A senior in high school, Alexis Lee grabbed the microphone and began to speak.
As cars rolled through downtown Mundelein early Tuesday evening, their vibrations causing intermittent distractions for masked-up spectators standing together on a narrow sidewalk, Lee ignored the irregular disturbances.
By the time she uttered the first few lines into her speech, she held the crowd’s full attention.
“I have a younger brother who (at a young age) was diagnosed with Asperger’s (syndrome). This means he is not able to process emotions like the other students in his grade,” Lee said. “I share a wall with him and I listen every day to how frustrated he is on that screen. I hear him slam his keyboard down as he thinks he is a bad student.”
But her brother is not a bad student, Lee went on to say. He’s the smartest person she knows. He takes an accelerated math class and plays three instruments—the clarinet, drums and saxophone.
By all indications, his high school career should be off to a flying start. But it’s not.
Stuck at home all day staring at a computer screen, Lee and her brother, who both attend Mundelein High School in Mundelein, IL, are struggling.
“He’s consistently earning C’s and D’s is getting a D in band class. How do you discipline a kid who can’t focus in their class and doesn’t understand what is happening?” Lee said. “We don’t know what to do. We are at a loss.”
Lee shared her story in front of the Mundelein District 120 and 75 offices on Lake St. in Mundelein. A crowd of close to 100 gathered in front of the building to rally the school’s board of education, meeting inside, for the return of in-person learning at the schools that make up the districts. Currently the schools offer full time remote learning.
It’s the latest in a series of parent-led rallies that have taken place all over Chicagoland in recent weeks. And school boards are listening—Arlington Heights Elementary District 25, Glenbrook High Schools District 225, Palatine-Schaumburg High School District 211, Lake Zurich Unit District 95 and Schaumburg Township Elementary District 54 and Libertyville-Vernon Hills District 128 have all reversed initial all-remote learning plans to go to some form of hybrid-learning model during the fall semester.
“I have a lot of friends at other districts, They are passionate, we’re passionate, we talk to each other,” Stephanie Enright said, who’s son, Conor, is a senior at Mundelein HS. “We all believe our kids need to be in school.”
Talking to parents Tuesday night, I asked them about how their kids are doing. About the six-hour Zoom school days.
Even the ones that said their kids are ‘Doing alright’ or ‘hanging in there’, they admitted to witnessing abnormal behavior in their children.
“He’s just more anxious than he normally is,” one parent said.
“The smallest things can get her really upset,” another parent said.
“They stare at screens all day and are not enjoying it as much,” a parent said.
These are just a random sampling of families in one school district. The story of Alexis Lee and her brother another example.
Extrapolate the ‘anxiety’ from kids in one area to kids across Chicagoland, across the nation, globally.
What we have is the makings of a mental health crisis.
Claudia Welke owns the titles of a professional in her field. She’s a child, adolescent and adult psychiatrist, Chief Medical Officer and one of the founders of Compass Health Center. The Center has offices in Chicago and suburban Northbrook, IL.
She is also the mother to three children. Two of them attend Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook, IL.
One daughter is a sophomore cross country runner at GBN.
“When it rains they have to go inside and if they can’t practice, she is beside herself on those days,” Welke said.
Welke notices how the absence of exercise, combined with a missing social part, can have adverse effects throughout a day.
“The piece of not seeing friends and the physical activity piece is huge and that leads into how are they sleeping?” Welke said. “They are already on Zoom all day. One bleeds into the other.”
Compass’s clientele breaks down into three age group categories—adults (anyone over the age of 24), adolescents (high schoolers) and child (middle schoolers). Compass works with people in those age groups beyond conventional therapy.
Conventional might mean someone who sees a psychiatrist once a month but is otherwise functioning in their daily life.
“We work with patients who need even more. Who might show more significant symptoms, people who are not able to function in their day-to-day world right now,” Welke said. “Conflict with family, pressure at school, a break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, those are typical triggers.”
Pre-virus, symptoms of depression or anxiety were common amongst adolescents.
When the virus first hit in March, things got quiet in the adolescent age group, Welke said. Her and her team thought reasons could be how typical stressers—school, friends—were off the table. Kids were home and under the protective shield of family, they believed.
But since the summer, things have changed. In June, Compass re-opened its doors to in-person therapy (they still do sessions virtually). They are not only seeing more patients than they did a year ago, but the reasons often given by patients for seeking mental health assistance is the uncertainty and instability in their lives.
“Am I even going back to school? Can I see my friends? Should I see my friends? Am I going to have a sports season?” Welke said. “There is so much loss going on for kids that even if they have already been dealing with typical adolescent stressers and you put the weight of the uncertainty and the loss (the virus) has put on them, it’s so concerning.”
