In 2023, 72% of transgender students and 69% of those questioning report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness and 1 in 4 attempted suicide. By comparison, 11% of cisgender girls and 5% of cisgender boys reported a suicide attempt. Ten percent of trans youth received medical treatment after trying to take their own life. 

Last year marked the first time data on high school students’ gender identity was collected as part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Administered every other year to some 20,000 ninth- through 12^th-graders, the survey has long been considered the most accurate depiction of the well-being of LGBTQ youth. 

This most recent survey is also the first to collect data on student welfare since dozens of laws in almost half of U.S. states have rolled back protections for LGBTQ youth and limited transgender people’s access to health care. A released in September by The Trevor Project found the rate of suicide attempts rose by up to 72% in places that enacted the laws between 2018 and 2022. 

“The figures reported by the CDC are harrowing and indicate that much remains to be done to support transgender young people’s health and safety in the U.S., especially as we’re witnessing another record-breaking year of anti-transgender legislation,” says Ronita Nath, Trevor’s vice president of research. 

The federal data adds to research showing that LGBTQ students aren’t safe at school. Compared with 8.5% of cisgender male students, more than 1 in 4 gender-nonconforming youth reported skipping school within the last month out of fear, and 40% said they were bullied. More than 10% of transgender and questioning students lacked stable housing, a rate five times higher than that of their cisgender peers. 

“These data confirm what we have long known to be true: Transgender young people are disproportionately impacted by a number of health disparities,” says Nath. “It’s crucial to clarify that these young people are not inherently prone to these negative mental health outcomes, but rather placed at higher risk because of how they are mistreated and stigmatized by others.”

According to the Movement Advancement Project, 53% of all LGBTQ people now live in states where there are no legal protections for queer students. Another 2% live in places where new laws prohibit local governments, including school districts, from enacting anti-discrimination policies. States with anti-bullying laws are home to 45% of the LGBTQ population.

Data about trans youth is scarce, but the statistics that are available underscore higher rates of poor mental health, suicidality, in-school victimization and other struggles. The number of youth who identify as gender-nonconforming or questioning in the new CDC data is much higher than past estimates. Extrapolating from 2017 and 2019 Youth Risk Behavior statistics drawn from a smaller number of states, in 2022 the Williams Institute, a UCLA-based LGBTQ research center, suggested 1.4% of teens are transgender. 

It is known that a higher number of youth now identify as LGBTQ in general than previous generations. But researchers caution that at least one more CDC survey cycle is needed to draw conclusions about whether teens are now more likely to say their gender identity does not match the sex they were assigned at birth. 

In 2022, President Joe Biden  geared at expanding LGBTQ data collection by the U.S. Department of Education and other federal agencies. At the same time, however, at least 10 states — including six where anti-gay and trans legislation has been enacted — in the Youth Risk Behavior Survey in full or in part. Civil rights advocates have complained that this will make it harder to . 

“We are grateful to see that, finally, transgender young people are being counted,” says Nath. “We urge all public health institutions to continue collecting data on this population, and to fund additional research and resources to better serve and protect transgender youth across the country.”

However, more than 80% of LGBTQ students feel , and nearly 58% have experienced discrimination. These numbers show that many LGBTQ students are not safe at the two places they spend most of their time. This lack of safety has a significant impact on students’ mental health, school performance, relationships and future plans. LGBTQ students are not getting the support they need, and it is resulting in systematic harm.

Teachers are in a perfect position to be the accepting adult LGBTQ students need and to advocate for them in their schools. Students spend thousands of hours in school over the course of their K-12 careers. In that time, they form trusting relationships with teachers, especially those who serve as coaches, club advisers and activity leaders. School is where many explore the names, pronouns and identities that feel right to them. How teachers react to this exploration directly impacts how students feel about themselves and their safety. Teachers also have the ability to push for improvements to policies to make schools safer for students when students can’t advocate for themselves. 

Without this support, queer students are more likely to .

Advocacy for queer students can take a variety of forms, depending on the school and district, as well as state laws and policies that might limit what educators can do.

Teachers can establish themselves as a safe person in a variety of ways, like including items in the classroom such as flags, posters and . This can also be done through clothing and accessory choices including rainbow earrings, lanyards, buttons, bracelets and other jewelry can help students know they are safe.

Teachers can also set up a GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance or Gender and Sexuality Alliance). These groups have a variety of names (Rainbow Club, Come As You Are Club) and create a space for LGBTQ students to gather. There are huge when a school has a GSA, even if students don’t attend. These include feelings of safety and better psychological well-being and reduced likelihood of hearing homophobic remarks or negative comments about gender expression or transgender individuals. , meaning that if a school has any extracurricular clubs, it has to allow GSAs. Information about starting one can be .

It is important to know school and district policies about bullying and discrimination. Teachers should learn how students can report this type of behavior and what should happen after they make that report. They should understand the power structure in the school and district so they understand the chain of command. They should also find out who the Title IX coordinator is — — and learn how that system works. This will help them assist students in reporting instances of harassment and provide ground to stand on when they talk to administrators about policies that aren’t followed or students who aren’t being protected. 

Teachers can advocate for specific policies like creating gender-neutral bathrooms and locker rooms, improving anti-bullying policies and harassment reporting,and addressing dress codes that target LGBTQ students. They should go into these meetings prepared with research and statistics about the needs and experiences of queer students, school and/or district policies, state and/or federal laws, students’ personal observations or specific concerns. It’s also helpful to come prepared with possible solutions as a starting point for discussion, and to follow up to ensure that things change.

Advocating for LGBTQ students is, unfortunately, a long process in most schools — it takes work and it takes courage. Educators may feel alone at their schools, but they aren’t. Lots of teachers are advocating for students in schools across the country, and there are support systems in place. is one place to start. Teachers need to keep fighting the good fight and helping the kids who need it. 

A few years ago, Dr. Steven Rogers, a physician in the emergency department at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, started a new initiative. He wanted to screen every child age 10 and up who passed through the department for suicide risk. That’s around 15,000 kids a year. 

“There’s lots of stigma around this question,” Rogers said. “I’d rather be able to identify kids who are low risk and need help versus when they’re an imminent risk or have already made an attempt.”  

In Connecticut, 11 children have died by suicide so far this year, nine of those in the past few months. To put that in perspective, just six children 17 and younger died by suicide in all of 2023. 

“I hope this isn’t a canary in the coal mine,” said Gov. Ned Lamont in late August at a roundtable event on youth suicide. 

There were no clusters of deaths, according to the Office of the Child Advocate, and deaths were distributed across the state, as well as among races and genders. The children were between the ages of 13 and 17. 

“We have a problem,” Sarah Eagan, Connecticut’s child advocate, said during the roundtable. She said most children who die by suicide in Connecticut die by asphyxiation, and in recent years, the age of those children is skewing younger. 

“We have work to do,” Eagan said, “and that work is not done until no child is bereft and alone, not knowing where to call, and there is no parent who … can’t sleep not knowing if they’re doing the right thing for their child.” 

For Rogers, the summer’s high numbers were especially hard to take in.

“It feels like a failure, especially for somebody who has committed a good part of their career to identifying kids at risk,” he said. 

Connecticut Children’s effort is just one example of a broadened push to respond to the youth mental health crisis in the state, one that has become increasingly urgent since the COVID pandemic. But even before the pandemic, Rogers was adamant that the screening tool was needed. Suicide is the No. 2 cause of death in children 10 and older, trailing unintentional injuries. 

And so, since August 2019, clinicians have been screening children 10 and older in the emergency department at Connecticut Children’s in Hartford, asking them a series of questions to assess their suicide risk, after their parent or caregiver is asked to leave the room. The process takes less than a minute, Rogers said. 

“Once you screen a kid positive that you didn’t suspect would be positive … I don’t want to be too dramatic and say it’s life-changing, but it is an eye-opener.”

Kids who do screen positive are directed toward appropriate mental health services. For some high-risk children, that might be an inpatient program. For others who are not in immediate danger of self harm, a counseling session or further evaluation might be scheduled in the comfort of their home. 

Of the 75,000 children that the hospital has screened in the past five years, 18% were positive for risk of suicide. That’s nearly 1 in 5 children. Most of those children came to the emergency department for a behavioral health issue in the first place. But an extraordinary number — around 6,000 children — initially came in for a medical issue like an asthma attack or a broken bone and ended up screening positive for suicide risk.

Rogers says he is fighting a perception that simply discussing suicide with children might plant a seed of suicidal ideation. But according to Rogers, this is a misnomer.

“It plants the seeds of hope,” he said.

In fact, he said, the screening tool can at the very least inform children that there is a place they can go that will ask them if they are considering suicide, a place where they can also get help. Because, he said, all too often, caregivers never have these conversations with children at all.

