&M — for the first time, surrounded by Black joy — in her first semester she was raped. Two years later, an abusive partner emotionally isolated her and repeatedly threatened to shoot her friends. The violent partnership stirred up previous suicidal thoughts.

“I sat on the bed and I got his gun from the closet on the top shelf. And I sat on the bed, and I put it to my head. And then I was like, ‘What am I doing?’” 

“That was a turning point for me. And it also helped me have a depth of compassion for youth who may be going through the same thing and don’t have that thing that shifts — that moment,” she said, donning a silver chain that reads ‘resilient’. “Everything in me is fighting for that kid.”

Mitchell, who also survived domestic violence in her second marriage, talks about her trauma often, through poetry, playwriting and performance. After speaking for a community college class, one student responded with an essay: her abuser trained her not to talk. After hearing Mitchell’s story, she felt granted “permission” in a way, to process and heal from what happened.

Mitchell keeps notes like these, and student art, within an arm’s reach at her home desk. She says they are reminders of her purpose, why her life led her back to weaving her community together in Portland. In the last year alone, I am MORE has partnered with other organizations to orchestrate art galleries, Black power movie nights, quilting and financial literacy workshops.

“This is not a job for me. This is a life path because of the trauma that I experienced. Because of the many times where I felt like my life is worthless. And understanding as a teacher, so many kids are going through this same thing every day,” Mitchell said. “They just need someone to see them in that moment and remind them of who they really are.” 

Craving a place of belonging

Mitchell is chipping away at the walls between communities in Portland, the same place she and her sisters hated so much as ostracized teens they graduated early to leave. 

Racism is baked into the region’s history — in 1859, Oregon became the only state in the nation to explicitly ban Black people from living within its borders with an exclusion clause in its constitution. The city was fiercely redlined; Northeast Portland’s Albina neighborhood was established as a Black stronghold.

City projects decimated the community under the guise of “urban renewal.” . For five decades, an empty stretch of land remained — the Hospital never grew. Mitchell felt sick driving past the lot. A new Black-led project is now working to build affordable homes, a community garden and shared office space on a plot returned to the community by Legacy Health. 

“Now, I have been accustomed to racism, but Oregon had a particular kind of racism. And I was like, I never want to live here again, I just want to escape,” Mitchell said, reflecting on her state of mind as she headed off to attend Florida A&M. In her teens, there were no gathering spaces or community experiences for Portland’s Black youth. 

The same cannot be said today. is reviving a cultural icon, its building home to the former Albina Arts Center, a destination for young and old in the 60s and 70s. A hub of learning, dance, music and intergenerational joy, community members came to the Center to access free photography, Swahili and modeling classes for just over a decade. 

Mitchell signed the lease in February as the pandemic wore on, taking responsibility for the Center’s next chapter from . With support from art curator Bobby Fouther and lifelong Albina resident Sunshine Dixon, Grant began the Soul Restoration Project and in fall 2021. 

Without adequate funds to keep the Albina Arts Center open, the institution so central to Black Portland had shuttered in 1977 – and would stay closed for years. Nonprofits like without success to buy and restore the space, now managed by the Oregon Community Foundation. While a feminist bookstore leased the space from 2006-2019, it remained mostly vacant, save the occasional community event, until Grant made it home to the Soul Restoration Project in 2021.

Residents describe a particular bookstore that mirrored Albina’s energy : Reflections, where they would run into neighbors, cousins, playing dominos, laughing and drinking coffee. A Black Cheers, in Mitchell’s sister Linda’s words, where everyone knew your name. Small but beloved. 

The pandemic shut down events. Young people began telling Mitchell they hadn’t eaten, washed up, or brushed their teeth for days in spring 2020 because they had no motivation. 

There was an acute need for a youth-centered community gathering space, one centered on mental health and wellness.

At the time, I Am MORE led hybrid programming at its coworking office space, but were constantly sushed for making “too much noise,” in the heat of conversation or laughter about their sexualities, hyper masculinity, colorism. They needed a bigger space to “show, to be ourselves,” safely.

“Not having access to those kind of spaces…you just don’t know how to ground yourself,” Mitchell said. “That’s the kind of thing we’re trying to revive…if I come here, my soul is going to be fed…I’m gonna walk away feeling better about myself and my connection to the community. That’s what’s missing in this very tiny Black community here in Portland, Oregon.” 

‘It’s helping me get to where I want to be’

On a Friday afternoon in early March, Manny Dempsey, a 9th grader, gets settled in an armchair and flips through an early draft of his children’s book on an iPad. It’s a series of letters addressed to his unborn son. 

He waits quietly for a publishing brainstorm with Elias Moreno-Lothe, I Am MORE’s “Vibologist” and youth director, who is DJing across the room, cohosting their weekly open mic night, Freestyle Fridays. The art mentorship, and atmosphere, is not something Dempsey can access at school. 

“It’s not a place that I love but it is home,” he quickly says of Portland. When asked about the Soul Restoration Center, he flashes a smile. It felt like an art gallery the first time he walked in a few weeks before. It’s where he could pop in after school to meet generations of Portland artists and dream big about the children’s book that’s become close to his heart, a love letter to future generations.

“The space is really good to me. It’s helping me get to where I want to be in my future. I want to make comic books and share my art worldwide and not just in one space,” Dempsey said, sitting in the gentle sensory explosion that is the Soul Restoration Center at 14 NE Killingsworth. 

Soft hip hop beats and the occasional Lauryn Hill are a constant, as are the sounds of a distant water fountain and faint smokiness from incense. Light from the front wall of windows showcases walls decked in Black art, ranging from humorous (a lifesize bronze LeBron James statue) to nostalgic and painful. 

A central stage is framed by a large skylight — some of Mitchell’s artwork hangs in the center, tributes to ancestors that read “heal.” Tucked at the bottom of a shelf are a row of teddy bears. 

Mitchell’s crew have decorated the open room to feel like home. Couches and close to a dozen rugs, a mix of mustard yellow, brown and red. 

“We know that people are coming in tense. We know that they don’t have space to gather. And in every way we want to lower those defenses, particularly with our youth,” she said.

