Posted by AIU on 4/20/2022
A Spotlight on Mental Health Services: School Based Supports
From the Allegheny Intermediate Unit Special Education and Pupil Services Division
As students in our region are coming to the close of their second full school year disrupted by the COVID-19 Pandemic, regional education agencies, such as the Allegheny Intermediate Unit (AIU-3), continue to urge families and educators to focus on the mental health of the students in their care. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that from 2016-2019, a reported 20 million U.S. children aged 3-17 were diagnosed with one or more of the four most common mental health disorders, which are identified as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Anxiety, Behavior Problems, and Depression.
Even prior to the pandemic causing the need to close schools, the number of children diagnosed with mental health disorders in U.S. children was a growing concern with a 3% increase in the number of children diagnosed with Anxiety or Depression from 2003 to 2012.
Although year-to-date data is not currently available from the CDC, experts know that transitions can be hard for children and families even during the best of times. These same transitions during a pandemic have led to increased levels of stress and anxiety in these same groups. Regionally, school districts have almost all returned to regular in-person learning and are challenged with meeting the academic and social-emotional needs of their students.
The Allegheny Intermediate Unit has supported several educational partners in the region with trainings related to identifying behavioral and mental health issues in students and supporting those needs. As part of these informational sessions, the AIU urges educators to support and accommodate the social-emotional needs of their students as they address the identified learning loss that occurred locally and across the nation. The importance of social-emotional learning as part of the education of children is a focus of the AIU and the Special Education and Pupil Services Division.