In 2019, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article studying the links between team sports participation and long term mental health. The article researched just under 10,000 individuals whom had experienced an ‘adverse childhood experience’ or ACE between grades 7-12. The study then interviewed subjects again when they were between the ages of 24-32.
The article concludes that in individuals with ACE’s who participated in a team sport as adolescents, they were at lower risk of being diagnosed with depression, 16.8% vs. 22%.
The article states:
Among individuals affected by ACEs, team sports participation in adolescence was associated with better adult mental health. Team sports may be an important and scalable resilience builder.
Welke said she sees the impact of the virus leading to ACE’s among the adolescent and child age groups.
“(The virus) has disconnected these kids, it’s disconnected us all,” she said. “You take a kid that is feeling disconnected or isolated—these are risk factors for depression and anxiety—so what happens when you have a kid who has depression and anxiety and you disconnect them further? It leads to suicidal thinking and next come suicide attempts. I’m not trying to be dramatic. It’s the truth.”
On a recent Zoom interview Dr. David Smith, a medical director of youth sports medicine in the University of Kansas Health System, spoke about the dilemma he faces every day with patients.
Is the risk a kid takes by playing sports outweigh the cost of not participating?
Is it risker to shut everything down and then have to deal with all the mental health aspects which may continue for years now, versus let’s see if we can open as safely has possible with everyone looking at the risk level or ratio, and if they feel the risk is too great to participate, that is their choice. If they feel like the benefit is greater than the risk and we can help follow with these guidelines and help with human behavior than I feel strongly that we can open up youth sports
Professionals like Welke and other psychiatrists can teach coping strategies to adolescents with problems. That comes with the treatment.
“There are all types of strategies we teach them so if they are having these types of symptoms or these types of thoughts we break it down into a very specific thought,” Welke said. “This is what you do, these are things you can do in the moment to help make you feel better. And there is a piece where there is an acceptance that we are all in this situation.”
An additional challenge is the unknown. When will school resume full time? What about sports? The holidays? Graduation? Or college?
At some point, all of it will come back. But even when all the activities we hold dear do return to pre-virus levels, Welke believes the lingering effects of the shutdown on our young people will last a long time.
“Let’s be clear, even before (the virus) we we’ve been in a mental health crisis, our country has been in one. I’m confident we are going to see numbers rising in terms of rates of depression, anxiety and suicide attempts,” Welke said. “When I think about these teenagers and six months from now, one year, two years.
“I’m so worried about what will come of all of this.”
Lisa Saunders grabs the microphone in front of the District building on Lake St. in Mundelein.
A language arts teacher at Woodland Middle School in Gurnee, she is also the mother of seven. Her youngest, Megan, is a senior at Mundelein High School.
“My fear is will (Megan) be ready for college educationally and emotionally,” Saunders said.
Later, I ask Saunders about teaching in an all-remote environment, which Woodland currently is.
“You ask (students) ‘will you turn your microphone one? Will you turn the camera on?’ I know they are not getting as good an education no matter how hard I try,” Saunders said.
I ask her about teachers and not going back to the classroom. Some have underlying health conditions and co-morbidities and need to stay home. But many, who love their job and miss their students, remain terrified of the virus.
“I know teachers that are afraid. They are afraid of going back into the classroom and catching the virus and taking it home and and giving it to someone else,” Saunders said. “And I understand that. But I don’t know a single teacher who said ‘this is great, my kids are learning great.’ This is not educationally sound or educationally functional.”
The District 120 Board of Education decided Tuesday night (Oct. 6) not to vote on a hybrid educational model. One parent who I spoke with said it is likely they will vote to enact a limited hybrid model beginning in early November. Many are not happy with the model, saying it’s too limited, which splits the school population into four groups and allows for in-person schooling twice every two weeks.
But all parents at the rally were generally pleased with the outcome because they feel they were heard. Getting a foot in the door is a start, but far from the finish line which is full time in-person schooling.
“If we want an equitable education for our kids we have to demand it,” Saunders said. “Our children are losing out and we have to let them know this is not acceptable.”
At the end of the evening, inside the building, Alexis Lee again spoke, this time in front of the school board. Rally-goers standing outside peek through the curtains, move their faces a little closer to the window in hopes of hearing the impassioned pleas of a young woman searching for routine and peace of mind for herself and her family.
“I’m the kind of kid who wakes up at 6:30 am and is at school from 7 am to 9 pm on a normal day. Now, my first period is 15 minutes. What am I supposed to learn in 15 minutes? There is no tactical instruction,” Lee said. “I don’t understand how we are supposed to go to college and have grades that represent us when our classes are not representative of what they should be. The curriculum is lesser, our experience is lesser.
“Everything is lesser.”