How Ready Are We to Support Kids Through This Trauma?

Heather Rowan-Kenyon

Heather Rowan-Kenyon, Associate Professor and Director of the Educational Leadership & Higher Education Program at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, has recently published a report on supporting students through trauma in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rowan-Kenyon and Mandy Savitz-Romer, at Harvard University, surveyed counselors to aggregate their needs in a time that is uniquely challenging to students’ mental health. In Education Weekly, they write: “It will be tempting for schools to direct resources and attention this fall to bolstering the instructional core, given well-founded fears of learning loss and the widening of academic inequities. But our research suggests that districts need to focus just as much on deploying staff and policies that promote students’ social and emotional development. School counselors have a critical but often overlooked role to play in meeting this urgent need.”

Read the full editorial in Education Weekly.