US school districts move to ease teacher stress, burnout

CONCORD: With Prince's “Raspberry Beret” blaring in the background, about 20 New Hampshire educators grabbed wooden sticks and began pounding their tables to the beat. Emily Daniels, who was leading a two-day workshop on burnout, encouraged the group including teachers, school counsellors, occupational therapists and social workers to stand up inside a hotel conference room. Before long, the group was banging on walls and whatever else they could find. Laughter filled the air. A few started dancing.

“Rhythm making offers the body a different kind of predictability that you can do every single day,” said Daniels, a former school counsellor who created The Regulated Classroom which trains teachers on how to manage their own nervous system and, in turn, reduce stress in the classroom. The training session is part of a growing and, some would say long overdue, effort to address the strains on educators' mental health. Addressing the mental health challenges of students coming out of the pandemic has emerged as a priority for schools nationwide. Many districts, facing hiring challenges, see tending to the educators as a way to help them help students and to retain them, amid stressors that range from behavioral problems to fears of shootings.

School districts have provided increased mental health training for staff, classroom support as well as resources and systems aimed at identifying burned out teachers and getting instructors connected to help. Karen Bowden-Gurley, a fifth grade teacher, said she attended the New Hampshire training because of teacher burnout, but she also feels student burnout. “The demands on all of us were really high and we were trying to make up for lost time for the couple of years that they fell back on their curriculum. But we forgot that they haven't been in school for a couple of years so they missed that social-emotional piece. We are dealing with that in the classroom.”

In a survey by the Rand Corporation, twice as many principals and teachers reported frequent job-related stress as other working adults. A study from a coalition of mental health organisations of New Orleans found educators working during the pandemic reported rates of emotional distress similar to health care workers — 36 per cent screened positive for anxiety, 35 per cent for depression and 19 per cent for post-traumatic stress syndrome. “It's all pretty bad,” said Leigh McLean, the primary investigator at the Teacher Emotions, Characteristics, and Health Lab at the University of Delaware School of Education, who has found levels of depression, anxiety and emotional exhaustion among elementary school teachers that are 100 percent to 400 percent higher than before the pandemic. She saw those issues increasing the most among early career teachers and teachers of colour. Some districts have or are planning to invest federal COVID-19 relief money in teacher mental health, seeing it as a way to also improve the classroom environment, boost retention and ultimately benefit the students themselves. The Atlanta school district launched a service with Emory University using federal funds to provide mental health services. Dubbed Urgent Behavioral Health Response, it funds 11 clinicians from Emory who provide emotional and behavioral assistance during school hours for struggling school employees.

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A Delaware district, meanwhile, hired two social and emotional learning coaches who work to address problems teachers are having in the classroom. Houston, which started building calming rooms where students can go to decompress, is hoping to do the same for teachers, according to Sean Ricks, the Houston Independent School District's senior manager of crisis intervention, noting that he has seen a “significant rise in teachers that were in distress.” The rooms would be different from the traditional teacher break rooms and a place where teachers could go during time off to “calm down and chill out,” Ricks said, adding they could have “could have some aromatherapy, maybe some soft music.” “We want them to be able to understand that we have to take mindfulness breaks and self-care breaks during the academic day sometimes,” Ricks said. An elementary school in Indiana starts the week with Mindful Mondays, where teachers guide their classes in deep breathing techniques. There are also Thoughtful Thursdays, where a student is called on to write a letter to a staff member to show appreciation, and Friday Focus, when students and teachers talk about self-care.

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“My teachers know when they need to take breaks throughout the day I want them to take those breaks,” said Allison Allen-Lenzo, the principal at O'Bannon Elementary School. A growing number of groups offer training that incorporates breathing exercises, yoga, gentle movements and meditation. One of these is Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education or CARE. In studies of its use among 224 New York City teachers, researchers found statistically significant improvements including reductions in emotional psychological distress, stress that comes from not having enough time as well as improvements in quality classroom interactions. Researchers also found that it extended to the students who showed increased engagement. Back in New Hampshire, the educators pushed aside the tables and were mastering a series of stretching movements known as qigong. Then, they gathered in a circle for an exercise that aims to synchronising their nervous system. Known as collective rhythm making, they began clapping their hands and snapping their fingers in unison.