The growing public awareness around mental health is in many ways a positive development. When mental health issues are less stigmatized, students are more likely to seek the care they need.
But some educators worry that the pendulum has swung too far in that direction, and that students are too readily missing school when they feel anxious, blue, or any of the other crummy—but normal—feelings that come with adolescence.
This matters because not only are students losing valuable instructional time, but they’re also not learning the emotional resilience they’ll need for life, said Matthew Sloane, the principal of Middleburgh Junior/Senior High School in Middleburgh, N.Y. He talks to his students about “healthy anxiety”—how someone feels before a big test or when they’re in an argument with a friend.
“In school, specifically middle school and high school, we want students to experience anxiety because it’s in a controlled environment,” he said. “They’re supported, they have their parents, teachers, [and] support staff here. And, you know, anxieties are going to happen throughout their life. Change is going happen throughout their life.”
Mental health days raise concerns about chronic absenteeism
This issue of students missing school for mental health reasons is top of mind for many school and district leaders right now as chronic absenteeism rates soar in many areas across the country. Chronic absenteeism is generally defined as missing 10 percent or more of the school year.
There’s been a convergence of messaging in the past few years that may have led parents and students to conclude that skipping school can help improve their mental health.
At least a dozen states in recent years have passed laws allowing students to take excused absences for mental health reasons.
Meanwhile, the U.S. surgeon general called the state of kids’ mental health the “crisis of our time” last year. And in 2021, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Academy of Pediatrics, and Children’s Hospital Association declared the state of child and adolescent mental health a national emergency.
Kent Pekel, the superintendent of Rochester public schools in Minnesota, added that the school closures during the pandemic sent an unintended message that showing up to class wasn’t necessarily important.
“We’re finding that there’s a lot of misconceptions about how important it is to be in school—'if I didn’t come to school at all in the pandemic, why do I urgently have to keep coming to school now?’” he said during a recent webinar on adolescent mental health hosted by the Frameworks Institute, a nonprofit organization that studies strategic communications around social issues.
Media coverage about mental health issues fuels parents’ fears
The deluge of media coverage around the youth mental health crisis is confusing for parents, too, said Matthew Strittmatter, the principal of Elizabeth Davis Middle School in Chesterfield County, Va. He thinks some parents are overreacting to their children’s emotions out of fear of doing the wrong thing.
“Parents are trying to navigate all of what they believe to be correct in the moment,” he said. “And there’s a lot of things on the news and social media that shows the outcry of what mental health, and a lack of mental health awareness, can lead to. Depression and suicide rates, those things are certainly at the tops of everybody’s minds, especially [parents].”
But experts have been warning that skipping school to address mental health challenges isn’t necessarily the answer, especially if a student is going to be home alone unsupervised because a parent or caregiver must work. If a child is feeling anxious or depressed—or even just a bit down—they shouldn’t be left at home by themselves, experts say.
“Almost any psychologist or clinical psychologist who works with children and youth will say that the answer to school refusal is not keeping them out of school, that is absolutely not the way to go,” said Andrew Fuligni, a psychology professor and director of the Adolescent Development Lab at UCLA, during the Frameworks’ webinar.
It’s developmentally important for adolescents to have strong emotional experiences, whether they are good or difficult ones, he said.
“It’s not that we want to dampen strong emotions, we want to support adolescents’ ability to work with those emotions to think about what they mean and how to regulate them and put them to good uses,” he said. “Sometimes we should be absolutely outraged by something that’s happening in the school or in the community.”
Why schools are struggling with how to address mental health days
But while district and school leaders might be aware that this is a problem in their schools—that too many kids are staying home because they’re conflating the normal developmental challenges of adolescence with mental health problems—how big of an issue it is and what to do about it is much harder to pin down, said Pekel.
The problem also presents a difficult tightrope for school and district leaders to walk, he said. Pushing kids who are maybe anxious about a test to come to school, while being considerate of kids who have clinically diagnosed anxiety and might need to stay home are two different scenarios.
Pekel said he’s seeing students use the concept of taking a mental health day as a get-out-of-school-free card. At the same time, he doesn’t want to approach students’ and parents’ concerns with skepticism, he said. “Part of the paradox for us is that we have a growing set of resources at our schools to help address that, so staying home may not be the effective thing to deal with a kid who is struggling with mental health.”
To address this conundrum, schools should talk to students and parents about the difference between feeling anxious about an upcoming test or over social drama among peers versus a diagnosed mental health condition like anxiety or depression, said Fuligni and Pekel.
School leaders also need to be proactive in meeting students’ needs, said Sloane. He makes sure he is aware of all the students in his building who have a clinical diagnosis for a mental illness, but his school also has additional supports in place, such as the Adverse Childhood Experiences (or ACEs) Assessment, to identify students who might be struggling but haven’t officially received a diagnosis.
Students need to feel safe and welcome at school
Finally, schools also need to make sure they’re creating an environment that supports students’ mental health, and one that makes them feel safe and welcome at school, said Keri Rodrigues, the president of the National Parents Union.
While a student might not have an official diagnosis for a mental health disorder, if they’re suffering from feelings of anxiety and depression because they’re getting bullied or harassed at school, it’s not unreasonable for parents to let their kids stay home, Rodrigues said.
She added that it’s easier to blame parents for students missing school rather than transform classrooms. But schools should resist the temptation to try to shift the onus for the chronic absenteeism problem onto parents.
“If we haven’t done the job of creating the conditions in the school, like addressing classroom management, safety in schools, whether or not [students] have a meaningful relationship with a trusted adult in the building, that’s not going to get us to where we need to be,” Rodrigues said.