The city, wanting to bolster youth development in the wake of police violence and Black Lives Matter protests, by . Mitchell became the fund’s first grantee, which enabled her to hire more staff, pay artists, plan citywide empowerment programming for the year and decorate the space. 

Many describe the Center as one of healing, particularly necessary in Portland right now as hundreds grieve the loss of loved ones. In 2021, Portland were recorded, surpassing the city’s previous record of 66 and numbers seen in much larger cities like San Francisco. Black families were disproportionately affected.

Sunshine Dixon, who joined Mitchell’s team as a community connector after working with Darell Grant, came to realize Portland’s youngest are attuned to and looking for ways to address the violence. Outside of the North Portland’s public library, she and Grant provided art supplies and encouraged young people to work through whatever was on their mind. 

One nine year old drew a man with a hole in his head, with bullets around the edges of the frame. 

“I said, can you tell me more about this picture, and he said yeah, there’s a hole in this guy’s head because you have to have a hole in your head if you don’t believe there’s gun violence,” Dixon said.

“This place is also addressing black youth and recognizing that they need a place to come, they need a fugitive space, space to be. They need a place of healing. They need a place of safety,” she added. 

Near the end of 2021, Mitchell began brainstorming more ways to meet the community’s emotional need to heal from violence through programming. “How can we not distract but give them something different?” 

She invited a renowned quilter to lead a workshop and share the behind her craft; during times of enslavement, Black women repurposed discarded food scraps, bags and clothing to make quilts. 

Together Stitching Hope, Peace by Piece, partially funded by the City of Portland, was a hit. Most attendees were young Black men who had never sewed before; two became so interested that they went home with their own gifted machines. In Mitchell’s words, the workshop had “opened up something so deeply in them.” 

“And that’s what I wanted to have happen — not to come to an event where someone says stop picking up a gun,” she said. “How can I redirect their energy towards something when they are in charge of their creativity?” 

The Albina Center’s former dance floor transforms week in pursuit of that creative goal. In January, it became a theatre for a Black power movie night and discussion; a local rapper screened The Murder of Fred Hampton. 

I Am MORE also facilitates signature fishbowl circles — a community building exercise centered on active listening. Youth start in the center, with elders surrounded in a circle. They’re prompted to share what they need that they’re not receiving, without interruption — observed like fish in a bowl.

“The young people get to speak and the people around them, all they do is listen. So the youth feel heard, they feel like somebody is paying attention to their opinion, what they have to say,” Mitchell explained. 

When adults enter the center, they begin by acknowledging what they heard before offering up ways they might support or lessons from their own life. Strangers learn what they may have in common, and build a sense of understanding. Mitchell added the exercise helps older community members, who yearn for ways to share knowledge, to build a legacy. 

The programming is an outlet for young people like , now 20, who love learning and creating but dislike traditional school environments. Today, he works four jobs at local youth development nonprofits.

“I had the worst attendance rate out of my whole class… I was not good at high school, but I was good at jumping on opportunities. And using them as much as I could,” Wrapper said. He taught himself to play piano, use Adobe Premiere Pro for videos and perform spoken word, with the encouragement of Mitchell and Moreno-Lothe.

On Saturday mornings in March, yoga mats, journals and pillows filled the space as social worker, mother and wellness instructor ZaDora Williams hosted a support group for Black women. 

“Baby, however you come, this is one place you can be loved on. You can create art with bullets, you can literally be you, that is what we are encouraging… We’re giving them language so that they can hopefully not re-experience the chronic health issues physically, mentally, spiritually that have plagued Black communities for generations,” Williams said.

Mitchell has curated the gathering space she, her siblings and neighbors craved as children. 

She models nurturing behavior she expects her team to use — asking if they’ve eaten and providing food if they haven’t; making them write their own job descriptions so they have agency over their work; canceling meetings with city partners if youth don’t have a seat at the table. 

Like her empathetic, creative reaction to quiet Black children nearly a decade ago, Mitchell leads with possibility and heart. 

“At the end of the day, I behaved in a way I desperately wanted to experience while growing up. And my students recognized it as love, without me ever having to define it out loud.”

Updated June 7 | Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to both the Weave Project and The 74.

For 24/7 mental health support in English or Spanish, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s at 800-662-4357. You can also reach a trained crisis counselor through the by calling 800-273-8255 or texting 741741.

Eight days after surviving the shooting at Robb Elementary, 9-year-old Zayin Zuniga returned to the school grounds to visit the memorial for his slain classmates.

Zayin and his mom approached one of the 21 crosses that were set on the school’s lawn to honor killed last week: the one for , 9, whom Zayin called Ellie. After a school dance at Robb, Zayin decided he wanted to give Ellie a gift. He begged his mom to get him a ring that he could give her. He was never able to do it.

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Zayin was in Room 111 during the shooting, one of the two conjoined classrooms where the gunman holed up. He recalls glass shattering and seeing bullet casings on the classroom floor as he and other students hid behind his teacher’s desk. Zayin and other kids were able to escape through a window.

“Everybody was scared,” he said.

Zayin often retreats to hug his mom as he recalls the scene. He can’t hear loud noises without thinking it’s the sound of another gunman trying to hurt people, said his mother, Mariah Zuniga.

The Zuniga family didn’t suffer any injuries or deaths that day, but invisible wounds linger in the form of trauma. Zayin doesn’t feel safe going back to Robb and isn’t ready to return to school in general. Research and studies suggest that child survivors will after shootings, but talking to them about it and making them feel safe is needed to help them heal.

Research and experts also that if there aren’t enough mental health resources for the survivors, witnesses and community, the trauma can impact education and lead to absences, declining grades and students choosing not to go to college.

Zayin and his family were at the Uvalde County Fairplex on Wednesday, an event center and indoor arena where organizations are offering to families and students affected by the shooting.

Zuniga said her son will need a professional therapist to talk to about the tragedy. When she first spoke to Zayin about his feelings after what happened last week, he burst into tears.

“I went to the counseling because I didn’t know what to really say to him after something like this,” she said.

Seeking ways to heal

Marcos Guzman, 12, who graduated from Robb Elementary last year, said he knew some of the kids and teachers who were killed last week. He doesn’t understand the senseless acts that left his peers dead, especially in Uvalde.