Rogers often thinks about the story of an 11-year-old girl who came to the hospital for a medical issue. To the clinician’s surprise, and to her mother’s, she screened positive for suicide risk. The mom asked her daughter — weren’t they best friends? They were, the girl told her mother. But, the mother said, didn’t best friends tell each other everything? “And she turned to her mother and just said, ‘Well, you never asked.’ “

“As human beings we need social support, we need reassurance, and algorithms now are taking advantage of those needs and keeping us online and engaged with content even when it doesn’t feel good,” Erickson-Schroth said in an interview with ����Ӱ��.

Youth suicide rates have escalated over the last decade, making it the second leading cause of death among teens and young adults. But suicide rates are starkly different among different populations, a reality brought into full view in , a nonprofit focused on youth suicide prevention. And the harms of social media — the subject of a bipartisan push to regulate tech company algorithms and a bevy of lawsuits filed by school districts and states — is just one piece of the crisis.

But Erickson-Schroth, JED’s chief medical officer, has observed one promising trend: Schools are more interested than ever, she said, in addressing students’ mental health needs. 

����Ӱ�� caught up with Erickson-Schroth, whose work places a particular emphasis on LGTBQ+ mental health, to gain insight into the factors driving the youth suicide crisis, the conditions that put some groups of students at heightened risk and strategies that educators and policymakers can use to keep kids safe. 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Among all youth, what are the primary factors that you see having contributed to the increase in the youth suicide rate over the last decade? 

The COVID pandemic certainly played a role. Globally, rates of childhood depression and anxiety doubled during the pandemic. In my own practice, working with LGBTQ+ young people, I could see how the pandemic was affecting them. Many young people were becoming more anxious because of the social isolation and having trouble reengaging in social situations. Many of them missed important milestones like graduation, many young people lost people in their lives.

But I don’t think it’s the whole story. Youth mental health issues and suicide rates have been increasing for the last decade at least and the COVID pandemic doesn’t explain that.

I think one of the biggest drivers is this increasing digital connection, when the internet met the phone, and we can see kind of around when that happened. If you look at studies of what percentage of Americans had smartphones at different times, in 2011 around 35% of people [had them] and now we’re up to about 85%. So almost everyone in the United States has a computer in their pocket.

That’s really different than the worlds that we grew up in in prior generations. There are a lot of positives and negatives to that. There are positives in building community and connections, especially for young people who have a hard time finding that in person.

But also it’s changed their lives completely in some negative ways. We’re constantly exposed to news, some of it really difficult news: wars around the world, climate change, racial violence, anti-LGBTQ legislation, those kinds of things. There’s cyberbullying, there are all of these chances for social comparisons, there’s this hijacking of reward systems. 

As human beings we need social support, we need reassurance, and algorithms now are taking advantage of those needs and keeping us online and engaged with content even when it doesn’t feel good. 

So all of that is adding up to a really different world that young people are living in where they’re increasingly lonely and disconnected socially.

Let’s turn to the pandemic. The data show that youth suicides reached a high in 2021 and leveled off a bit in 2022. What does this tell us about the pandemic’s effects on the youth suicide rate and how has the situation changed now that we’re no longer in lockdown? 

It’s important to say that youth suicide rates have been increasing for a long time, long before the pandemic. 

So we did see youth suicide rates rise during the pandemic. There was a study that looked at the second half of 2020, and there was a higher than expected rate of suicide for young people. It was particularly (true) among some groups, and that’s including Black youth. That likely had to deal with specific events that were occurring during the pandemic within those communities. 

Black youth disproportionately lost members of their families and communities to COVID. The pandemic also coincided with these highly publicized incidents of racial violence. So, the pandemic really did have an effect on young people, but the pandemic isn’t the whole story. 

If we’re talking about the increase from 2020 to ’21 and then the decrease from 2021 to 2022, yes, based on we do see that there was an 18% drop in suicides for young people 10 to 24 and then a 9% drop for young people 15 to 24. The pandemic might have added to the numbers for 2021 and coming out of the pandemic might have improved those numbers. 

But there were a lot of other factors that were contributing. I think one is that we’re paying more attention to mental health than we were in the past. We can see it in the numbers. Large donors gave more money towards mental health in 2022 than in any other year over the past decade.

At JED, we work with schools and we’re seeing more schools interested in making mental health a priority than we’ve ever seen before. 

LGBTQ+ students have long experienced higher suicide rates than their straight and cisgender peers. What do the data show about the current political climate’s effects on their well-being and suicide risk? 

There’s good research coming out of The Trevor Project. They do a survey every year that looks at LGBTQ+ young people’s experiences and one of the questions that they always ask is about how the political climate is affecting them. Based on their data, it looks like it’s affecting them quite a bit. 

Young people who are hearing about anti-LGBTQ+ legislation or movements against their rights are having a more difficult time with their mental health, which makes sense. It’s important that, in our conversations about this, we make sure that people know it’s not about someone’s gender or someone’s sexuality. That’s not the reason that they’re having mental health issues. It’s about the way that our society reacts to young people who are different. 

Black youth have experienced the fastest increase in suicide rates, with that rate nearly doubling in just the last decade. What do the data tell us about what might be at play here within the last decade in particular? 

It’s always been really hard to be a Black young person in America, so what makes the recent decade different? I think what makes it different is, again, this constant digital connection. 

The water that you swim in is this digital world and you have to spend time in this world because it gives you so many positives. It connects youth of color to other youth of color, who may be in other areas, so they can seek out community. It helps them connect with adults who are going to be supportive of them. But it also involves interacting with racist comments online, it involves seeing these really highly publicized incidents of racial violence. Young people are watching those videos and seeing what’s happening. They’re seeing movements for change, but they’re also seeing pushes back against those.

I’m curious about the rural-urban divide. Young people in rural areas are far more likely than their urban counterparts to die by suicide. What particular risk factors do rural teens face and what prevention methods might work best for them in particular?

I think young people in rural areas are in a unique position right now. There are a lot of positive benefits to living in rural areas. Young people getting out in nature and having close social ties. But at the same time, rural communities can be places where young people have less access to some of the things that they need. If they are in a particular group, there might not be as many people like them in that area.

It’s hard to connect to providers if you’re looking for mental health support because rural communities have lower rates of insurance and they have provider shortages. There’s also a lot of stigma around mental health in rural areas and it depends on the area, of course, from one place to another. 

A really important one to talk about is access to firearms. It’s really common for young people in rural areas to have access to firearms. In rural areas, young people are twice as likely to die by suicide as those in larger metro areas. And they have easier access to firearms. 

We have a lot of work to do in terms of expanding access to mental health care and making sure that young people can access mental health care in school. I was on a panel with a middle school and a high school principal and both of them were in rural areas. 

And one of the things that they talked about was that young people in rural areas may not want to seek out mental health help from a clinic or a hospital because that may put them at risk of being identified as someone who’s getting mental health care. If you park your car outside of a clinic in a rural area, everyone else in your community knows what you’re doing. If you get mental health help in school from a school counselor, that’s just a regular part of the day that lots of young people engage with.

What immediate, actionable steps can parents and educators take to help prevent this problem from getting worse?

We can talk about immediately actionable things that we know are going to make a difference in the short term and then we can talk about longer-term solutions. In the short term, one of those things is, you know, how are we going to approach firearms? 

More than half of young people who die by suicide use firearms and we know that firearms are readily accessible to many young people in their homes: 4.6 million children live in homes with at least one loaded, unlocked firearm.

How do we approach that? That’s through community work, that’s through making sure that gun owner groups, gun retailers and families are aware of the risks, that young people are turning to firearms when they’re thinking about suicide. Suicidal crises are often shortlived. Many people who attempt suicide, there’s very little time between when they first think about that suicide attempt and when they act upon it, so if we can reduce their access to lethal means in that moment, we can get them through the crisis and make sure that they have the support that they need, that they’re safe, that they have someone that they can talk to. 

So that’s one of the clearest actions we can take. 

How about policymakers? What key policy changes would you like to see, that you believe would have the largest impact on reducing young people’s’ risk for suicide? There are a lot of ongoing legislative efforts to limit children’s access to social media as a way to improve their mental health. 

It’s really, really important that legislators and the government are involved in this issue. Number one, we have to establish a minimum set of safety standards for young people online. We have to have a regulatory commission that oversees that, we have to make sure that we have regulations for companies so that they don’t have to govern themselves.

Those kinds of things would include mandating that they collaborate with technology companies and independent research teams coming together to make sure that people outside of the companies are looking at the data ensuring that the algorithms are not negatively affecting young people’s mental health.

I think we have to take on advertising to young people. You know, what type of advertising is permitted at what ages, what the delivery looks like. We have to require that social media companies build in experts like psychologists to advocate for young people’s well-being and know what’s going on in the algorithms.

We have to make sure that we can accurately detect age, when young people are using these platforms. Those are all things that the government should be regulating. 

There are things social media companies can do, too. They should be aggressively moderating harmful content. They should be making their data available to researchers and being transparent about their algorithms, they should be building in ways for young people to control their experiences online to be able to choose the kinds of things that they’re going to see.

