Fractured Futures: The Impacts of COVID-Era Education Policy on the Mental Health of Underserved Students

By Edith Guan 

Photos by Giulia Squillace and Desola Lanre-Ologun on Unsplash.

In 2020, schools closed, shutting doors for students without support to continue learning. During the COVID-19 pandemic, students from underserved communities faced both emotional trauma exacerbated by volatile surroundings and barriers from fully taking advantage of remote learning. The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund was signed into law, the first in three rounds of federal grants totaling 189.5 million to help schools adapt. However, policies that were rolled out failed to account for adolescents' cognitive vulnerabilities, digital access disparities, and underfunding in marginalized communities, which systemically hindered students' academic performance and mental health in the long run.

When in-person school was brought to an abrupt halt, trauma moved in with students. The prolonged isolation, the disrupted daily rhythm, and the deaths COVID brought were stressors triggering the formation of flashbulb memories -- vivid and detailed recollections with potentially lifelong emotional impacts. Adolescence was especially a period of critical cognitive development dependent on external feedback; hence, stress during this period activates students' maladaptive schemas, such as chronic depressive episodes, according to researchers at Northwestern University. These emotional needs were widely ignored, especially in low-income BIPOC communities where school districts did not offer social-emotional support programs due to limited resources.

Physical challenges manifested in the digital gap. 83% of rural counties were categorized as having a high digital divide based on Purdue University's Digital Divide Index; specifically, families in these regions have neither the socioeconomic resources nor community infrastructure to provide high-speed Internet to their students. Decreased investment, low profits, and government micromanagement (such as implementing price controls and labor mandates) undermine private broadband network providers' incentives to expand services to rural areas despite heavy federal investment. Besides low engagement and long-term academic performance gaps, students facing the digital divide often feel alienated and unconfident, further intensifying COVID's emotional impacts.

Even after schools reopened, marginalized communities continued to suffer the lockdown's repercussions. As districts are funded with local property tax revenues, schools in marginalized BIPOC communities tend to be underfunded. While wealthier districts pivoted easily between in-person and remote learning, these high-need schools encountered challenges in staff retention, access to technology, and a lack of trauma recovery programs. As 58% of rural students were cut off entirely from education, this inconsistency damaged the trust between students and teachers. This relational trauma leads students to withdraw from learning and disrupts the ability to connect with educators, which is needed for healing.

Missed opportunities, though, were abound. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL)'s trauma-informed framework was attempted to be banned in eight states, which policymakers argued (without evidence) was a Trojan horse to introduce "liberalism". Community school models, which focus on each community's unique holistic needs, achieved local success but never scaled nationally. As ESSER only listed broad categories, spending transparency remained poor, as only 48% of funds were used for academic and SEL recovery according to the Aspen Institute. The patchwork of local-level executions resulted in inequitable support, as most districts lacked the initiative to implement high-dosage interventions.

As COVID established trauma and academic gaps, equity must be the basis of every intervention for long-term healing. Disaggregating mental health data by race, income, and location would make disparities transparent for timely intervention. A national standard on trauma-informed SEL would ensure targeted, context-appropriate support for student's mental health, and mandated access to technology for Title 1 school students would keep students connected with a support network and promote achievement. By combining both approaches, innovative platforms like Mindfulness Labs offer easily integrable, bite-sized SEL activities that support diverse students and adapt to each community's needs with the aid of AI.

Despite heavy investment, national policies ignored the need to access trauma-recovery services and digital platforms for underserved students. Mistakes made on multiple levels -- from a lack of transparent local spending to counterproductive federal digital access incentives -- compounded with pandemic-period discontinuity and loss to traumatize students, hindering both development and academic performance. As students' healthy cognitive functioning is a prerequisite to learning, mental health should be treated as a fundamental right. Effective interventions will focus on investing in trauma-informed SEL programs and their associated digital infrastructure. Ultimately, students only begin to heal when policy structures listen and respond to their needs.