“I’m sad,” Guzman said in Spanish. “I just want to cry.”

As Uvalde grieves, local, state and federal officials are also looking for ways to help the community heal.

Texas Health and Human Services is overseeing the state’s crisis response in Uvalde, and therapists have been offering help in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. But services will also be needed for much longer to respond to its lasting emotional effects on both the surviving children and the families who are grieving, said Dr. Steven R. Pliszka, chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UT Health San Antonio and program administrator.

“At some point, we’re going to need to transition from this acute response to working with people over the long term,” Pliszka said. “After the acute situation settles down, that’s usually when people find that they really need to return for help.”

A state-funded telehealth program for youth is offering services to the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District to help identify students and families in mental or emotional crises and give them counseling or therapy services they may not otherwise have access to, Pliszka said.

The Texas Child Health Access Through Telemedicine program funnels resources and expertise into a network of doctors, counselors and other professionals at universities in 12 regions across the state to respond to children identified in schools as showing signs of distress.

“I have reached out to the superintendent, and if they wish to respond, we can certainly enroll them immediately. There’s no barrier whatsoever,” Pliszka said.

A network of mental health providers and experts from universities across the state have also volunteered their time through the state-funded Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium, coordinating with Texas health officials to offer their services to adults and children in Uvalde, said Dr. Sarah Wakefield, chair of psychiatry at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock and medical director of the university’s consortium-funded school-based mental health program.

That might mean giving a teletherapy session to a family who lost a loved one in the shooting, being available to run counseling sessions at the local civic center where the state is offering help for those who are grieving, or sending a social worker to a candlelight vigil to talk to people who are struggling with their emotions, she said.

In this first phase of trauma response, Wakefield said, those types of actions are key to keep grieving, frightened people connected to their community to get them through the devastating first few days after an extremely traumatic event.

“It’s really about helping people realize that even in the wake of tragedy, we’re not alone and there’s a community of support,” she said.

After the early shock gives way to longer-term grief, anger and helplessness, the people of Uvalde — and particularly the children at the school during the shooting — are at high risk of suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, she said.

Characterized as having a prolonged sense of life-or-death alertness for a long period of time, PTSD can manifest in panic attacks and other emotional difficulties — as well as physical inflammation in the body that can lead to serious physical health problems like heart attack, stroke or cancer, Wakefield said.

“PTSD can occur when you experience a trauma in which you thought you might lose your life or a person very close to you might lose theirs,” she said. “Our biological systems are wired to keep us safe from trauma, to be on high alert, to be able to run or to fight if we need to do that. But when we’ve been exposed to extreme trauma, many of our brains — 20-30% typically — will kind of stay in that high-alert place. … You will have this prolonged biological response as if that trauma is happening over and over and over.”

The younger the victim is and the closer they were to the event, the more likely they are to suffer from PTSD afterward, she said.

An extremely traumatic event can also trigger underlying or undiagnosed psychological problems in people, maybe even for the first time, such as major depression or anxiety, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, she said.

“Maybe there was a predisposition to things that you hadn’t manifested yet, but this is a major trigger … to further illness,” she said. “And so we could see new onset of other types of illnesses that were triggered by all of the emotionality and the helplessness and hopelessness of this tragedy.”

The shooting may also worsen symptoms in those already suffering from mental health issues, as well as the prolonged and complex grief from the sheer loss of life that will affect some people’s ability to function well in the future if they don’t have access to some help, Wakefield said.

And while the risk of mental toll is highest for those children and adults who were in the school when the shooting happened, the lingering trauma is likely to permeate throughout the tiny rural town of 15,000, Wakefield said.

“I grew up in a town around that size, and I can imagine the impact on them,” she said. “It will affect the whole town.”

“That building needs to be gone”

Some officials have suggested that Robb Elementary should not be a reminder of the shooting and proposed that the school be torn down and replaced with a new building.

State Sen. , D-San Antonio, told San Antonio television station there is hope that the federal government will provide a grant to rebuild the school. He said President Joe Biden, , told him, “We’re going to look to raze that school and build a new one.”

“I can’t tell you how many little children that I’ve talked to that don’t want to go back into that building. They’re just traumatized. They’re just destroyed,” Gutierrez told KSAT.

Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin said he believes the same should be done.

“I don’t think anybody’s plans are but to tear that building down,” McLaughlin told . “I would never ask, expect a child to ever have to walk in those doors ever, ever again. That building needs to be gone.”

The school district’s superintendent announced Wednesday that students and teachers to Robb in the fall and instead will relocate to other campuses.

Generations of Uvalde residents have gone to Robb Elementary, which has served the community since 1955 and has been the site of momentous progress for the mostly Latino town of about 15,000. In the 1970s, Mexican American families to make the school more inclusive.

The school holds sentimental value for many of the city’s residents, but that shouldn’t stop officials from demolishing and building a new school, said Uvalde resident Dolores Contreras, 77.

Contreras said she went to Robb as a child, along with some of her siblings. Her children and grandchildren attended the school, too. But now, helping the community heal should be the priority.

“It should come down,” she said. “Kids don’t feel safe.”

Other schools across the country have been demolished after mass shootings. Santa Fe High School near Houston; Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida; and Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, have either renovated or built new buildings with features like bullet-resistant walls and windows.

Zayin and his mother don’t want to go back to Robb, either. Zuniga, who moved to Uvalde a year ago, said they have a lot to think about before deciding where Zayin will continue his education.

“None of my kids want to go back,” she said. “It’s just so scary to think about something like this happening again.”

Fears that won’t vanish easily

The road to recovery will be long for students who survived the shooting and for their parents.

Zuniga said it will be hard to forget the fear she felt when she first learned there was an active shooter at her children’s school. She couldn’t grasp what was happening. She was in San Antonio when she first got a text about the incident and raced to make the nearly 80-mile drive back to the school.

Zuniga has another child that goes to Robb. She was in the cafeteria and was able to get to a safe house quickly. She didn’t know that Zayin had been in one of the classrooms the gunman attacked until they had reunited.

“Being able to see them again, it’s like you’re so thankful and grateful,” she said. “And you don’t want to take that for granted because there’s other families that don’t get to see their kids anymore.”

