As the world continues to experience the COVID-19 pandemic, public health experts continue to try to understand the virus and its many effects and impacts and how it will evolve over time. Among the many models and predictions about how much longer it’s likely to last or how and when the virus will spike again, there’s one crisis that we—as a society and schools—need to be paying closer attention to: mental health challenges. According to 2020 data from the American Psychological Association, rates of serious anxiety and depression have been climbing, with increased stress levels documented among adults in general and parents in particular. Conversations about the ill effects of COVID-19 and distance learning have generally focused on children’s losses in education, with little attention paid to their mental health. There’s no question that children’s levels of stress and distress also will increase the longer COVID-19 is unrestrained. And for schools, it will be important to proactively do everything possible to foster well-being in their own communities, as experts suggest that “mental illness will be the next wave of COVID.” Our work with schools has shown that over the years, schools have paid increasing attention to social-emotional learning and promoting resilience. The term “resilience” refers to the phenomenon where people do well in the face of adversity, and this “doing well” is affected by many risk and protective factors such as relationships at home, relationships at school, and attributes of individuals themselves. Through many years of partnership with schools and communities, Authentic Connections has been working to foster resilience and improve mental health through data and insights. We’ve created and administered surveys, rooted in 30 years of peer-reviewed research, to provide schools with rigorous data about their individual communities. Summarized results allow schools to see how their own students fare on important mental health indices compared with national norms from similar schools, and learn which risks and protective processes are especially influential within their own communities. Collectively, these findings help provide leaders a focused, customized list of the most important next steps to drive meaningful improvements at their own schools. In spring 2020, we launched two new surveys to specifically assess the mental health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in schools: the Student Resilience Survey (SRS) and Faculty Resilience Survey (FRS). As we have done with other surveys, we partnered with participating schools in gathering data on their community mental health—on measures of student and faculty well-being and modifiable aspects of life (risk and protective factors)—especially relevant during the pandemic. In each collaboration, school leaders distributed the surveys and our team analyzed all (anonymized) responses; we summarized major findings and from these, arrived at tailored, actionable recommendations that were integrated with lessons from research on resilience. Between April and June, we used the SRS and FRS to collect data on 15,000 students and 5,000 faculty members at about 70 independent schools across the United States. Through these collaborations, we found that some risk and protective processes repeatedly emerged as critical across all independent schools assessed. Specifically, we found four common themes among schools that did best in terms of mental health during the pandemic: They fostered a strong sense of community, communicated clearly and consistently, prioritized mental health, and frequently sought and addressed feedback. These early results offer important insights for school leaders starting a new school year amid continued uncertainty—a year that will look quite different than any other.

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