Why Are We Making Our Children Sick?
In the elementary and middle schools of Rockingham County, N.C., a rural district north of Greensboro, administrators have to discard as many as 20 test booklets on exam days because children vomit on them.
"Kids [are] throwing up in the middle of the tests," says Dianne Campbell, the district's director of testing and accountability. "They cry. They have to be removed. The stress is so much on the test that they can't handle it."
It's not just tests that are stressing students. Across the country, school nurses, psychologists, counselors, and others concerned about children's mental health say that schools in general have become more stressful places and that many students can't handle the pressure.
What are we doing to our children? Why are we making them sick? What is it about our families, our communities, and particularly our schools that has made their lives so stressful? And what can we do to help?
While there are few studies on stress among K-12 students, two recent surveys show a disturbing trend at the college level. In one of the studies, released in February by the journal Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, the counseling center at Kansas State University found that the percentage of students being treated for depression at the center had doubled between 1989 and 2001. The study, once of the most extensive of its kind, followed a 2001 national survey in which more than 80 percent of college counselors said they believed the number of students seeking help for serious psychological problems had increased over the past five years.
And the trend appears to be starting before college. At the K-12 level, school health experts say they are seeing more student stress, much of it coming from outside school. High divorce rates, a sluggish economy, and the rapid pace of society have all put unprecedented pressure on families -- and on kids.
Fear of failure
These societal pressures are difficult enough without schools contributing to the problem, but some observers say that's exactly what's happening. Students are stressed by the climate of schools that have grown too large and impersonal and by the unintended effects of the nationwide effort to raise standards. Parents complain about a glut of homework in the early grades, about elementary school students having to sit through hours of testing, about kindergartens morphing from places where children learned to love school to the start of what could become a grueling 13-year marathon.
"Young children, even first-graders, know where they stand in the achievement hierarchy," says Rhonda S. Weinstein, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Reaching Higher: The Power of Expectations in Schooling. Rather than creating classrooms that develop talent, Weinstein says, "We magnify minor differences and make them salient."
This relentless sorting is not helping our students, Weinstein says: It undercuts self-esteem and increases the fear of failure. As the late John Holt, the eminent teacher and education writer, wrote in 1964, "Adults destroy the intellectual and creative capacity of children ... above all by making them afraid, afraid of not doing what other people want, of not pleasing, of making mistakes, of failing, of being wrong."
Almost three decades later, that fear has not abated.
Intolerable levels of stress
In numerous interviews with professionals in education and mental health -- including school nurses, counselors, and psychologists -- ASBJ found near-unanimous agreement that too many students are suffering from intolerable levels of stress. Of course, much of this stress comes from family and societal factors that are beyond the school's control. But instead of creating schools that are refuges from outside stress, these professionals say, we have too often constructed environments that only add to them.
"It's about as rough as I've seen it in a number of years of talking to schools," says Randy Compton, executive director of the School Mediation Center in Boulder, Colo. "It's hard out there."
Adds Michael Klonsky, director of the Small Schools Workshop at the University of Illinois, Chicago: "The pressures on students are tremendous."
That's certainly the case in Rockingham County. In North Carolina, students are tested in grades three through eight as part of a process that can determine whether they will be promoted. For Rockingham, that's about 7,500 students. "I probably have, during a three-day period, about 15 or 20 cases where kids get sick during the test," Campbell says. "That's a pretty high rate. As the tests start, they literally fall apart. It would break your heart."
Campbell believes in testing as a diagnostic tool, and she says the teachers in Rockingham try their best not to transfer the pressure they feel to the kids. "Even though you feel the pressure, don't put it on your kids," she says. "There's a fine line between making them feel responsible and making them feel overstressed."
Stress and pressure -- both external and self-imposed -- affect kids all along the achievement spectrum. For high-achieving students, it's harder than ever to get into a top college or a state's flagship university. In part that's because of the sheer number of students competing for a limited supply of spots. At Berkeley, for example, where admissions officers refer to this generation as "Tidal Wave II," it's almost twice as hard to gain acceptance as it was 10 years ago, the admission rate having dropped from 42.9 percent in 1992 to 23.9 percent last year.
Students respond by loading up on Advanced Placement courses and a dizzying array of extracurricular activities. Sleep becomes "the one part of their schedule that is expendable," says Laura Celestino, a school nurse at Acalanes High School, an academically rigorous public school in Lafayette, Calif., in the valley east of Berkeley.
"I don't know how many kids will sit in my office and say, 'I don't know what I'm going to do when I get out of high school,'" says Lynne Harr, a therapist who leads stress-management groups at Acalanes and other schools. "And this kid will be 15."
Harr describes a meeting with a senior who, by all accounts, has above average credentials for college, including a 3.2 grade point average. "She's absolutely terrified -- and probably rightly so -- that she won't get into anything," Harr says.