Surgeon general Vivek Murthy warned Tuesday in a that social media poses a profound risk to children, with excessive use impacting sleep, relationships and depression that can lead to thoughts of suicide. The report may also shape national policy as legislators and courts take on algorithms, privacy and age policies, and access to platforms. 

“We are in the middle of a national youth mental health crisis, and I am concerned that social media is an important driver of that crisis – one that we must urgently address,” Murthy said in a statement.

According to Murthy’s report, even as 95% of teens and 40% of 8-12 year olds use social media, there is no evidence platforms are “sufficiently safe.” Spending more than three hours daily doubles their risk of poor mental health, including depression and anxiety symptoms, the report states. The average daily use for teens is three and a half hours, research shows.

The surgeon general also noted push notifications, infinite scrolls, and public like lists are particularly enticing and concerning for youth in early adolescence who frequently compare themselves to peers.

Citing many of the same concerns Murthy identified, more than 100 school districts nationwide have sued companies including TikTok, Snap, YouTube and Meta for their allegedly addictive algorithms that they say harm students.

Lawyers at the forefront of district litigation said the surgeon general’s report strengthens their claims.

“I think you’re going to see even more file as a result of this advisory,” said Dean Kawamoto, counsel with Keller Rohrback, the leading Seattle-based law firm representing several districts who hope to make platforms less harmful. 

But some lawyers not involved in the case remain skeptical, believing that while the report will inform the national conversation, it does not carry enough weight to make waves in court.

“It is tentative and ambiguous and not really definitive in the way that most courts are going to want when ruling on something being dangerous,” said Rebecca Tushnet, First Amendment expert and Harvard Law professor.

In contrast to the definitive stance on, for example, smoking, the surgeon general acknowledged social media also holds benefits. Platforms can help create a community for marginalized young people.

Active Minds, one of the nation’s leading mental health advocacy nonprofits, urged families and policy makers curbing social media access in the wake of the advisory to consider what may be lost. 

Bans could cut off access to critical sex education or communities where isolated LGBTQ, Black and Brown youth feel they belong — similar reasons other .

“While the harmful impacts of social media usage on youth mental health certainly exist, are well documented, and require additional research…we’ve also heard from many youth and young adults, particularly from vulnerable communities, who credit social media with saving their lives,” Active Minds told ����Ӱ��.

Among the practical recommendations for and tech companies: set limits in the house around meals or bedtime; reach out for help; share data that could further research on health impacts; enforce age minimums; develop safety standards by age; and increase funding for research. 

“Our children and adolescents don’t have the luxury of waiting years until we know the full extent of social media’s impact. Their childhoods and development are happening now,” the report states.

About two thirds of adolescents are “often” or “sometimes” exposed to hate-based content. Six in 10 girls have been contacted by a stranger on social media in ways that make them uncomfortable. Young girls and LGBTQ youth are more likely than their peers to experience cyberbullying or harassment, which about 75% of adolescents believe is poorly managed by social media sites. 

At the same time, in a recent survey of , 64% said they would rather give up their right to vote for one year than give up their social media accounts.

Meta and TikTok did not respond to requests for comment. 

“As a messaging service for real friends, we applaud the Surgeon General’s principled approach to protecting teens from the ills of traditional social media platforms,” a spokesperson for Snap Inc, owner of SnapChat, told ����Ӱ��.

Now, new national data unveil one factor that could be exacerbating the crisis: a record increase in sexual violence.

Nearly 1 in 5 teen girls experienced sexual violence in 2021, forced to kiss or touch someone in their life, according to the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s released Monday.

A startling 14%, more than 1 in 10, were forced to have sex against their will, according to the report which compiled responses from 17,000 young people surveyed in the fall of 2021. The violence is up 20% since 2017. 

The CDC conducts the survey every other year, though Monday’s report is the first to capture pandemic-era trends. And while there are bright spots — bullying and use of illicit drugs are down overall — the recent findings are grim.

In 2021, at least 18% of girls experienced some form of sexual violence — forced to touch or kiss someone in their life. And while the rate of girls forced to have sex in particular had remained pretty constant for the last 10 years, in the two year period from 2019 to 2021, it jumped from 11% to 14%. 

“This is truly alarming,” said Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s division of adolescent and school health. “For every 10 teenage girls you know, at least one of them, and probably more, has been raped. This tragedy cannot continue.”

Nearly 1 in 3 girls also seriously considered suicide. One quarter of girls and 37% of lesbian, gay or queer youth made suicide plans. Thirteen percent of girls attempted it, the highest numbers in a decade, roughly double the rate for boys. 

While increases in suicidal ideation can be seen across many demographics, Black and Native or Indigenous students remain significantly more likely to attempt and are the students most impacted by housing insecurity.

“America’s teen girls are engulfed in a growing wave of sadness, violence and trauma,” said Debra Houry, chief medical officer for the CDC, during a press briefing Monday. 

“These data are hard to hear and should result in action,” Houry said. “As a parent to a teenage girl, I am heartbroken.”

Research confirms adolescents who are forced to kiss, touch or have sex with people against their will are symptoms of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress. In children, this can manifest in a number of ways, including withdrawal from friends or social activities, difficulty sleeping, poor , self-harm, substance abuse and suicidal ideation.

Houry said while this report did not look at the connections between sexual violence and the increase in depression and suicidality, prior research has shown “sexual violence is associated with mental health issues, substance use and also long-term health consequences.” 

Girls are also 5% more likely than boys to misuse prescription opioids and more likely to have tried illicit drugs like cocaine, inhalants, heroin, methamphetamines, hallucinogens, or ecstasy, according to the report 

Nearly half of all high schoolers are “persistently sad or hopeless,” the report found, symptoms used as a proxy to measure depression. Numbers are notably higher for girls, queer youth and students of color. 

The feelings, particularly when they are the result of sexual violence, hold the power to have lifelong impacts: “young people who feel hopeless about their future are more likely to engage in behaviors that put them at risk for HIV, STDs, and unintended pregnancy,” the report states. 

Only about half of teens, according to the 2021 findings, used a condom the last time they had sex. And only 5% were screened for STIs within the last year.

Yet many of the challenges facing young people today, Houry added, are in fact “preventable.”

can revamp health curricula to educate young people about sexual consent and managing emotions; encourage school-based clubs like Gay Straight Alliances; and increase mental health training for teachers, peers and staff. 

Healthy relationship and bystander training programs like Green Dot can reduce harm and stigma in talking about sexual or romantic violence, CDC officials said. 

The CDC and advocates also encouraged families to look for warning associated with suicide and regularly ask young people about their feelings or concerns. 

“I wish my family knew these resources and what to look for earlier,” national PTA President Anna King tearfully said during the media briefing. King lost a niece to suicide nearly five years ago. 

“These conversations will help parents learn how to help their child and figure out what’s going on emotionally, building their ability to cope with life’s stressors and show them their feelings matter,” King said. “It also helps them to understand that they’re not alone.”

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Additional resources are available at . For LGBTQ mental health support, you can contact The Trevor Project’s toll-free support line at 866-488-7386.

Building upon their earlier blockbuster findings on the link between education and mortality, the researchers said Americans are on two distinct paths based on educational attainment. Angus Deaton, who co-wrote the recently published with Anne Case, calls the current system unfair. 

“The B.A. has become this sort of condition for participation and dignity in the modern economy — and a lot of it is unnecessary,” Deaton, a British American economist and 2015 Nobel Prize winner, told ����Ӱ��.

There was, however, one positive development, the researchers said. While the gap in mortality rates between those with and without a bachelor’s grew markedly since 1990, Black men with four-year degrees fare better than they ever have since such data became available more than three decades ago. 

“It used to be that Black mortality rates were not very different whether you had a B.A. or not,” Deaton said. “Now, Black men with a B.A. are much closer to white men with a B.A. than they are to Black or white men without a B.A. The same is true for [Black] women. Blacks with a B.A. have made a huge amount of progress.”

But inequity remains: While 42% of white Americans 25 and older earned a bachelor’s degree, just 28% of Black Americans and 20% of Hispanics have this advantage, according to recent . 

“The B.A. divide is getting bigger while the race divide is getting smaller — but it still exists,” Deaton said. 

The pandemic worsened academic outcomes, particularly for minority men. While undergraduate college enrollment dropped for all students, for example, the figures are startling for Black men: They fell by 14.8% overall and by 23.5% for those enrolled in two-year schools between 2019 and 2021, . 

Latino men also fared poorly during this time, with their enrollment slipping by % overall and by 19.7% among those attending community college.

And COVID’s toll expanded well beyond education: Life expectancy itself fell in the U.S. in 2021 for the second year in a row, the first time it dropped for two consecutive years in a century, .

​​Deaton’s and Case’s work has focused specifically on how higher education has acted to ward off death from a particular type of suffering, calling it a “talisman” against overdose fatalities. 