Wherever her children go to school next, Zuniga said she will meticulously look through its safety protocols. The family might move somewhere else. She’s even considering home schooling. All the options are on the table.

“I don’t know if we’re gonna end up relocating. We just moved here,” she said.

For the first couple of nights after the shooting, Zayin stayed with his mom in her bedroom. They really couldn’t sleep. The events would still play over in his head, she said. They would take melatonin to try to get some rest.

The two of them visited the memorial at Robb on Wednesday to start the healing process. Zuniga finally got Zayin the ring he wanted to give to Ellie and placed it on her memorial.

He now wears a matching one to always remember her.

Disclosure: Texas Tech University and Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

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“Not very good aim,” responds Randy Boyden, a school resource officer with the police department in South St. Paul, Minnesota, called in for backup that day by school staff.

“What are you going to do?” the brash fourth-grader spits back before taking another shot. 

Sydney, a victim of child abuse and neglect whose real name The 74 is shielding, suffers from multiple disorders and, as a result, struggles to regulate her behavior and emotions. She fell into an hours-long fit of rage that day after not wanting to go to Spanish class, including wielding a pair of scissors, throwing a chair against a classroom window and biting and kicking her teacher. She landed blows on several of the adults in the room and by the time the cops arrived, school staff had already restrained Sydney in an effort to de-escalate the situation.

“If you get it into my mouth, I’ll eat it,” Boyden tells the overwrought girl in an exchange that student disabilities experts saw as taunting and one called “really disturbing.”

Sydney throws two more crackers before she climbs onto a high cabinet, rips a speaker off the wall and flings it to the ground. At this moment, it seems most likely the student could hurt herself, yet it isn’t until she scampers down and jabs a SMART Board with a marker that the adults move in.

Special education teacher Tony Phillips and school Principal Terry Bretoi grab her by the elbows, force her to walk in circles and then lower her to the ground. As they press down on her arms and shoulders, Boyden and another police officer, Mellissa Cavalier, join in. The officers hold Sydney to the carpet by her kneecaps as she tries to break free, squirming and whimpering in distress. Eventually, she lets go of the marker, stops resisting and her 75-pound body goes limp. 

The final physical struggle inside her elementary school involving the police lasts for nearly six, difficult-to-watch minutes. Students like Sydney, Black and in special education, are among the most likely in the U.S. to be physically restrained in school. Except for the occasional cell phone video, however, the highly controversial tactic is rarely witnessed by outsiders. In Sydney’s case, the video documentation recorded on police body cameras is even more remarkable because it captures the second time in little more than a week that educators and those same two officers physically restrained the disabled girl during a mental health crisis.

Just eight days earlier, after she ran out of school, six adults dragged her by the limbs and forced her into the back of a police car where they locked her inside as she put words to her misery. 

“I hate school, I hate work and I want to die,” she says. “That’s what’s wrong.”

This story is based on records provided exclusively to The 74 by Sydney’s adoptive parents, including the police body-cam footage, audio recordings, police reports, special education reports, disciplinary records and other documents. The videos, after being edited to obscure Sydney’s identity, were shared with experts who commented for this story. The 74 sought out the officers and school staff in the videos, some of whom have since changed jobs or plan to soon. They either did not respond or declined to be interviewed.

After watching videos from both incidents, special education attorney Wendy Tucker said they reaffirmed ’s opposition to police presence in schools, particularly when it comes to their interactions with children who are disabled. When George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in nearby Minneapolis, it generated a national conversation about police use of force. Dozens of districts nationwide cut ties with the police, who

“This video demonstrates front and center the problem of mixing kids with disabilities and police officers,” said Tucker, the national nonprofit’s senior policy director. “This girl is the poster child for removing law enforcement from schools.” 

Imminent danger vs. property damage

For Sydney’s adoptive parents, whose real names were also changed to protect their daughter, the video footage from the two incidents in the winter of 2019 spurred a years-long campaign to hold officials accountable for the girl’s cuts, bruises and mental scars. In response, the Minnesota Department of Education found that school staff violated state law, but officers never faced similar sanctions. In late February, the education department sent a letter notifying Sydney’s parents that they would investigate an allegation that she “may have been mentally injured” by school staff.

Robert, the girl’s father, said that educators and police had only intensified his daughter’s struggles — a reality he said reflects America’s bleak mental health system. Rather than understanding the girl’s disabilities and calming the situation, he charged, they responded with excessive force and a desire to take control. It remains unclear the degree to which the two school resource officers were trained in how to de-escalate situations involving children with disabilities.

“Police aren’t designed to respond to this type of thing, it’s not their job,” Robert said. “Their job is to find the killer, it’s to stop the speeding car that robbed a bank. It’s not necessarily to respond to the school for a 9-year-old that’s having a mental health crisis.” 

Educators and police were clearly placed in a volatile situation with Sydney. Federal law requires school officials to accommodate Sydney and other children with special needs, but some educators have acknowledged they struggle to support students with the most significant behavioral health issues. Sydney’s case highlights those complexities and the challenges educators face when thrust into these highly fraught interactions. 

Sheldon Greenberg, a former police officer and education professor at Johns Hopkins University, offered a different assessment of how the police interacted with Sydney. Good officers have “an incredible sixth sense about people’s behavior” and follow a “use-of-force spectrum” that begins with verbal persuasion and moves up to physical confrontation. Officers can generally de-escalate situations without physical force, Greenberg said, and in responding to Sydney, the officers “followed the spectrum beautifully.” 

“They were patient, there was gentle talk in the beginning,” he said. Ultimately, he said that officers must assess crisis situations and prevent them from escalating. 

Sydney, already debilitated by childhood trauma, said she tries hard to forget about the times school staff and campus cops grabbed her arms and legs and held her down — at times in violation of state education law. 

“I just feel comforted knowing that I’m out of that school,” said Sydney, who switched elementary schools just weeks after the incidents and is now in middle school. She reflected on the source of her outbursts, which have grown less frequent. “I feel unloved and stuff, and a lot of sad and dark feelings.” 

