MONTEREY >> Ella Myers was 13 and in middle school when the COVID-19 pandemic shut schools down. Zoom school wasn’t for her. She tried to balance learning through a computer screen, being an outdoor person who wasn’t allowed outdoors and dealing with rowdy brothers at home — it was a rough time.

Then, schools were allowed to return in-person and that brought a whole new set of challenges. All of a sudden, kids who were at the beginning of their teenage years when the pandemic started were now entering high school, with no clue how to read certain social cues. They had been isolated and left to their devices (literally).

Even for Myers, a three-sport standout athlete, readjusting to life after the pandemic didn’t come easy. She had plenty of experience interacting with kids her age through sports before COVID shut them down, but like many students, she was at a loss as to how to interact with others once the lockdown ended.

In Myers’ words, “it was kind of a big shock.”

The students who grew up during the pandemic have faced a myriad of challenges — remote learning, a lockdown, and, for many, increased awareness of their mental health.

According to Montage Health’s Ohana, a mental health program for youth and parents in Monterey County, mental health emergency visits increased up to 31% in kids aged 12-17 during the pandemic.

Five years later, the county is still dealing with the mental effects the pandemic had on kids, and trying to figure out solutions and best practices to keep kids’ wellbeing a priority.

An expert’s perspective

Ohana was established in 2018 following a $106 million donation from Bertie Bialek Elliott. Operated through the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, the program focuses on mental health care for children, adolescents and families.

The need for expanded mental health services in the county had already been rising for years, which was what originally prompted Ohana, but the pandemic boosted those numbers, according to Executive Director Dr. Susan Swick.

Half of all lifetime mental illnesses have shown up by the age of 15 according to Swick and 75% of them have shown up by the age of 25. Also worth noting, she said, is the rate of illnesses like depression and anxiety disorders in youth has been climbing by as much as 50% over the last two decades.

So while COVID wasn’t the start of this climb, mental health professionals have charted a clear correlation between the ongoing climb to the effects of the pandemic and losing out on formative years in school.

“In the last five years, all of the challenges that children were facing that were maybe causing the rate of anxiety disorders to climb and the challenges accessing services or treatment, all of those have kind of gotten worse since COVID,” said Swick. “Except for one.”

Swick said she has noticed the stigma around mental health has diminished since the pandemic, with more people willing to speak up publicly about their struggles.

“There has been public shared discussion without shame or secrecy about how common these problems are, how burdensome they are and the need to ask for help and expand services when needed,” said Swick. “That’s gotten better in a way that was accelerated, I think, by COVID.”

Although the pandemic may have helped drop the veil in a positive way, being out of school for over a year still had serious consequences for the development of kids’ mental and social wellbeing, said Swick.

“School does a lot of extraordinary health building and it’s often by giving young people a chance to do critical work which builds social skills and develops their confidence skills,” she said. “They’re all the building blocks of mental health. We build them when we learn algebra or we learn the rules of soccer — they’re not just learning rules, they are also building social skills and patience, frustration tolerance… those are sort of the rudiments of good mental health.

“The capacity to face adversity and adapt and still experience positive emotions … that’s the muscle of mental health and school is where a lot of that happens, and kids were out of school.”

School solutions

School districts have made their awareness of mental health needs apparent in the past few years, from hiring more therapists and school psychologists to building dedicated wellness centers.

Salinas Union High School District, for example, opened its first wellness center at Everett Alvarez High School during the 2018-19 school year. This was in response to students telling the administration they needed to pay more attention to students’ mental health. When administrators saw an uptick in visits to the center upon the return to school, the district realized just how much students needed these spaces.

Students coming back from the pandemic reported feelings of anger, depression, anxiety and loneliness. The wellness centers offer check-ins, grief and anxiety support, stress management, crisis response and more. Salinas Union has now opened seven wellness hubs and aims to have one at each of its campuses.

Pacific Grove Unified School District used some of its one-time COVID relief funding to hire three mental health therapists to support the counselors already in place at its school sites.

When schools reopened, the district did see an uptick in students seeking mental health resources, but those visits have since leveled out according to Superintendent Linda Adamson.

“I think the awareness … has been the biggest shift in our approach and thinking, particularly since the pandemic,” said Adamson.

Part of Pacific Grove Unified’s approach was focusing on “the whole child” by emphasizing social-emotional learning in the curriculum starting at the transitional kindergarten level.

“We’re trying to build and give students the tools early on for them to really be able to address some of those emotional challenges that they may have and face as they age up,” said Adamson.

Monterey Peninsula Unified has dedicated wellness teams and counselors at each school site that offer check-ins, peer support opportunities and referrals to community resources. There are also posters hung up all around campuses with QR codes for students to understand the resources available to them.

“We had already seen an uptick in the needs around mental health before this,” said Monterey High School Principal Tom Newton. “Obviously, this was exacerbated on an exponential level from that point on. Kids were isolated at home.”

This transparency from the schools has made students more comfortable speaking up, according to Myers, a Monterey High student.

“I think people are more outspoken about mental health due to the pandemic,” said Myers. “From what I’ve seen, I feel like everyone is super upfront about it. You know that you can talk to anyone on campus, any of the teachers about it, and they will fully support you.”

Students weren’t the only ones impacted

The confusing and oftentimes contradictory information coming out at the time led to anxiety and fear among school communities, said Newton. On top of that, educators had to figure out how to keep their families safe while caring for and teaching their students.

“It’s hard to say it out loud now, considering how we recovered, but it was a really intense time,” said Newton. “Just a lot of almost hysteria and fear, but we had to do our jobs and do them well because kids were at stake.”

While she didn’t know the teachers of Monterey High before the pandemic, Myers was struck by their resilience.

“Overall, I think it was just really impressive how teachers, both in middle school and when we started coming back to actual school at Monterey High, how the teachers kind of adapted to it,” said Myers. “You could tell that it was stressful for them, but they held it together really, really well.”

Newton said this wasn’t without struggle. In the conversation about the effects of the pandemic on mental health, he said, the effects on educators need to be discussed. From dealing with pressures of dealing with new and ever-changing regulations in the classroom to their personal lives, educators had an immensely stressful and anxiety-inducing time throughout the pandemic, said Newton.

“I think that teachers have been more anxious as well,” said Newton. “I think that their mental health has suffered because of it all. Things don’t happen without them … the school doesn’t run without students but it also doesn’t run without the educators, and they’re suffering.”

What’s the lesson here?

For many, the willingness of the community to come together and speak about their challenges has been a highlight.

“I think that the more we can communicate, the more we can take advantage of the fact that COVID was a catalyst for these conversations, the better it’s going to be overall that we can educate kids and educate people,” said Newton.

As for what students need, Myers thinks it’s simple: just a little understanding.

“I think maybe older generations were raised on the principle of like, ‘you need to get over it, rub some dirt on it, hide it, you’ll get through it,’” said Myers. “But I think we need to really understand that, yeah, we will get through it, but we need help to get through it.”