Guest Essay: Prioritize children’s mental health in school closure decisions
Glaringly missing in the District 65 school closure board deliberations are the actual social and emotional conditions in which this current cohort of K-5 children have grown up and been forced to cope and adapt around.
As a licensed clinical psychologist and marriage and family therapist working closely with children and families across the district since 2006, let me be clear: these are not normal times.
This cohort of kids are the children of COVID–asked abruptly to adapt and contort emotionally and socially to the most confusing, scary, and emotionally challenging pandemic of the past 100 years. To be good leaders and stewards in supporting the growth and development of our children, it is imperative we make leadership decisions through an accurate understanding of the actual systemic conditions of their lived experience.
These young, innocent children had the inconvenient timing of reaching school age after experiencing a staggering level of disruption, societal chaos and emotional tumult. It disappoints me to no end how little as a society we have addressed the traumatizing impact of the COVID era for all of us. Further left unaddressed are the challenges experienced by young, developing children and how confusing and disruptive it was for them to experience such unusual physical distance relationally with others and the overall lack of normal socialization for their cohort in some of the most critical socialization years in human development.
This much we know from the science of child development: safe and healthy relationships, trust, stability, consistency, predictability, openness, and non-judgment are the fundamental ingredients necessary to form healthy attachments for children with themselves and with others. Developing a healthy attachment style is arguably the single most important psychological/emotional variable to help form and shape within the internal architecture of a child’s psyche for their long-term success and well-being.
School communities are a primary environment where attachment is shaped and influenced: either healthy attachment styles develop or children are harmed. What typically follows when healthy attachment is disrupted is internalized confusion, shame and other complex psychological, relational, and emotional problems. A school and its staff can do so much for a child simply by being consistent, predictable, and creating a safe environment. Children need to feel secure enough to explore newness in the world (ideas, people, culture or experiences). Children grow best when they can explore safely so they discover more of who they are, what they like, what they are interested in and what they are good at.
On top of COVID, this same cohort of kids are very aware that their own government recently sent agents armed with weapons of war into their neighborhoods, around their schools. Some of their young eyes and hearts have witnessed the terrifying abduction of neighbors.
The closure of Foster School in the 1970s harmed and traumatized the innocent children of the 5th Ward, who in turn lost their own primary school environment, were separated from their best friends and trusted teachers, and were robbed of their own consistency and predictability, all while absorbing an impossible societal weight to solve desegregation for the whole district.
Please, let us not make the same mistake again!
The amount of empathy and humanism we bring to solving this financial deficit will predict how much healing and resilience will be available for our children and community to access following this tough decision-making process!
We must prioritize the mental health of all Evanston children. While next steps are murkier following the board’s December 1st deadlocked vote, we must urge the board to proceed intentionally during these extraordinary and volatile times with only closing one more school (on top of Bessie Rhodes) and not moving children in special programs out of their primary school communities.
A program like Willard TWI should be protected in times like these, not slashed, as our Hispanic friends and neighbors are under assault by our own government–and now the district is telling these kids they do not belong at the only school they have known. Likewise, programs like STEP (for vulnerable children on the Autism Spectrum) should be disrupted as little as possible, respecting how harmful altering consistency and routine is for this specific population of children.
We must avoid tearing apart school communities by forcibly and clumsily relocating vulnerable children based on cherry-picked data. District 65 must honor repeated promises made these past four years to provide continuity by allowing kids to finish at their current school if it remains open. This is how we re-establish trust.
Thoughtful and intentional timing can make a huge difference here in our children’s mental health outcomes if we allow more of this cohort to finish 5th grade in their established schools. For example, kids who were two or three years old when the pandemic hit, and began kindergarten with masks in the Fall 2022, will graduate 5th grade by Spring 2028.
Closing only one more school now and displacing the fewest numbers of young students possible should be our goal, especially given the research-based alternative proposals for capturing needed savings without reducing in-school staff or programs. This would still shutter two rich and textured school communities (Bessie Rhodes and presumably Kingsley), which is gutting and heartbreaking for these children and families.
Let this community come together and support this board solving its financial crisis, while maintaining a humanistic approach for our children, and grow a stronger District 65 community with Foster School back in it!!
David Hauser, PhD is a licensed clinical psychologist based in Evanston/Skokie.
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