Thousands of students in Minnesota and across the country are despite efforts to curtail a practice that’s led to injuries and, in rare cases, death. In Minnesota, state law only allows educators to restrain disabled children in emergency situations where someone is in imminent danger of physical harm. Experts questioned whether Sydney’s behavior had reached that threshold and said that school officials appeared more concerned with preventing property damage. 

During the part of the incident inside the special education classroom captured on video, officials didn’t use physical force until she stabbed at the costly SMART Board. The state banned student in 2013. 

Robert believes that physical restraints are necessary when children present imminent danger to themselves or others. But in their interactions with Sydney, he believes the adults responded excessively. Rather than protecting Sydney, the police and school staff assaulted her, Robert alleged, and falsely imprisoned her when they secluded her in the back of the squad car.

“It wasn’t just the police trying to force her into the back of a police car,” Robert said, adding that school staff were similarly at fault. “Why, in this case, are they saying to the school employees, ‘Yeah, let’s force her into the back of the car — you can help.’”

The South St. Paul Public Schools acknowledged that they changed their practices after the state Education Department found they violated the law in restraining Sydney. The district said student privacy rules prohibited them from discussing the case further. The South St. Paul Police Department cleared the officers of any wrongdoing, the police chief said.

‘Such an extreme’

Both of the officers had interacted with Sydney before and knew at least some of her history. One of them, Cavalier, was there on one of the worst days: When the little girl was placed into foster care. Yet in the footage, she dismisses the girl’s distress as a desire to stay home and watch movies. 

“That’s the whole thing,” Cavalier says while Sydney is locked in the car, “she doesn’t want to be in school today.” 

Sydney was born with fetal alcohol syndrome to a mother whose losing battle with addiction had forced the family into homelessness. A victim of physical abuse and neglect, she was placed with her adoptive family after school staff watched her biological mother hit Sydney with a belt during a February 2017 meeting on campus, according to police records. Though school officials called police — including Cavalier — to the scene, Robert said their failure to immediately intervene shattered his adopted daughter’s trust in them.

“Nobody in the room made attempts to stop that from happening,” he said. “The principal was there and didn’t stop it immediately.”

On the same day Sydney was beaten by her mother and humiliated at school, Robert and Julia, who had begun the process to become foster parents, got the call: Sydney was in need of emergency placement. The couple scrambled to open their home as refuge to a child they knew little about. They fed her McDonald’s, collected her belongings — a teddy bear, hair brushes and clothes that had grown too tight — in a small pink bin and introduced her to their dogs Lucy, Finley and Lola. Lucy, a Pomeranian seemingly aware of the girl’s recurring nightmares, slept in Sydney’s bedroom every night for a year. 

By that time, Sydney, then 6, already had a history of school suspensions for aggressive behavior. First-time parents, Robert and Julia learned almost immediately that Sydney was struggling to identify and control her emotions. 

“Her body doesn’t know what the emotion she’s feeling is,” Robert said. “If you’re having this emotion and you don’t know what it is, she would tend to panic and freak out. Instead of going, ‘I feel sad, I feel happy,’ she didn’t know what those emotions actually were.” 

In addition to fetal alcohol syndrome, Sydney was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, ADHD and , a serious condition that results when children’s basic needs for comfort, affection and care are not met. She was placed in special education, but Sydney’s parents said that school staff failed to fully comprehend the root causes of her outbursts, and instead wrote them off as willful misbehavior. The can mimic misbehavior, and Tucker, of The Center for Learner Equity, said it’s critical for educators to recognize that such actions are a form of communication. 

“When they’re communicating that they’re struggling or they’re having a hard time, the worst thing that you can do is exacerbate that by physically holding them down and taking more control from them,” she said. 

Sydney, who attends myriad therapies, said she’s “just matured a little bit” since the incidents in the video. Her parents say she’s made significant progress and they are not aware of any restraints in school since then. To her, there was no confusion about the source of her meltdowns. 

“I guess some trauma,” the self-aware 11-year-old said in an interview, adding that her biological mother was frequently absent and in jail. “So I guess, kind of neglect.”

Once in her new home, Sydney’s outbursts continued and Robert and Julia were getting beaten up as they tried to calm her, including the time Julia had to get stitches after getting hit in the lip. Such scenes may have deterred others, but for the couple, who would adopt Sydney in 2018, the bond had already been forged.

“We fell in love with her the first week she was here,” Robert said. “It was ‘This kid is so cool, I love this kid.’ Part of me didn’t want her to ever leave.”

Still, her behaviors were a force to be reckoned with, so they signed up for a training program on crisis prevention, which included instruction on de-escalation and how to use physical restraints. Parents don’t generally enroll in the program, which is designed for special education teachers and emergency responders. The course, Robert said, was “one of the best things that we have done.”

Ironically, at the same time the couple was attending a December 2019 , school staff called to report that Sydney was in crisis. Once they obtained the police body-cam footage of her getting pinned to the floor in the special education classroom, Robert and Julia said it was their training that allowed them to conclude that the restraints placed on their daughter differed drastically from what they had been taught.

‘Nowhere in [the training course] does it say ‘hold down their kneecaps and their elbows and their wrists, and twist them up,’” Julia said. “You have four adults on her already. Why do they go to such an extreme?”

‘Do we need to handcuff you?’

On the day she would find herself locked in a cop car, Sydney had been struggling in math class, so she fled. Overwhelmed, she bolted from school and stood in a nearby street, where she attempted to get struck by oncoming traffic. 

Yet officials don’t use force until she throws what her suspension report describes as “landscaping blocks.” One block comes close to striking Phillips, the special education teacher. Another clobbers a parked pickup truck. 

That’s when officer Cavalier gives Sydney an ultimatum — go back to school or wait in the back of her squad car — before tugging on the girl by her arm. 

“We can’t damage people’s property and we can’t hurt anybody,” Cavalier says before the girl tries to kick free and drops to her knees in the middle of the street. Together, Cavalier, Boyden and four school employees grab her arms and legs and force her into the car, where she puts up a fight. As she tries to escape from the back seat, Sydney at one point reaches for Boyden’s gun. 

“Do we need to handcuff you?” Cavalier asks Sydney in response. “I don’t want to do that but you can’t just start grabbing things that don’t belong to you.” 

