When many districts returned to normal,
were students able to sort of re-engage back
into what was the norm prior to the pandemic
where they were able to be in a classroom
with teachers and students again?
- No, I think it's been really difficult
to be able to get back into the swing of things.
For the children that I work with,
I work with children mostly with autism
and behavior difficulties,
and those particular children really need social practice,
they need communication practice
and then they need behavior support.
And we have not really been able to get a good handle
on where a lot of those children are at right now.
We don't know where they're at socially.
That's one of the things that we've really been focusing on
over the past month or two, is trying to help these children
to...
Even typically developing children,
we're trying to get them to articulate what's going on,
what are they feeling,
what is some of the difficulties that they're having?
And we've seen that children have a really difficult time
articulating what they're going through right now,
which I think is fairly consistent with how adults
are feeling.
I think as adults, we're having a hard time articulating
what the past year has done to us
and we have found that children
are even more so having difficulty trying to articulate.
- Across the state, there are not enough counselors
in school districts to help meet the needs of students.
Traditionally, what would you like to see
counselors fill that gap?
I mean, that some of the issues you just mentioned.
I mean, what could they be doing if there were enough?
- What I would love to see
is if we were able to put more focus on individual children
and what they might be struggling with.
For example, I've been involved in a few cases
over the last couple of weeks where we're taking a child
that didn't have identified social anxiety
before the pandemic and we're making a plan for them
to go to school for just 15 minutes on this first day.
You're just going to go in,
you're going to say hi to your friends,
you're going to do your check-in
and then right after that, you can leave.
I would say the majority of the children
that we'd been working on,
we now have them at a point
where they're able to attend full day,
they're able to participate with their peers.
But at the beginning
they just really needed a very focused individualized plan
on how we were going to transition them back
from completely at home learning
to seven days or seven hours a day at school.
And so, I think we could really use more counselors
or more social workers in the schools to be able to assist
with these very individualized treatment plans
that we need to give these children
so that they can make the transition back into the schools.
- In the short time we have left Dr. Hartzell,
anything about this year that you look forward to next year
saying, "This gives us some hope and that students
will be able to rebound?"
- Yeah, I definitely think there's hope.
I don't mind to in any way communicate
that I think that this is just a hopeless situation.
I definitely don't think it is,
we have great educators,
we have wonderful school districts
that have been working so hard.
I have seen like so much...
Work from teachers
and focus and plans to meet the needs of the children.
I think children are very resilient
and I think that children tend to bounce back
much quicker than adults sometimes
and their ability to manage change and transition.
I think I would just caution everyone to still be very aware
of those subtle social, emotional, communicative
and behavioral differences that we might see in our children
that might indicate that there's a great amount of anxiety
or stress underneath all of that.
So, while I think that they'll adapt,
I think that they'll be able to come back next year
and be resilient and respond well to the changes.
I still want us to be really aware
of maybe some of the underlying difficulties
that maybe children aren't very good at articulating yet
that they might be struggling or going through.
- Okay.
Dr. Rebecca Hartzell
from the University of Arizona College of Education,
thank you for your insights.
- Yeah, thank you for having me.
Have a good day.