Jeff Maher, 18, a senior at Acalanes, talks about high achievers breaking into tears when they get less than an A in a course. But unlike at many high schools, where grade inflation is rampant, it's not easy to be perfect at Acalanes, and the competition puts incredible pressure on students to stand out. That kind of rigor is why Ivy League admissions offices like the school, Maher said: They know an A from Acalanes means something.
"Harvard takes one or two" students from certain public high schools, Maher estimates. "So what they're doing, early on, is pitting kids against each other."
Maher recently scored a perfect 800 in the SAT-2 writing test; his friend got a 790. "She was pondering studying for it all over again," Maher says. "Why?"
Increased anxiety
Low-performing students, especially those from poorer areas, face a different challenge -- simply staying in school. And being held back a grade raises the stakes. Numerous studies show that grade retention doesn't help students' academic success and may even increase dropout rates, yet between 1980 and 1992 the number of students retained increased from about 20 percent to nearly 32 percent, according to a 1995 study by Melissa Roderick. Anecdotal evidence suggests the rates have increased further since 1992 -- and will continue to increase -- as more states require high-stakes tests for promotion and graduation.
What impact is this retention -- and the threat of it -- having on students' emotional well-being? Without any national studies to draw on, we can't be sure, but some indications suggest it increases the level of anxiety. Consider a 1987 study in which Kaoru Yamamoto, of the University of Colorado at Denver, and Deborah A. Byrnes, of Utah State University, examined how stressful various events were in the lives of 558 elementary school children. For sixth-graders, fear of grade retention was the third-highest stressor, right behind losing a parent and going blind.
Rose Paolino is a counselor at Bailey Middle School in West Haven, Conn., where a large number of students receive free or reduced-price lunches. Lying just across the river from New Haven, the city shares many the social and economic problems of its larger neighbor. Many of Paolino's students come from single-parent homes and don't have the emotional resiliency of their peers from intact families, Paolino says. She says her caseload has nearly doubled in six years.
"The social-emotional has to come before the academic, and it will always be that way," Paolino says. "Until a child is established socially and emotionally, you can forget about the academics."
And that's true regardless of the student's intellectual ability. Maher, the Acalanes student with the perfect SAT-2 score, had already been accepted at the University of Massachusetts Amherst by February and was waiting to hear from Northwestern University, his first choice. But his high school career was not always so smooth. Coming from an easier middle school, he was unprepared for the work he would have to do at Acalanes.
Counselors say transitions between schools are always tough on students, but for Maher the change was devastating. He was anxious, depressed, distracted -- and earning Cs and Ds. Only after being treated for several medical and behavioral problems -- including depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and Tourette's syndrome -- did his health and grades improve. Since then he's had to play catch up and until recently was studying more than six hours a day to make up for his slow start.
Too much, too soon
How much of this stress can be blamed on schools and how much on our fast-paced, fractured society? It's hard to say. With anytime access to cable TV, the Internet, and other kinds of media, kids are no longer shielded from what goes on in the world. They're forced to grow up fast -- or, at least, to appear to grow up fast. And a large part of that stepped-up pace of development is facing sexual pressures at an earlier age.
"Some girls will say, 'I'm a lesbian' to keep the boys off them and not be pressured so much,'" says Brenda Melton, a counselor at Alamo Achievement Center, an alternative school in San Antonio, and president of the American School Counselor Association.
A school may teach values or abstinence or problem-solving skills, but Britney Spears teaches something else. A generation ago, if you skipped school, your neighbor or your relative down the street might report you, and your parents and the teacher would have a talk. Now, your parents are both working, your neighbor doesn't know you, and there is no relative down the street.
In past generations, "there was just a much more consistent and reiterated message" from society, says Dr. Mary Schwab-Stone, a psychiatrist at the Yale Child Study Center who works with the New Haven schools.
Schools also can't control a child's reaction to world events, and the world of late has seemed a strange and treacherous place. Several school nurses and counselors say that Sept. 11, the war in Afghanistan, and the possibility of war in Iraq all cause stress for their students.
Sandra Gadsden, a school nurse in the Worthington Public Schools near Columbus, Ohio, tells of a fourth-grader who came into her office complaining of a stomach ache and saying his eyes were "feeling funny."
"His mother had the television on, and he heard all this rattling about war in Iraq," Gadsden says. "He told me he's afraid our country will go to war. He's 9 years old."
But most of her students' concerns are closer to home. They often involve their parents' expectations and the fear that they cannot meet them. "I've had children tell me, 'My mother says I won't get into a good college if I don't do well on the test,''' Gadsden says.
And these children are in elementary school.
Parent pressure
Sometimes, parental expectations and school pressure combine to put needless strain on children. More than a year ago, on a state testing day, a third-grader walked into Gadsden's office carrying with her a terrible odor of skunk. It turned out that the girl's dog had been sprayed by a skunk and then jumped on her.