Greenberg, the Johns Hopkins professor, said the public generally sees police use-of-force during extreme, worst-case scenarios. Though he said the video footage involving Sydney provides a limited window into those incidents, he felt the officers “showed incredible restraint before applying restraint.” 

“You can tell when someone is reaching a point that harm to self or harm to others is about to occur,” he said. “You just know it, you feel it and you know you have to do something to minimize that harm.”

Police officers who are stationed inside schools full time generally are given much greater discretion than educators in how they respond to disruptive students. Just last year, efforts in Minnesota to adopt modest regulations to officers’ restraint practices in schools fell short. State legislation would have prohibited cops from placing students in the face-down “prone restraint,” — like the one used on George Floyd — and would have required them to receive the same training as school staff. The state education department, which endorsed the reforms, will continue to promote the changes, assistant commissioner Daron Korte, who oversees student support services, told The 74.

“We just wanted to make sure that there’s at least a minimum level of training,” that officers know how to use safe restraint techniques and understand “that this should be used in a last-ditch emergency situation,” he said. 

While some advocates oppose all forms of student restraints, Robert and Julia believe that physical holds are necessary in some emergency situations if done properly. When Sydney was in the street, for example, school staff could have used a brief hold to move her to the grass. They also could have moved her to a room in the school with a padded floor and a mini-trampoline. Instead, they dragged her by the limbs and locked her in the back of the police car.

“Why would you let a child who says ‘I’m going to kill myself’ and ‘I’m going to go sit in that street and I’m going to get hit by a car,’ why wouldn’t you restrain them at that point so they don’t commit suicide?” Julia asked. “We’re not necessarily against restraint, but you have to have trusted people who are well trained, who are doing it with dignity and have the right intentions.” 

Similar situations have come up in the past. In 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union sued a Kentucky sheriff’s deputy for handcuffing two elementary school students above the elbow who were acting out as a result of their disabilities. One incident was captured in a viral cell phone video. That case ended with . In 2020, the city of Flint, Michigan, a lawsuit accusing an officer of excessive force when he handcuffed a disabled 7-year-old boy for roughly an hour after he ran around on school bleachers and kicked a supply cart during an afterschool program. 

In Sydney’s case, West Resendes, a legal fellow with the ACLU’s disability rights program, said school staff used improper restraint techniques in both incidents to control the girl’s disability-related behaviors and shouldn’t have called the police for help. In their interactions with Sydney, he said that officials treated her “not as a human being but as an object” and were unclear about why she was being restrained.

“Seeing the male officer egg her on about not having good aim or wasting crackers was really disturbing — and it predictably and directly led to an escalation of the situation,” Resendes said.

‘Make sure that this doesn’t happen again’

Sydney is Black and her adoptive parents are white — a reality the couple said gave them a new perspective on the police and racial bias. On multiple occasions, her outbursts have prompted aggressive police responses. 

During one episode at the Mall of America, officers accused Robert of trying to abduct his daughter, he said. On another occasion, Robert had a gun pulled on him by a cop who mistook an exchange in the family car between him and a distraught Sydney as an assault. 

Though officers backed off once they understood the context, Robert thought the cop might shoot him. In 2016, that same officer was involved in the fatal shooting of a man in crisis outside a McDonald’s restaurant. He was shot 15 times. 

Sydney’s parents and special education advocates said that race was a likely factor in how educators and police responded and believe she may have been treated differently if she were white. 

Dave Webb, the district superintendent, declined to be interviewed but said in an email that the district does not use physical restraints to discipline students. He acknowledged they had to update their restraint procedures to match state law after the two incidents with Sydney but said they had not been held liable for using the tactic in a way that is racially discriminatory. 

“The district takes its obligation to comply with the laws governing restrictive procedures very seriously and provides ongoing training to its staff to comply with those legal requirements,” Webb said. 

Years of federal education data have found that students of color — especially those with disabilities — are disproportionately restrained in schools. In Minnesota, Black students were 11.8 percent of students in special education during the 2019-20 school year but were subjected to 27 percent of the physical holds documented in schools, . 

That school year, the latest for which state data is available, student restraints dropped by 25 percent, a change officials attributed to the pandemic as students learned from home during the second half of the year.

Initially, educators’ responses “looked textbook” when they talked calmly and tried to comfort Sydney, said Joshua Ladd, a staff attorney at the Minnesota Disability Law Center, but he faulted school staff for allowing police officers to take the lead in both situations as if they “had given up and just decided to start watching.” Ladd said that school staff were clearly unable to support Sydney’s needs and that her behaviors — such as bolting from class — were a form of communication. 

“I would describe her communication as saying ‘I’m not safe here and I can’t trust adults because adults have let me down my entire life,’” he said. “‘I have learned to protect myself and take care of myself because the adults around me have failed me.’”

After acquiring the body-cam footage, Sydney’s parents filed a formal complaint and a state education department investigation found that school staff broke the law when they restrained the girl in “non-emergency” situations, among other violations. The officers never faced any repercussions. Both incidents were investigated but no disciplinary action was taken against the two school resource officers, South St. Paul Police Chief William Messerich wrote in an email. He declined to comment further.

District officials were required to undergo training and update school policy to make clear that staff could not restrain kids to “prevent serious property damage” consistent with state law. They also required school staff to reassess Sydney’s special education services. 

“It already happened, there’s nothing you can do to go back in time to stop that from happening,” Korte, the assistant commissioner, said of the incidents. But moving forward, district staff were required to develop a strategy “to make sure that this didn’t happen again.”

Sydney’s parents were left longing for more. The interventions did little to help their daughter’s suffering, they said, or to hold officials accountable for pinning her to the ground. Robert, a mechanic, and Julia, a teacher, considered suing the district and the police, but were discouraged by the cost of hiring an attorney. 

A could result in educators losing their licenses. Robert said he filed multiple complaints against the educators who restrained Sydney but the state initially declined to open an inquiry. He said that changed just weeks ago after Sydney’s therapy team submitted a report stating that she suffered trauma directly related to the restraints at school. 

The investigation raises the possibility that Sydney’s parents may get confirmation of something they’ve long maintained — that their daughter was abused in a manner that went beyond poor training or outdated policy.