The death rate from drugs, alcohol and suicide climbed for all Americans in the most recently studied period, they found, but was concentrated among those without a bachelor’s degree: The alcohol-related mortality rate for whites without a bachelor’s degree increased by 41% between 2013 and 2019 for those ages 25–74. The suicide rate jumped by 17%, and the drug-related mortality rate shot up a whopping 73% for that group, researchers said. 

Results were equally troubling for Blacks and Hispanics who did not hold a bachelor’s degree: Drug-related deaths more than doubled between 2013 and 2019 for these two groups. The suicide rate increased by a third for both. Alcohol-related mortality rates rose 30% for Blacks and by 24% for Hispanics who hadn’t completed college. 

The researchers gleaned data about educational attainment, age, sex, race, ethnicity and cause of death through death certificates. They called out how fentanyl, the drug now dominating headlines, had vastly different impacts in the Black community depending on education.

 “The arrival of street fentanyl in 2013 led to a drug mortality rate among less-educated Blacks that was seven times greater than that among more-educated Blacks in 2019,” they write.

Deaton said results were not much improved for those Americans who completed some college — including those who earned an associate’s degree. Their mortality and disease rates and job placement were just slightly improved but far closer to those with a high school education than those with a bachelor’s degree. 

While the calculations, first published in Annual Reviews in August, were made before data from the pandemic became available, there was no reason, researchers said, to think the rates would decline once COVID-19 was brought under control. 

Deaton’s and Case’s earlier work after it identified that mortality rates among middle-aged whites shot up in a relatively short amount of time, between 1999 and 2013, because of suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol abuse. From this finding, they coined the much-quoted term “deaths of despair”.

Back then, the authors linked the deaths of less-educated white Americans to economic and social conditions. Through their later work on their , they cited falling real wages, a decline in religious participation, increasing rates of children born to unwed mothers and a drop in marriage rates overall.

A decrease in availability of good jobs for those without a bachelor’s degree, exorbitant health care costs and a lack of a financial safety net for those who were neither children nor elderly also contributed to a “rising tide of despair,” they said. 

“Both the safety net and the financing of health care are radically different in other rich countries where — with a few exceptions — there are few deaths of despair,” they noted. 

Under these circumstances, they wrote, it was not surprising to see a rise in drug and alcohol abuse, unhealthy eating and suicide.

“We do not believe that the opioid epidemic in the United States would have happened to the extent that it did without the ocean of pain and distress among less-educated Americans,” they wrote.

Deaton told ����Ӱ�� their later research yielded two important findings. 

“These deaths of despair, which were largely confined to whites, later spread to the African- American and Hispanic population, largely to do with drugs, both legal and illegal, including fentanyl,” he said. “The other is that these deaths of despair are not confined to whites currently in middle age, but are even worse among younger people: Each younger-born generation is getting worse than the one before. We know a lot of people who have fallen into addiction traps. Among people without B.A.s, this is much worse.”

Secondary students at every grade level maintain depression, stress, and anxiety is the most common barrier to learning. And fewer than half of them, regardless of gender, sexual and racial identity, have an adult they feel comfortable talking to when stressed or upset, according to a new YouthTruth. 

The report also reveals drastic mental health disparities, with white students students  at least 7% more likely to access a school psychologist, counselor or therapist than their Black, Latino and Asian peers. LGBTQ youth experienced suicidal ideation more than double the rate of their peers.

“The increase in the mental health load that students experienced during the pandemic has not gone away,  is still very present, even increased and it’s not going away anytime soon,” said Jen Wilka,  executive director of YouthTruth. “For now, we need to adjust to that as the new normal and and think about how we support students.” 

The survey found that last academic year, less than a quarter of students spoke to school counselors, therapists or psychologists about what they were facing. 

“I think that the conversation about learning loss and the academic side of learning is so loud, that we can sometimes lose sight …  of the interconnectedness between emotional and mental health and students’ ability to learn academically,” Wilka added. “It’s really impossible to do one without the other.”

Less than half of the 222,837 students surveyed this fall across 20 states are satisfied with their school’s mental health offerings. “I wish the school did more to train and educate its students on how to identify … warning signs of deteriorating mental health, abuse, self-harm, and violence within their peers – and respond appropriately and compassionately,” one Asian-American high school senior boy wrote.

Gender disparities 

YouthTruth’s findings, disaggregated for the first time by gender identity, also reveal starkly different emotional realities and gaps in access to meaningful care for LGBTQ students.

An overwhelming majority, 83-85%, of trans and non-binary students say depression, stress and anxiety block their ability to learn, rates at least 33% above the average for all students. LGBTQ middle and high school students report twice as much as their peers that bullying also impacts their learning.

Only about a third of LGBTQ students report their school’s mental health support is satisfactory.

“That says that we still have work to do to meet those students where they’re at and be tailoring that support,” Wilka said. 

LGBTQ students want to feel “seen and recognized” in , which would contribute to a positive sense of self. Recent efforts to censor content at school have plagued students’ mental health, write-in responses reveal. 

Curriculum bans launch a domino effect, stifling classroom talks about gender and sexuality. The culture makes it difficult for students to process when they may not freely be able to at home, and to feel a sense of belonging. 

Distinctive Schools, a charter network in Chicago and Detroit and YouthTruth partner, is currently ramping up support for LGBTQ students — encouraging active Gay-Straight Alliances on each campus and making their dress code language more gender inclusive — and expanding their mental healthcare teams to combat mental health stigma.

“I’m giving trainings to teachers that historically you would only get as a clinician…and we can still be doing better, they still need more, and we still can’t keep up with the demand,” Distinctive School’s Director of Clinical Services, Michele Lansing, told the 74. Their suicide or risk assessments are up, the result of peers sharing their concern for one another more frequently. 

“Our students are more educated and getting better at putting words to what was already there, ”Lansing said. 

“They know that their friends deserve help and support.”

Boys were the least likely subgroup to speak with school staff about their mental health or the problems they experience, at about 15%. One young student, in a workshop analyzing his school’s results, hypothesized that a “culture of masculinity” impacts the numbers — there’s an expectation that boys shouldn’t express their feelings. 

“Even though in this data, we might look at it and say ‘oh, boys and young men are doing fine, it’s girls, transgender, and non-binary students that we need to be worrying about.’ We know from other data that boys and young men are not fine,” Wilka said.

“Do better:” Involve students, families 

The overwhelming ask from students’ write-in responses is now “do better.” The plea is a stark shift from past surveys, where students wanted schools to do something, anything, to address the mental suffering they experience and witness.  

“That refrain, ‘talk to us first’ is just exploding in the qualitative data right now,” Wilka said, adding that the message suggests schools can do more to bring students into the process of planning or adjusting offerings. Distinctive Schools, for example, meets each family individually at the start of the year.

“We’re young, but we deserve respect,” one white high school senior wrote in their survey response, criticizing what they felt were inadequate attempts to address needs by adding mental health days. 

“Don’t just hear us, listen to us,” another wrote, “ …You have to work alongside us, or it just doesn’t work. Do something … Do better.”

The new normal is not at all surprising to Makayla, a Black high school junior at one of Distinctive School’s Chicago high schools. She asked her last name not be used to maintain privacy. 

“I have experienced all three — the depression, stress and anxiety, and it definitely did affect my work … I was torn apart, and so many days, I just wasn’t okay,” she told ����Ӱ��.  

Typically a high-achieving student, Makayla found it harder and harder to stay emotionally stable last spring, often sitting in the counselor’s office collecting herself for most of the school day. Her grades plummeted. Yet she was among the minority of secondary school students comfortable enough with her teachers to be honest when they took notice. 

“On the days that I would come to school while I was mentally not okay, my English teacher, she was like, ‘do you need to take a breather? Do you want to just sit here and catch up on work later?’ ”  Makayla said. “…They understand that if you need a moment, then I’ll give you a moment, or however long it takes.”

Hiding in Plain Sight: Youth Mental Illness, a two-part documentary that premieres Monday on PBS, presents the raw accounts of nearly two dozen young people from diverse backgrounds who open up about their excruciating life experiences. Through varied stories that touch on issues like abuse, addiction and discrimination, the Ewers hope their film will give their audience an understanding that they came to themselves: Everybody, no matter their backgrounds, is affected by America’s mental health crisis in one way or another. 

The film, executive produced by renowned documentarian Ken Burns, was screened at the White House Thursday, with First Lady Jill Biden saying, “We have so much work to do to help our children heal,” and thanking the filmmakers for shining a light on mental health.

“It’s impossible not to be moved by the pain that these young people and their families share,” she said. “But there was so much hope there, too. Because they had all found a way from that darkness towards the light.” 

The documentary can be seen at 9 p.m. ET on Monday and Tuesday and will be available on PBS stations nationally, PBS.com and the . It is part of , called Well Beings, to raise awareness about mental health issues. 