"I had to come up with a plan very quickly to 'de-skunk' her" so she could take the test, Gadsden recalls.
The cafeteria didn't have any tomato juice, a common antidote for skunk musk, so Gadsden doused the girl with catsup, rinsed it off, and put a stocking cap over her wet head. She later recalled the note that had been sent home with the students, telling parents to make sure their children got a good night's sleep and a nourishing breakfast before the test. This test, the note seemed to say, was extremely important.
"This mother didn't have the confidence to say, 'Testing isn't all that important,'" Gadsden says.
Obviously, this mother thought the test was more essential than helping her daughter rid herself of an embarrassing and unpleasant odor. But other parents in Worthington are questioning the wisdom of frequent testing and the other academic demands being placed on their children. And they've asked Gadsden to lead a stress-reduction group for interested students.
One of those parents, Pam Nylander, was concerned about her 13-year-old daughter Brittany, a seventh-grader who has juvenile diabetes. A straight-A student, Brittany was staying up too late to finish her homework, and Nylander was worried about her health. She talked to other parents and found their children were also doing homework late into the night, so they approached the school about their concerns.
Of course, it's not all the school's fault. Parents need to limit their children's outside activities, Nylander says, but that, too, can be hard. There was a time a generation ago when students could do well in school, take up a sport, play an instrument, and participate in a youth group -- and still have free time.
Not anymore. Noting that her daughter is an accomplished pianist, Nylander says, "If she wanted to, she could be in five music competitions in the next three months." The same is true of the increasingly competitive world of athletics, whether school sponsored or run by a club.
"Everybody has raised the bar on their expectations for these kids for everything," Nylander says, "and it's very difficult to strike a balance."
One school district that is trying to strike a balance is the Adams 12 Five Star Schools in Thornton, Colo. More than two years ago, the district convened the first of 89 focus groups to ask residents what they wanted for the school system and its students. What the district found, says Superintendent Jim Christensen, is "that they have higher expectations and more expectations than just the test scores."
The result is a plan for "Educating the Whole Child" in which students will be assessed according to eight traits. The district says students should be competent, creative, productive, healthy, ethical, successful, thoughtful, and good citizens.
Christensen, who has been working on ways to assess these traits, says the main goals are motivating students and involving their parents. "It really focuses on getting the students, the parents, and the teacher on the same page," Christensen says, "so that [the student's] competence can be enhanced through these traits."
Feeling more connected
Venice High School is a big school on a big campus -- 66 acres in an affluent beach town south of Sarasota, Fla. It's got all the advantages of a well-appointed comprehensive high school -- and the inevitable drawbacks as well: 2,200 students packed into a sprawling complex that takes up to eight minutes to traverse between classes.
"Personal" wouldn't be the best way to describe it.
"High schools are much too big." says Principal Candace Millington. "They're like mega cities. ... Venice High School is bigger than the college I attended."
Recognizing that the sheer size of the school and its impersonal atmosphere might be adding to students' stress, the Sarasota Public Schools decided to do something about it. So last fall, armed with a federal Small Learning Communities grant, the district began to break up the campus by grouping the ninth-graders into five "Cornerstone Teams" of about 90 students each. The students will spend four years with their team members, and every new ninth-grade class will be organized into similar teams.
"Day One, we saw an immediate difference on our campus," Millington says. "The campus was calm. There was a peacefulness and serenity about the campus that we had not experienced."
Breaking up large, impersonal schools as Venice did is a promising way of reducing stress and helping students feel more connected. "Students in these schools are anonymous. Nobody really knows them," says Klonsky, of the Small Schools Workshop. "And they're also heavily tracked and competitive -- not just academically, but socially. They're under great pressure to make themselves known or find some kind of identity."
At Venice High, that sense of identify comes more easily now. Each ninth-grade team has become for its students "their neighborhood and their home," Millington says. "And they develop close relationships with their teachers. In fact, during their lunch period, students even go back to the area and have lunch with their teachers and socialize with their friends."
Staff members on each team decide how they will divide the students so that each one has the opportunity to meet regularly with an adult. Students are asked to help develop their own goals for after high school, plus an academic plan to meet those goals. That also helps remove stress, Millington says, "because they know why they're taking the courses they're taking."
The changes have been welcomed by parents, who say they now have a better opportunity to get to know their children's teachers, Millington says. For the parents' benefit (and also the student's), staff members take a picture of each ninth-grader in a cap and gown, a kind of visual reminder of the goals the student has set.
"It's a very powerful, very, very emotional picture," Millington says. "And some of the parents cry when they see these pictures, they're so moved."
— Lawrence Hardy
Overburdened Overwhelmed
American School Board Journal
May 2003
http://www.asbj.com/2003/04/0403coverstory.html
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