They realize ​​other parents of disabled children never get near that level of resolution — and believe they may not have either without video evidence.

“How many kids, how many nonverbal kids, does it happen to?” Robert asked. “Kids that can’t go home and tell their parents ‘Yeah, there were four adults pinning me to the ground today.’ They just come home and destroy the house and the parents are left wondering what is going on.”

The most obvious early effects of COVID-19 were the ways in which it shrank the spheres of life, work, and school. Within a few months of its emergence last winter, hundreds of millions of Americans found themselves stuck together in crowded homes, adults often sharing couch space with children stranded from their classrooms.

It was an atmosphere, many worried, that could drastically increase the dangers of domestic violence. As parents were left to ride out the economic instability brought on by sudden business closures, most K-12 students were no longer in direct contact with teachers, who are among the most common reporters of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse to children. Worries only grew as complaints of abuse during the pandemic’s early weeks, with advocates warning that serious mistreatment was likely going unnoticed.

More than a year later, researchers are sounding the same alarm. Studies of both local child welfare agencies and national emergency room visits suggest that while total child abuse reports declined significantly last year, the cases that arose were more likely to result in medical exams and hospitalizations. And with more kids set to return to in-person classes in September, the findings raise the question of whether school systems will be prepared to assist large numbers of children who have suffered invisible trauma over the preceding 18 months.

Jodi Quas, a professor of psychological and nursing science at the University of California, Irvine, is currently studying patterns of abuse in a large, unnamed Southern California county. In an interview with The 74, she said that it “makes sense, when you think about family stress and economic insecurity,” that child abuse and neglect would grow more severe during times of intense upheaval.

“We have just one county, but it does look like kids are more at risk,” she said. “It’s the stress and uncertainty. It’s parents either losing their jobs or trying to work at home while engaged with kids in online school. All of those stressors, we’re guessing, contributed to increased anxiety with fewer resources and support systems available.”

With co-authors Stacy Metcalf, a doctoral candidate, and Corey Rood, a pediatrician, Quas leveraged two sets of data — monthly reports of suspected child maltreatment from the county’s social services agency, as well as records of medical evaluations at a local child abuse clinic — to compare the trends between March and December 2020 with those of the same period in 2019. While their research is still under review and must therefore be read cautiously, the figures indicate that the number of abuse reports fell during the spring (-33.2 percent), summer (-13.1 percent) and fall (-24.5 percent).

The decline appears to be related to school closures: While one-third of abuse reports in the county came from school and daycare staff in 2019, the data show that just one-sixth did in 2020.

In , school employees like teachers and nurses are mandated reporters of abuse. A from researchers at Cornell University and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that time spent in school increases the likelihood that abuse will be noticed and documented. Educators’ prominent role is illustrated by the fact that reports typically decrease during the summer. Given the swift separation of students from schools during the past year, Quas said, it was predictable that reports were “absolutely going to drop, and you saw that in the first months of the pandemic.

Though complaints to social services fell, Quas and her team found that the number of children who received medical evaluations at a local child abuse clinic increased by 30 percent. They also measured an increase of seven percentage points in the proportion of children who received examinations once they were referred to the clinic — in essence, a sign that the cases of serious, hard-to-ignore abuse grew as a percentage of total reports.

‘What happens in the fall?’

That finding corresponds with evidence from released in December by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That research found that, in the four weeks immediately following President Trump’s COVID-19 emergency declaration last March, emergency room visits related to child abuse and neglect fell by more than half compared with the same period in 2019. The decline was apparent across all children and adolescents, with visits for kids between ages 5 and 11 dropping by 61 percent.

But the most concerning of those visits, those resulting in hospitalization, stayed steady throughout September 2020. In total, the percentage of all maltreatment-related ER trips that led to hospitalizations of children jumped significantly, from 2.1 percent in 2019 to 3.2 percent in 2020. That average includes increases from 3.5 percent to 5.3 percent for the youngest children, and a near-doubling (from 0.7 percent to 1.3 percent) for children between 5 and 11.

Dr. Elizabeth Swedo, a CDC researcher and one of the brief’s authors, warned in an email that because of the massive disruptions to the medical system that occurred last year, the hospital data needed to be interpreted with care. Even in normal circumstances, hospital trips can vary substantially by season, and in 2020, the swings were .

“Visits for almost all non-respiratory diseases and conditions dropped precipitously in March 2020,” Swedo wrote, “in large measure due to patients being more reluctant to travel or seek medical care during the pandemic.”

“These denominator shifts presented challenges for interpreting data and communicating complex findings,” she added.

Swedo said that local research of the kind that Quas and her collaborators are conducting “really help contextualize the findings from our national study,” adding that it would be critical to incorporate future data released by national resources like the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data Center and the National Violent Death Reporting System.

It’s still unclear how the factors that may have contributed to worsening abuse and neglect have responded to the gradual improvement in the economy and public health conditions. have shown that quarantines, and particularly lengthy ones, can lead to fear, anger, and symptoms of PTSD. Studies looking specifically at the COVID era suggest that the workers most affected by the pandemic to their mental health, and living under a stay-at-home order loneliness and anxiety.

Even with COVID cases and deaths back on the upswing in recent weeks, more adults and kids are beginning to resume their pre-pandemic routines. But Quas noted that school districts might need to get ready to identify and provide services to a sizable group of students who spent the 2020-21 school year not just isolated from teachers and friends, but also under threat from adults in their homes.

“What I’m thinking about is, what happens in the fall? Not that the pandemic is fully over, but by fall, I think more kids are going to really be back in school after a pretty long period. How do you prep for what we think might be an increase in reporting that could happen then, as kids go back to school more consistently?”

“Have you talked to him about the coronavirus?” Lieberman asked.

“No, I don’t want to frighten him,” the mother replied.

“Mom was wearing a mask,” Lieberman told me later. “How could her son not notice that?”

Of course, the boy already knew, on some level, about the virus. When his mother did talk to him after the telemedicine call, explaining what she knew, admitting that the virus is scary, and describing to him in a reassuring tone of voice what she was doing to keep him and the family safe, he had questions. How can something be so small you can’t even see it? How can something that small kill you? She answered to the best of her ability, and shortly thereafter he seemed calmer and stopped playing dead.