“The goal of the film, we hope, is that people will find relatability in their own lives through these kids’ stories,” Christopher, who co-directed the documentary with his brother, told ����Ӱ��. “I felt connected in ways that I can’t even describe to each and every person’s story. Some of them nearly destroyed me as we were filming their interviews because they hit so close to home.”

The young people featured in it range in age from 11 to 27, including a teenager who lost the fight against addiction at the age of 15, a young Native American woman who felt so isolated that she contemplated suicide and a high school freshman who experienced a series of assaults that led to troubling hallucinations. Among them is Billie, a 15-year-old from a rural farming community who endured intense bullying for being transgender. For 14-year-old Xavier, trauma stemmed from an abusive father. 

“Cigarette smoke is a very triggering thing from my past since I associate that with getting beat by wooden sticks,” said Xavier, who recalled getting beaten “for seemingly no reason.”

begin by the age of 14 and 75% occur by age 24, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. 

“The things my ancestors went through, it’s shown through alcohol abuse, addictions, non-stable families, toxic relationships,” explains Alexis, a 21-year-old who grew up on a Native American reservation. “That’s the burden that Indigenous youth deal with everyday, you’re just born into it.” 

New Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data offer bleak insight into the extent of the problem and how the pandemic has made the crisis even worse for millions of teens, especially LGBTQ youth and girls. In a recent CDC survey, more than a third of high school students reported experiencing poor mental health during the pandemic, nearly 20% reported that they seriously considered dying by suicide and a staggering 9% had actually tried. Even before the pandemic, suicide was a leading cause of death among teens as rates of youth anxiety and depression surged. In 2009, a quarter of high school students reported feeling persistent sadness or hopelessness. By 2019, that rate jumped to nearly 37%. 

Though the project has been years in the making, the film acknowledges how the pandemic has made the crises far more urgent. The Ewers are longtime collaborators with Ken Burns and the trio will continue working together to create a series of films examining the mental health crisis in America.

Over the course of four hours, this first film takes viewers on a journey that for many began with traumatic experiences that led to debilitating mental health struggles, but ended with a message of hope. Despite roadblocks including homelessness, arrests, addictions, eating disorders and suicide attempts, many of the young subjects were able to go on and live happy lives thanks to mental health care and the coping skills they developed.

Yet recovery is a lifelong process. It’s a lesson that Erik learned firsthand over the course of filming the documentary, he said. Throughout his entire life, he struggled to understand his emotional issues. Although his parents took him to a psychiatrist while he was in elementary school, it wasn’t until he started filming the documentary that he began to truly address his challenges. The youth in his film, he said, “gave me an education about myself.”

“If the film has the power to do that for me, I can only hope that it will have that power for other people as well,” he said. 

Christopher said the youth interviews hit home for his family, too, as his daughter struggled with mental health challenges of her own. Listening to each of the stories, he said, “gave us the courage and the commitment to see through the proper care for our daughter.” 

As the filmmakers weave the young peoples’ individual stories into a cohesive narrative, the result can only be described as a gut punch. With the goal of presenting an unvarnished look into the pervasiveness of youth mental health crises, the documentary is difficult to watch at times. But sugarcoating the issue would be a disservice to those who are struggling, Erik said. 

“Imagine a kid out there who is literally watching it and we watered it down, which of course, we had not,” he said. “But if they did, they’d be saying ‘Wow, I’m a lot worse than I thought,’ or say ‘This is bullshit.’”

The stigma still associated with mental health issues prevents many young people from sharing their experiences, yet the Ewers brothers said their subjects were motivated to open up on film — and wound up feeling better as a result. They were tired of keeping their suffering bottled up inside and hoped that greater awareness could save lives. 

Alexis, who grew up on the reservation, said that nearly all Indigenous youth are the victims of trauma and abuse to some degree. Yet also embedded in her DNA, she said, is resilience. 

“I know for a fact that my ancestors and my elders, they’re rooting for me and they want me to do good,” she said. “I’ll share my story over and over again. I’ll go through those emotions like a million times if it helps one person.”

For the 13-year-old from Minneapolis who lives close to where George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, the pandemic-induced isolation and social unrest amplifed his transgender dysphoria, emotional distress that occurs when someone’s gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth. His billowing depression landed him in the hospital after an attempt to die by suicide. During that dark stretch, he spent his days in an outpatient psychiatric facility, where therapists embraced music therapy. There, he listened to a punk song on loop that promised how  

Eventually they did. 

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Logsdon-Wallace, a transgender eighth-grader who chose the name Teeth, has since “graduated” from weekly therapy sessions and has found a better headspace, but that didn’t stop school officials from springing into action after he wrote about his mental health. In a school assignment last month, he reflected on his suicide attempt and how the punk rock anthem by the band Ramshackle Glory helped him cope — intimate details that wound up in the hands of district security. 

The classroom assignment was one of thousands of Minneapolis student communications that got flagged by Gaggle, a digital surveillance company that saw rapid growth after the pandemic forced schools into remote learning. In an earlier investigation, ����Ӱ�� analyzed nearly 1,300 public records from Minneapolis Public Schools to expose how Gaggle subjects students to relentless digital surveillance 24 hours a day, seven days a week, raising significant privacy concerns for more than 5 million young people across the country who are monitored by the company’s digital algorithm and human content moderators. 

But technology experts and families with first-hand experience with Gaggle’s surveillance dragnet have raised a separate issue: The service is not only invasive, it may also be ineffective. 

While the system flagged Logsdon-Wallace for referencing the word “suicide,” context was never part of the equation, he said. Two days later, in mid-September, a school counselor called his mom to let her know what officials had learned. The meaning of the classroom assignment — that his mental health had improved — was seemingly lost in the transaction between Gaggle and the school district. He felt betrayed. 

 “I was trying to be vulnerable with this teacher and be like, ‘Hey, here’s a thing that’s important to me because you asked,” Logsdon-Wallace said. “Now, when I’ve made it clear that I’m a lot better, the school is contacting my counselor and is freaking out.”

Jeff Patterson, Gaggle’s founder and CEO, said in a statement his company does not “make a judgement on that level of the context,” and while some districts have requested to be notified about references to previous suicide attempts, it’s ultimately up to administrators to “decide the proper response, if any.”  

‘A crisis on our hands’

Minneapolis Public Schools first contracted with Gaggle in the spring of 2020 as the pandemic forced students nationwide into remote learning. Through AI and the content moderator team, Gaggle tracks students’ online behavior everyday by analyzing materials on their school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts. The tool scans students’ emails, chat messages and other documents, including class assignments and personal files, in search of keywords, images or videos that could indicate self-harm, violence or sexual behavior. The remote moderators evaluate flagged materials and notify school officials about content they find troubling. 

In Minneapolis, Gaggle flagged students for keywords related to pornography, suicide and violence, according to six months of incident reports obtained by ����Ӱ�� through a public records request. The private company also captured their journal entries, fictional stories and classroom assignments. 

Gaggle executives maintain that the system saves lives, including those of during the 2020-21 school year. Those figures have not been independently verified. Minneapolis school officials make similar assertions. Though the pandemic’s effects on suicide rates remains fuzzy, suicide has been a leading cause of death among teenagers for years. Patterson, who has watched his business during COVID-19, said Gaggle could be part of the solution. Though not part of its contract with Minneapolis schools, the company recently launched a service that connects students flagged by the monitoring tool with teletherapists. 

“Before the pandemic, we had a crisis on our hands,” he said. “I believe there’s a tsunami of youth suicide headed our way that we are not prepared for.” 

Schools nationwide have increasingly relied on technological tools that purport to keep kids safe, yet there’s to back up their claims.

Like many parents, Logsdon-Wallace’s mother Alexis Logsdon didn’t know Gaggle existed until she got the call from his school counselor. Luckily, the counselor recognized that Logsdon-Wallace was discussing events from the past and offered a measured response. His mother was still left baffled. 

“That was an example of somebody describing really good coping mechanisms, you know, ‘I have music that is one of my soothing activities that helps me through a really hard mental health time,’” she said. “But that doesn’t matter because, obviously, this software is not that smart — it’s just like ‘Woop, we saw the word.’” 

‘Random and capricious’

Many students have accepted digital surveillance as an inevitable reality at school, according to a new survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology  in Washington, D.C. But some youth are fighting back, including Lucy Dockter, a 16-year-old junior from Westport, Connecticut. On multiple occasions over the last several years, Gaggle has flagged her communications — an experience she described as “really scary.”

“If it works, it could be extremely beneficial. But if it’s random, it’s completely useless.”
—Lucy Dockter, 16, Westport, Connecticut student mistakenly flagged by Gaggle

On one occasion, Gaggle sent her an email notification of “Inappropriate Use” while she was walking to her first high school biology midterm and her heart began to race as she worried what she had done wrong. Dockter is an editor of her high school’s literary journal and, according to her, Gaggle had ultimately flagged profanity in students’ fictional article submissions. 

