As students head back to school this fall, funders that care about education and youth need to know: How are kids really doing in the aftermath of COVID-19? And how does philanthropy need to evolve to support the needs of a generation of students emerging from the pandemic’s tumult?

CEP’s YouthTruth initiative set out to answer this question by consulting the experts: students themselves. We analyzed quantitative and qualitative student feedback data from over 500,000 secondary students gathered before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. From that data, we learned that student perceptions of learning and belonging in the 2022-23 school year returned to pre-pandemic levels (though troubling differences across student demographic groups remain). Concerningly, however, students’ experiences with mental health and support from adults in school worsened during COVID-19 and have not recovered.

Understand and Address the ‘Support Gap’

Perhaps even more striking is the fact that students’ experiences with their own mental health and support from adults worsened during COVID-19 — and have not recovered. Nearly half of all students in the 2022-23 school year reported that depression, stress, or anxiety makes it hard for them to do their best in school. (And for LGBTQ+ students, an astonishing 77 percent of students cited depression, stress, or anxiety as an obstacle.) This proportion increased steadily over the course of the pandemic. Meanwhile, the proportion of students saying that there is an adult at school they can talk to when feeling upset, stressed, or having problems decreased to just 41 percent in the 2022-23 school year.

The “support gap” created by the simultaneous increase in students’ mental health as an obstacle to learning and decrease in support from adults at school emerged in fall 2020. This gap has since widened, despite significant attention to COVID’s impact on youth depression, anxiety, and mental health. Students describe “not enough counselors” and ask that their schools “make more of an effort to reach out to students,” making it “more accessible and clear” how to get the help they need rather than just “pushing it under the surface.” The bottom line is that young people’s challenges with mental health and insufficient support are not getting better, not yet anyway — and these challenges directly impact students’ ability to learn.

Here, too, there is an opportunity and a need for philanthropy. Education funders, community foundations, and health funders concerned with mental health: Consider how you (or how you could) support programming, training, staffing, or additional resources for youth mental health and well-being in schools or in students’ communities. How might you help advocate for structural changes to the funding or staffing of youth mental health supports?

Put Student Voice at the Center of the Narrative

The national narrative on learning loss is well-meaning but limited. Our obsession with test scores, the pressure to “catch up,” and one-dimensional accountability systems crowd out other integral sources of feedback about how young people are doing. The world is taking shape around this younger generation, and decisions are being made about their future. Yet far too often their voice is ignored.

Read the full article about supporting kids by Jen Vorse Wilka at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.