As director of the at the University of California, San Francisco,  Lieberman helps practitioners, parents and advocates to help traumatized young children. “The first five years are the most dangerous, epidemiologically speaking,” she explains. This time also provides the greatest opportunities to promote children’s and families’ strengths.

Lieberman is the developer of Child-Parent Psychotherapy, an approach that involves seeing both together and helping them understand each other’s conflicting feelings and points of view. She is a disciple of Selma Fraiberg, author of the groundbreaking article Ghosts in the Nursery (1975), the title of which Lieberman describes as “the suppressed parts of our lives where we feel unresolvable fear, which can get turned into anger.”

Another influence on Lieberman’s thinking was Stanley Greenberg, pioneer of the “,” which literally meant getting down on the same level as young children.

“Trauma,” explains Lieberman, “will be transmitted from generation to generation unless it is addressed and processed. We have to be willing to speak the unspeakable. We have to be authentic. Children need us to take them seriously.”

Studies by Duke University’s Michael De Bellis and others have found evidence of chronically elevated levels of stress hormones, leading to structural differences in the parts of the brain that control memory and planning. These problems can be remediated, but first they need to be understood.

Asked whether babies can register trauma, Lieberman explains that 4-month-olds who are removed from abusive parents and put in foster care will, when re-introduced to their abusers, might turn their heads away and scream—expressing themselves with the the only language they have.

Even if it doesn’t strike anybody we know, the coronavirus pandemic must be viewed as a trauma. She compares it to a tsunami: “Whether we are safe on high ground or in a cabin in the coastline, we are all affected.”

It should come as no surprise that in the midst of this traumatic pandemic, children have been waking up crying more often and throwing more tantrums. Her advice for parents and caregivers:

• Be honest. Translate reality for even the youngest children. “Kids are smart,” she says. “They can tell if you’re lying or sugarcoating.”
• Be understanding. Now is not the time for expecting children to “tough it out.” Lieberman does not agree with a and a popular columnist who have railed against “coddling” children. “They are talking about families with an abundance of wealth and resources, she explains. (And even with these families it is more complex). Lieberman says, “Children thrive when adults acknowledge and support their developmental needs. They rely on the adults they trust to manage their fear and move toward self-confidence, age-appropriate autonomy, and secure relationships.”
• Take care of yourself. Stress is contagious and children are highly responsive to how their parents feel. Lieberman invokes the metaphor of the oxygen mask on the plane. “It’s like the flight attendant always says, put on your own mask first.”

Recognizing that the trauma is real and ongoing, Lieberman says she’s been consistently impressed with the resourcefulness of parents as they attempt to manage their careers and simultaneously attend to their children. “They’re being present for their children,” she says, “and that’s more important than being perfect.” None of us every can be perfect!

What is the extent of the crisis? that, at any given time, about 12,500 unaccompanied children are in U.S. government custody. They stay in these government-contracted congregate care facilities—essentially, orphanages—for several weeks to several months, according to Kathryn Shepherd, national advocacy counsel for the Immigration Justice Campaign at the American Immigration Council (Disclosure: my wife, Jennifer Guilfoyle, works for this organization).

Myra Jones-Taylor, chief policy officer of ZERO TO THREE, a national organization devoted to young children, maintains that such conditions harm children. “Shift workers cannot replace that one consistent caregiver with whom children have an attachment,” she says. “Reams of research show it’s detrimental to development.”

Several hundred more children are being held in family detention facilities (which are essentially prisons), typically with their mothers. On a recent visit to a family detention center in Dilley, Texas, Shepherd saw young children with runny noses and pink eye, many of them engaging in regressive behavior like kicking and biting. There are no soft furnishings in these facilities, and the infant formula and other dietary provisions are barely adequate. of 1997 stipulates that these families be released to relatives after 20 days.

“Detention is not humane for babies,” asserts Jones-Taylor. Even well maintained, fully stocked and staffed conditions are inherently damaging. “There is no optimal separation from community.”

“It’s been a tough year,” Jones-Taylor admits. “Nobody was prepared for this.” ZERO TO THREE champions legislation and practices that promote physical and mental health for these important years. Significant numbers of children of color were already in crisis before this other crisis came along.

“We’re focused on childcare, home visits, health and nutrition,” she says. “But there’s no way we could look away from this. As baby champions, we have to raise our voices and bring our expertise.” ZERO TO THREE and formed a united front on the issue with organizations across the country.

Jones-Taylor rejects claims that the current policy is acceptable. “I’ve heard it said, They’re so young, they won’t even remember, but their bodies and brains absolutely remember. Trauma is baked into their neurocircuitry.” She adds, “We don’t wade into immigration policy, but we know child trauma. We can speak with authority and confidence.”

She points to immediate and long-term threats of these policies.

• Immediate: Detention and separation are incredibly stressful ordeals for children who’ve already gone through the stressful experience of getting here. During the journey, at least they had a parent or caregiver to trust. In these circumstances, however, the brain goes into immediate response mode: fight, flight, or freeze. Stress hormones are released and not turned off. That biological response is on constant loop.
• Long term: The mental and physical health outcomes are well known. The cognitive disabilities can persist through adulthood and adult relationships. Children in their first three years are especially vulnerable to the harmful effects of trauma because their brains are so plastic and receptive.

The evidence supports Jones-Taylor’s concerns. She cites the work of ZERO TO THREE board member Charles H. Zeanah, Jr., professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Tulane University School of Medicine, and the . Researchers followed the trajectories of children abandoned at or around the time of birth and placed in one of six institutions for young children in Bucharest, Romania. The study found: “Early institutionalization leads to profound deficits in many domains examined to date, including cognitive and socio-emotional behaviors, brain activity and structure, alterations in reward sensitivity and processing, and a greatly elevated incidence of psychiatric disorders and impairment.”

The consequences are grave and for many children they may endure, but mental health professionals can provide amelioration. “There are things that can be done now,” Jones-Taylor assures. “Families need access to specialized mental health services, including psychotherapy to help children process their trauma and cope. Caregivers need support so they can understand what’s happening with their child.”