“The link at the bottom of this email is for something that was identified as inappropriate,” Gaggle warned in its email while pointing to one of the fictional articles. “Please refrain from storing or sharing inappropriate content in your files.” 

But Gaggle doesn’t catch everything. Even as she got flagged when students shared documents with her, the articles’ authors weren’t receiving similar alerts, she said. And neither did Gaggle’s AI pick up when she wrote about the discrepancy in where she included a four-letter swear word to make a point. In the article, which Dockter wrote with Google Docs, she argued that Gaggle’s monitoring system is “random and capricious,” and could be dangerous if school officials rely on its findings to protect students. 

Her experiences left the Connecticut teen questioning whether such tracking is even helpful. 

“With such a seemingly random service, that doesn’t seem to — in the end — have an impact on improving student health or actually taking action to prevent suicide and threats” she said in an interview. “If it works, it could be extremely beneficial. But if it’s random, it’s completely useless.”

Some schools have asked Gaggle to email students about the use of profanity, but Patterson said the system has an error that he blamed on the tech giant Google, which at times “does not properly indicate the author of a document and assigns a random collaborator.”

“We are hoping Google will improve this functionality so we can better protect students,” Patterson said. 

Back in Minneapolis, attorney Cate Long said she became upset when she learned that Gaggle was monitoring her daughter on her personal laptop, which 10-year-old Emmeleia used for remote learning. She grew angrier when she learned the district didn’t notify her that Gaggle had identified a threat. 

This spring, a classmate used Google Hangouts, the chat feature, to send Emmeleia a death threat, warning she’d shoot her “puny little brain with my grandpa’s rifle.”

When Long learned about the chat, she notified her daughter’s teacher but was never informed about whether Gaggle had picked up on the disturbing message as well. Missing warning signs could be detrimental to both students and school leaders; districts if they fail to act on credible threats.

“I didn’t hear a word from Gaggle about it,” she said. “If I hadn’t brought it to the teacher’s attention, I don’t think that anything would have been done.” 

The incident, which occurred in April, fell outside the six-month period for which ����Ӱ�� obtained records. A Gaggle spokesperson said the company picked up on the threat and notified district officials an hour and a half later but it “does not have any insight into the steps the district took to address this particular matter.” 

Julie Schultz Brown, the Minneapolis district spokeswoman, said that officials “would never discuss with a community member any communication flagged by Gaggle.” 

“That unrelated but concerned parent would not have been provided that information nor should she have been,” she wrote in an email. “That is private.” 

‘The big scary algorithm’

When identifying potential trouble, Gaggle’s algorithm relies on keyword matching that compares student communications against a dictionary of thousands of words the company believes could indicate potential issues. The company scans student emails before they’re delivered to their intended recipients, said Patterson, the CEO. Files within Google Drive, including Docs and Sheets, are scanned as students write in them, he said. In one instance, the technology led to the arrest of a 35-year-old Michigan man who tried to send pornography to an 11-year-old girl in New York, . Gaggle prevented the file from ever reaching its intended recipient.  

Though the company allows school districts to alter the keyword dictionary to reflect local contexts, less than 5 percent of districts customize the filter, Patterson said. 

That’s where potential problems could begin, said Sara Jordan, an expert on artificial intelligence and senior researcher at the in Washington. For example, language that students use to express suicidal ideation could vary between Manhattan and rural Appalachia, she said.

“We’re using the big scary algorithm term here when I don’t think it applies,” This is not Netflix’s recommendation engine. This is not Spotify.”
—Sara Jordan, AI expert and senior researcher, Future of Privacy Forum

On the other hand, she noted that false-positives are highly likely, especially when the system flags common swear words and fails to understand context. 

“You’re going to get 25,000 emails saying that a student dropped an F-bomb in a chat,” she said. “What’s the utility of that? That seems pretty low.” 

She said that Gaggle’s utility could be impaired because it doesn’t adjust to students’ behaviors over time, comparing it to Netflix, which recommends television shows based on users’ ever-evolving viewing patterns. “Something that doesn’t learn isn’t going to be accurate,” she said. For example, she said the program could be more useful if it learned to ignore the profane but harmless literary journal entries submitted to Dockter, the Connecticut student. Gaggle’s marketing materials appear to overhype the tool’s sophistication to schools, she said. 

“We’re using the big scary algorithm term here when I don’t think it applies,” she said. “This is not Netflix’s recommendation engine. This is not Spotify. This is not American Airlines serving you specific forms of flights based on your previous searches and your location.” 

“Artificial intelligence without human intelligence ain’t that smart.”
—Jeff Patterson, Gaggle founder and CEO

Patterson said Gaggle’s proprietary algorithm is updated regularly “to adjust to student behaviors over time and improve accuracy and speed.” The tool monitors “thousands of keywords, including misspellings, slang words, evolving trends and terminologies, all informed by insights gleaned over two decades of doing this work.” 

Ultimately, the algorithm to identify keywords is used to “narrow down the haystack as much as possible,” Patterson said, and Gaggle content moderators review materials to gauge their risk levels. 

“Artificial intelligence without human intelligence ain’t that smart,” he said. 

In Minneapolis, officials denied that Gaggle infringes on students’ privacy and noted that the tool only operates within school-issued accounts. The district’s internet use policy states that students should “expect only limited privacy,” and that the misuse of school equipment could result in discipline and “civil or criminal liability.” District leaders have also cited compliance with the Clinton-era which became law in 2000 and requires schools to monitor “the online activities of minors.” 

Patterson suggested that teachers aren’t paying close enough attention to keep students safe on their own and “sometimes they forget that they’re mandated reporters.” On the , Patterson says he launched the company in 1999 to provide teachers with “an easy way to watch over their gaggle of students.” Legally, teachers are mandated to report suspected abuse and neglect, but Patterson broadens their sphere of responsibility and his company’s role in meeting it. As technology becomes a key facet of American education, Patterson said that schools “have a moral obligation to protect the kids on their digital playground.” 

But Elizabeth Laird, the director of equity in civic technology at the Center for Democracy and Technology, argued the federal law was never intended to mandate student “tracking” through artificial intelligence. In fact, the statute includes a disclaimer stating it shouldn’t be “construed to require the tracking of internet use by any identifiable minor or adult user.” In , her group urged the government to clarify the Children’s Internet Protection Act’s requirements and distinguish monitoring from tracking individual student behaviors. 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, agrees. In recent letters to Gaggle and other education technology companies, Warren and other Democratic lawmakers said they’re concerned the tools “may extend beyond” the law’s intent “to surveil student activity or reinforce biases.” Around-the-clock surveillance, they wrote, demonstrates “a clear invasion of student privacy, particularly when students and families are unable to opt out.” 

“Escalations and mischaracterizations of crises may have long-lasting and harmful effects on students’ mental health due to stigmatization and differential treatment following even a false report,” the senators wrote. “Flagging students as ‘high-risk’ may put them at risk of biased treatment from physicians and educators in the future. In other extreme cases, these tools can become analogous to predictive policing, which are notoriously biased against communities of color.”

A new kind of policing

Shortly after the school district piloted Gaggle for distance learning, education leaders were met with an awkward dilemma. Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer prompted Minneapolis Public Schools to sever its ties with the police department for school-based officers and replace them with district security officers who lack the authority to make arrests. Gaggle flags district security when it identifies student communications the company believes could be harmful. 

Some critics have compared the surveillance tool to a new form of policing that, beyond broad efficacy concerns, could have a disparate impact on students of color, similar to traditional policing. to suffer biases. 

Matt Shaver, who taught at a Minneapolis elementary school during the pandemic but no longer works for the district, said he was concerned that could be baked into Gaggle’s algorithm. Absent adequate context or nuance,  he worried the tool could lead to misunderstandings. 

Data obtained by ����Ӱ�� offer a limited window into Gaggle’s potential effects on different student populations. Though the district withheld many details in the nearly 1,300 incident reports, just over 100 identified the campuses where the involved students attended school. An analysis of those reports failed to identify racial discrepancies. Specifically, Gaggle was about as likely to issue incident reports in schools where children of color were the majority as it was at campuses where most children were white. It remains possible that students of color in predominantly white schools may have been disproportionately flagged by Gaggle or faced disproportionate punishment once identified. Broadly speaking, Black students are far more likely to be suspended or arrested at school than their white classmates, according to federal education data. 

Gaggle and Minneapolis district leaders acknowledged that students’ digital communications are forwarded to police in rare circumstances. The Minneapolis district’s internet use policy explains that educators could contact the police if students use technology to break the law and a document given to teachers about the district’s Gaggle contract further highlights the possibility of law enforcement involvement. 

