Social worker Erica Jennejahn helps students cope with growing mental health needs
Three years on, and yet Erica Jennejahn still sees ripples of the COVID-19 pandemic in the classrooms of Rappahannock County Public Schools (RCPS).
“What I see is that kids and parents alike have a hard time communicating their feelings, a hard time regulating their emotions and a hard time resolving conflict face to face,” said Jennejan, who just finished her first year as RCPS’s social worker.
“Those things that were already hard to do before the pandemic, as we’ve shifted into this world of virtual interactions, phones, social media, it’s now a totally different way of navigating interpersonal relationships. And the pandemic didn’t help us.”
There’s no shortage of evidence of COVID-19’s impact on academic performance. National test scores in math are at their lowest level in 34 years, and in reading they haven’t been this low since 2004.
The effect on the mental health of students, at all levels, has been harder to measure, but Jennejahn and the other members of RCPS’s Mental Health Innovators Team have seen firsthand a swell of kids seeking help.
“There were times we were just so slammed my head was spinning,” she said.
A growing need
As in many rural communities, mental health care options for children and teenagers in Rappahannock are limited at best. So the school district has had to scale up its role in responding to the growing need.
Before the recent school year, for instance, staff members were required to take Mental Health First Aid training, a program that’s still voluntary in many school districts. It’s designed to help teachers, coaches and others to recognize the warning signs of students struggling with emotional or social issues.
“What they get out of this program is more knowledge and a few more tools to help them build relationships so that students feel safe enough to say to them, ‘I’m really feeling depressed.’ And it teaches staff what to do with that information,” said Jennejahn. “When kids trust you, they’ll talk to you.”
She said she hopes to make the training available to students in the coming year, adding: “We know kids don’t listen to adults as much as they listen to their friends.”
The school district’s mental health team had a caseload of just under 100 students, according to Jennejahn – slightly lower than the previous school year, but still about 13% of the RCPS population. Another 28 students requiring more clinical treatment were referred to therapists with Health Connect America, which has a partnership with the district.
More than half of the students in the caseload were in the elementary school, where the pandemic’s effects tended to play out in poor social skills and bad face-to-face interactions.
“It might be temper tantrums, crying, students refusing to comply with directions from the teachers,” said Jennejahn. “We had a few kids who would just leave the classroom. It usually had to do with kids not knowing how to regulate their behavior.”
At the high school, the counseling has been more about responding to student concerns regarding their mental health. “It’s them coming to us and talking about their feelings of depression and anxiety, or feeling overwhelmed, and just trying to navigate social life as a teenager,” she said.
On several occasions, Jennejahn recalled, students came forward and said that based on something a friend had said or posted on social media, they were worried about what they might do.
“The sense of community among our young ones is so strong that they notice the slightest changes in others. They notice all kinds of things,” she said. “What amazes me is how many kids think they’re the only one going through something.”
Building trust
Jennejahn concedes that the mental health team still gets questioned by some teachers who feel disruptive students are rewarded with special treatment, such as being removed from class to take a walk with a counselor. They’ve also received some pushback from parents.
“You have these fidget toys that kids can use, and a parent will say, ‘I don’t want my kid to have toys. He needs to go to school to do his work,’” said Jennejan. “But if he can fidget with this toy under his desk and use his other hand to do his work, he might be a lot more productive.”
She hopes that in the coming school year she’ll be able to engage more students in addressing the mental health needs of the community. One idea is to create a group of what she referred to as “youth mental health ambassadors” – students who discuss social and emotional issues and come up with ways to promote mental health wellness in the schools.
“The most valuable thing I learned this year is how resilient this community is,” she said. “We have folks here who work really hard to keep it together, and don’t know there may be other ways they could do things.
“We’ve had a large number of kids who are willing to say, ‘I’m struggling and I need some help,’ But we have a lot of things that don’t get talked about in Rappahannock County. There’s still this very strong feeling that what goes on in my home isn’t anybody else’s business.
“I respect that. But there are a lot of patterns and behaviors that occur behind closed doors that are hard for kids to navigate and that impact them daily. So for me, I need to earn my way in and keep building that trust.”
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