Jason Matlock, the Minneapolis district’s director of emergency management, safety and security, said that law enforcement is not a “regular partner,” when responding to incidents flagged by Gaggle. It doesn’t deploy Gaggle to get kids into trouble, he said, but to get them help. He said the district has interacted with law enforcement about student materials flagged by Gaggle on several occasions, but only in cases related to child pornography. Such cases, he said, often involve students sharing explicit photographs of themselves. During a six-month period from March to September 2020, Gaggle flagged Minneapolis students more than 120 times for incidents related to child pornography, according to records obtained by ����Ӱ��.

“Even if a kid has put out an image of themselves, no one is trying to track them down to charge them or to do anything negative to them,” Matlock said, though it’s unclear if any students have faced legal consequences. “It’s the question as to why they’re doing it,” and to raise the issue with their parents.

Gaggle’s keywords could also have a disproportionate impact on LGBTQ children. In three-dozen incident reports, Gaggle flagged keywords related to sexual orientation including “gay, and “lesbian.” On at least one occasion, school officials outed an LGBTQ student to their parents, according to . 

Logsdon-Wallace, the 13-year-old student, called the incident “disgusting and horribly messed up.” 

“They have gay flagged to stop people from looking at porn, but one, that is going to be mostly targeting people who are looking for gay porn and two, it’s going to be false-positive because they are acting as if the word gay is inherently sexual,” he said. “When people are just talking about being gay, anything they’re writing would be flagged.” 

The service could also have a heavier presence in the lives of low-income families, he added, who may end up being more surveilled than their affluent peers. Logsdon-Wallace said he knows students who rely on school devices for personal uses because they lack technology of their own. Among the 1,300 Minneapolis incidents contained in ����Ӱ��’s data, only about a quarter were reported to district officials on school days between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.

“That’s definitely really messed up, especially when the school is like ‘Oh no, no, no, please keep these Chromebooks over the summer,’” an invitation that gave students “the go-ahead to use them” for personal reasons, he said.

“Especially when it’s during a pandemic when you can’t really go anywhere and the only way to talk to your friends is through the internet.”

Survey Finds Parents Aren’t So Thrilled About Most K-12 COVID Recovery Solutions on the Table: Via and ����Ӱ��

• “Roughly a quarter of parents say their school offers in-person tutoring (27 percent both during and after), and of that quarter of parents, 34 percent of their children participate during school, 29 percent after. Among those who don’t currently have the opportunity, 30 percent of parents say they would enroll their child for during-school tutoring, 25 percent after-school.”
• “In-person pod use is also low, with 17 percent of parents reporting their child’s school offers pods. Of those, 38 percent of students are participating. If offered, 25 percent of parents say they would enroll their child in a pod.”
• “Though most parents do not favor tutoring overall, remote tutoring scored high in the survey, with 82 percent of parents supporting or strongly supporting. This is consistent across subgroups.”
• Read more at ����Ӱ��.

June 18, 2021 — The Big Three

Teen Suicides: The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says suicide attempts among adolescent girls

• “Visits to emergency rooms for suspected suicide attempts rose about 51 percent on average for girls aged 12 to 17 in the four weeks ending March 20, [2020,] compared with the same period in 2019.”
• Numbers for adults and adolescent boys were stable over that period.
• According to the study: “Importantly, although this report found increases in [emergency department] visits for suspected suicide attempts among adolescent females during 2020 and early 2021, this does not mean that suicide deaths have increased.” ()

State ESSER Plans: describing how states plan to use American Rescue Plan Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds. . Some highlights:

• Nine states detailed plans to prioritize vaccinations for educators and students.
• Tennessee released a template for school districts to develop health and safety plans as they work to bring more students back to in-person instruction and developed a data dashboard on school operating status that it plans to continue to share publicly in the fall.
• Kansas will reserve a portion of funds for an initiative that will offset the cost of admission for students to visit museums, zoos, historical sites, state parks and the Kansas state fair.
• Oklahoma is using approximately $35 million for districts to hire school counselors, licensed mental health professionals and licensed recreational therapists to lower the student-to-counselor ratio.
• 23 states haven’t submitted plans yet.

FDA and CDC Meet to Discuss Rare Heart Issues With Adolescents and COVID Vaccines: The to weigh in on how many kids might need to be enrolled in clinical trials and how much safety data companies might need to provide.

• They also discussed rare but higher-than-expected cases of a heart issue called myocarditis among adolescents and young adults who received their second shot of one of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
• “Overall, among all age groups, there were after people received their second dose of either mRNA vaccine, compared to 216 after the first dose, according to data presented by Tom Shimabukuro, an immunization safety expert at the CDC.”
• “Among 16- to 17-year-olds, who had received 2.3 million doses, there had been 79 cases of myocarditis or pericarditis reported. … Based on baseline frequency of the myocarditis and pericarditis, there would have been an expected two to 19 cases in that group.”
• “For 18- to 24-year-olds, who had received 9.8 million doses, there were 196 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis reported, compared to an expected eight to 83 cases.”
• to further discuss this emerging issue.

Federal

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: related to the $39 billion Child Care Development Block Grant funding included in the American Rescue Plan.

National Telecommunications and Information Administration:

• Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration released the final rule for the .
• It also released an that links poverty, usage and broadband access by compiling data sets to show where high-poverty communities are located with relation to internet usage patterns and access to computers and related equipment.

City & State News

California: Los Angeles Unified School District and the teachers union to fully reopen classrooms this fall.

• Protocols include increased testing, daily symptom screening, cleaning and paid leave for those required to quarantine.
• High-risk staff can request reasonable accommodations in the online program.
• Students and staff will wear masks.

Connecticut: links remote learning to chronic absenteeism.

• 30 percent of ninth-graders missed at least a tenth of last school year.
• “For Black/African-American students across all learning modes, chronic absenteeism rates were highest for in-person 11th-graders and lowest for in-person sixth-graders. In contrast, for Hispanic/Latino students, rates were highest for ninth-grade remote students and lowest for sixth-grade in-person students.”

New York: Some great before-and-after photos.

Ohio:

• Sidney City Schools is introducing the , a virtual learning experience for students in grades K-12.
• ‘We don’t want to lose students’: Cleveland schools to offer remote classes in the fall.

Arizona: “, graduates from high school with 2-year-old with the help of .

Pennsylvania: by Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials reveals district spending priorities for stimulus funds:

• Purchasing educational technology for students to aid in regular classroom instruction: 87 percent
• Addressing learning loss among students: 87 percent
• Planning and implementing activities related to summer learning and supplemental after-school programs: 85 percent
• .

COVID-19 Research

Using Smart Thermometers to Predict the Next COVID-19 Wave: New York City will to identify future outbreaks days or even weeks before case numbers start rising.

• “Kinsa will distribute for free up to 100,000 of its internet-connected thermometers through New York City’s elementary schools.”

Novavax Vaccine: “The two-shot regimen was conducted when variants had begun to complicate the pandemic in the United States and Mexico.”

Delta Variant: compared with the previously dominant variant in Britain.

• “The BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine provided 79 percent protection against infection from the Delta variant, compared with 92 percent against the Alpha variant, at least two weeks after the second dose, the study found.”
• “The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, meanwhile, offered 60 percent protection against the Delta variant, compared with 73 percent for the Alpha variant.”
• “WHO official: “

Study on UK Secondary School Reopenings: Just like in primary schools, from September to December.

• : “This is yet another study showing that schools are not filled with asymptomatic kids spreading #SARSCoV2 to others. If that was the case, antibody positivity rates would be much higher (especially in kids), as seen in care homes, hospitals, prisons, etc. (30 to 60 percent).”

Catchup Needed on Routine Vaccinations: Children behind on their shots for preventable diseases like measles and whooping cough could pose a “” during the return to in-person schooling this fall.

Viewpoints

CDC Foundation:

• 20 percent of parents are vaccine-hesitant, and 19 percent are undecided about getting vaccinated themselves.
• Almost 50 percent of parents reported that they would be more comfortable with their child attending in-person school once teachers and staff are vaccinated.
• Among parents of school-age children, the following characteristics were independently associated with being vaccine-hesitant: non-Hispanic Black or African American, under age 40, household income under $50,000.
• Parents unwilling to have their child tested regularly for COVID-19 at school for in-person learning were eight times more likely to be vaccine-hesitant than those in favor of testing.

Knowing What Schools Did in the Pandemic is Crucial. So Is Preserving That Data, Via :

• “So even as schools look forward to recovery, Brown University economics Professor Emily Oster is looking back, that can inform researchers and policymakers well into the future.”

Connecting the Heartland to Bridge the Digital Divide: — “We’re working with a wide range of partners — from state agencies to community organizations — to help us reach and connect with eligible families, including providing information to be distributed at schools, libraries, health care facilities, employment service centers and more.”

Virtual Learning Fault Lines: Via

• “’But in New Jersey, learning remotely will no longer be an option.“All we want is the choice,’ said … a New Jersey mother of three who has joined with other parents to protest the state action.”
• “The crosscurrents have created a new education fault line: School by computer is on the way out in some places and on the rise in others — driven by sharply differing views on the long-term value of virtual instruction and the best way to help the most vulnerable children and families in a moment when the stakes are high.”

Long Shadows: The Black-White Gap in Multigenerational Poverty: from Brookings and AEI.

• Three-generation poverty occurs among one in 100 whites but describes the experience of one in five Black adults. Black adults in their 30s are over 16 times more likely than whites are to have had both a parent and grandparent in poverty (defined as the bottom fifth of the income distribution).
• Blacks are 41 percent more likely to be in third-generation poverty than whites are to be poor.
• .

Virtual School Is an Appealing Option for Many Black, Latino and Asian Families: Via

More Than 8 in 10 Parents Plan to Send Their Children to In-Person School in the Fall: of more than 2,000 parents, conducted by RAND Corporation and commissioned by The Rockefeller Foundation. .

Darnella Frazier:

JUST IN: Darnella Frazier, the teenage girl who pulled out her cell phone and recorded the police murder of George Floyd last summer, has received an honorary Pulitzer Prize for her courage.

— 19thnews (@19thnews)

…And On a Lighter Note

Backyard Squirrel Maze 2.0: The Walnut Heist: Former NASA and Apple engineer .

• “The contraption Rober designed and built alongside his friends took two months of meticulous planning, but the real fun comes in watching the squirrels completely dissect and destroy their best-laid plans”

ICYMI @The74

Weekend Reads: In case you missed them, our top five stories of the week:

• Juneteenth: A Year After Nationwide Protests, District Promises for Racial Equity — Juneteenth Gains Legal Popularity, but Misses Classroom Recognition (Read more)
• Teacher Diversity: El-Mekki — Pandemic Learning Loss Is Rooted in the Racial Chasm Between Educators and Students of Color. Only Teacher Diversity and a Strong Black Teacher Pipeline Can Fix It (Read more)
• COVID Recovery: States Submit Plans for Using Relief Funds for Recovery, But 23 States Still Working on Drafts ()
• Analysis: Tutoring, Summer School, Pods — Survey Finds Parents Aren’t So Thrilled About Most K-12 COVID Recovery Solutions on the Table (Read more)
• Federal Policy: A School Discipline Double-Take: How Catherine Lhamon Could Turn Back the Clock With a Renewed Focus on Persistent Racial Disparities — and Ignite New Feuds (Read more)

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

The day I found out my grandfather died, I cried so hard I threw up. Two days later, I went back to school.

I walked through the front doors holding back tears. It wasn’t that I felt uncomfortable crying in public. I just wanted to avoid combining a mask with a runny nose.

First period went by without a hitch. Second period was on track to end the same way until I decided to verbally respond to an email from my history teacher. At the time, my school had a hybrid schedule with three rotating groups. For example, if Cohort A was in school on Monday, Cohorts B and C would do school virtually.

The night before coming into school that day, I’d sent my teacher a message. The email read: “Hi Mrs. Hollman, yesterday after school, I found out that my grandfather had passed away. I just wanted to let you know in case I ever started crying during class. I’m trying my best to hold myself together, but I just can’t help it.”

She responded: “So sorry to hear that. It sounds like you were close. How old was he? When’s the funeral? If you need to turn off your camera or step off Zoom any time I understand.” Two simple questions, and yet I couldn’t send a reply. Looking back, I realize that I waited because the grief trapped in my body had nowhere to go.

Why? That’s a long story. It makes me think about how hard the isolation of the pandemic has been on kids my age, particularly those who had previously battled loneliness and depression.

When I was born, my parents lived in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn. They wanted to move to the suburbs to raise their family but hadn’t saved up enough money. With only my dad working (and my mom staying at home to take care of me), my parents eventually decided to send me to China to live with my grandparents. By the time my parents finally bought a house in the suburbs, I was five years old. At the time, moving back to the United States was an unwelcome and drastic change. I didn’t understand a word of English, and my grandparents were all I knew. They took me to the park, cooked my favorite meals, and tucked me in at night.

For as long as I knew him, my grandfather had a nicotine addiction. He started smoking cigarettes at fourteen, and the problem only worsened as he got older. By the time he reached his sixties, he could not walk up a flight of stairs without heaving. He never had cigarettes in his pockets, but it was hard not to notice the smell. During my stay in China, I followed him everywhere to make sure he didn’t smoke. I even spied on him from behind curtains. Once, I caught him hiding a cigarette on the ledge of the stone wall that surrounded the house. After he walked away, I rushed out and stood on my tippy toes, feeling for the cigarette along the length of the wall. When I found it, I ripped it in half, emptied out the contents, and left it there for my grandfather to find.

I did annoying things like that a lot, but my grandfather never raised his voice at me or told me to leave him alone. He’d just chuckle and call me a “bad egg.”

Unlike my relationship with my grandfather, the one I share with my parents has always been tense. My parents are what you might consider “typical immigrants.” They’re Chinese nationals who left in their early twenties to pursue a better life for themselves and their future children. For them, discussing mental or emotional health has never been easy or necessary. When you grow up splitting a single egg with your siblings, there is no time for “feeling blue.”

Whenever I struggled with difficult emotions, my parents did as well. Loneliness was met with anger, sadness with dismissiveness, fear with biting words. I have never felt comfortable speaking to my parents about my emotional or mental wellbeing, and only do so when I want to feel worse than I already do. In other words, never. It doesn’t help that my parents are barely home: They leave for work hours before school ends and come home minutes before I’m about to fall asleep. I know that owning and operating a restaurant isn’t easy, but I wish I had time to say more than “good morning” and “good night.”

My brother isn’t exactly someone I can confide in either. He’s five years younger than I am, and didn’t have the same close relationship with our grandfather. To him, grandpa was some old guy who lived on the other side of the world. I didn’t know how to explain to him, or any of my friends, that knowing grandpa isn’t somewhere on earth felt like a part of me was being violently ripped away. So I stayed silent, isolated, unsure of how to cope.

At the end of second period, once all the students left, I turned to Mrs. Hollman and said, “He was about to be eighty.” I remember tightly clenching my hands, digging my nails into my palm. But once the first tear broke free, the rest followed in an unbroken stream. I then blubbered out everything I had been holding in. I finally had someone to listen to all the words I wanted to say. I don’t remember exactly what Mrs. Hollman said. No quantity or quality of words could ease the pain, but that’s okay. At least she listened.

After arriving at my next class, I quickly asked to go to the bathroom so I could clean myself up. Luckily, I was the only person in there — awkward stares and questions avoided. I blew my nose, wiped my mask, put it back on, and tried all the .

I have these memorized because in freshman year, when my depression and anxiety were unmanageable, I’d often randomly burst into tears. I think every one of my teachers from ninth grade saw me cry at least once.

The first time I acknowledged my mental health problems was with my eighth grade English teacher. A toxic friendship, low self-esteem, and persistent feelings of failure made me wish I could stop waking up in the morning — at the age of fourteen. In school, I would stare at a wall without noticing that an entire period had gone by.

My English teacher at the time, Mrs. Doane, noticed my odd behavior and pulled me aside after class one day to ask whether I was okay. The answer was no, but that’s not what I said. Mrs. Doane didn’t believe me, and I’m glad she didn’t. By continuing to use the power of, “How are you?” she gradually got me to open up. And through our conversations, I learned that I needed professional help.

It took me three years of consistent, agonizing steps in the right direction — steps so microscopic that they didn’t seem to exist at all— before I finally felt I was meant to live.

Death from COVID-19 complications isn’t something most students have to worry about. But the consequences of pandemic-induced social isolation shouldn’t be underestimated. A surge of in Clark County, Nevada, convinced district officials that schools need to reopen as quickly as possible. from the Centers for Disease Control found that emergency room visits for suspected suicide attempts among teens increased 31 percent last year compared to 2019; for teen girls, the attempts were over 50 percent higher.

Reaching out to students struggling with depression may seem next to impossible when teachers and administrators have so much to deal with as a result of the pandemic. But I know I wouldn’t have made it this far without my teachers.

Students certainly need additional help. I have an idea about how technology can be used to open a new frontier in mental health support. Students, with the help of their guidance counselors, could launch peer-support video conferences. Although these conferences wouldn’t replace professional counseling, they could help students cope. Any time during lunch or even after school, a student who is struggling could join such a group and talk with a fellow student who is there to empathize, ask questions — and most importantly — to listen.

It’s been five months since my grandfather passed. Things have gotten better. Sometimes an entire day passes where I don’t think of him at all. But on the days that I do, I feel a deep sense of longing that nothing can alleviate.

I’ll be a senior next year, so I’ve started looking at colleges, thinking about prospective majors and planning my future. But although life goes on, I’d give anything to call my grandfather again and tell him one more time to stop smoking.

Cindy Chen is a junior at James Caldwell High School in Caldwell, New Jersey.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.