A month ago, at one of the schools I serve in East New York, I found myself in a challenging situation that highlighted the misconceptions surrounding the role of school mental health professionals.

A teacher, visibly frustrated, approached me after struggling with a student in her class. Despite my three counseling sessions with the student, she said she saw no discernible changes and was disappointed.

The teacher’s anger was palpable, and her words stung. This encounter was a poignant reminder of the prevailing narrative that school support staff, including mental health professionals like me, are “fixers” tasked with resolving all student issues. But students do not require “fixing”; they need guidance and support.

This mistaken narrative often portrays school social workers, counselors and psychologists as unsung heroes who are perfect at de-escalating volatile situations and can magically transform student behavior.

While the sentiment of the narrative is well-intentioned, it perpetuates unrealistic expectations and undermines the complexity of our roles as professionals — providing social and emotional support to students and helping them navigate challenges and foster healthy relationships.

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The teacher’s outburst prompted me to reflect on the broader implications of such perceptions. The pressure to “fix” students can inadvertently pathologize normal developmental behaviors, such as emotional regulation and impulse control issues.

Labeling students as broken or in need of fixing can undermine their sense of self-worth and exacerbate feelings of inadequacy and isolation. Instead of positioning ourselves as fixers, school support staff should advocate for creating a nurturing environment, one that allows students to heal at their own pace.

By reframing our role as facilitators rather than fixers, we can provide tailored tools and resources to support their emotional growth and well-being. Every student, regardless of their background or personal circumstances, deserves access to the kind of compassionate, personalized support that acknowledges their unique needs and strengths.

However, many public schools struggle to provide sufficient mental health student support. School counselors, social workers and psychologists often face overwhelming workloads due to high demands and limited resources.

Students should not receive our support only when they exhibit challenging behaviors, and support should not be viewed as a punitive measure. Rather, getting support to foster growth, resilience and well-being should be recognized as a fundamental right.

As facilitators, we can focus on celebrating the growth and strengths of our students, cultivating open and respectful communication and embracing the diverse perspectives and experiences of students and staff.

It is crucial to engage in open, honest conversations with educators, administrators, parents and students about the realities of our roles. By redefining the expectations placed on us, we can create collaborative relationships that prioritize students’ collective well-being.

Related: Mental health: Is that a job for schools?

Returning to the interaction with the teacher, it became evident that her frustration stemmed from a lack of understanding about what I could actually accomplish with the student during counseling sessions.

I took the opportunity to clarify the nature of my role. We discussed how I seek to create a supportive environment for students. That means equipping them with coping strategies, monitoring their progress and acknowledging the boundaries and limitations of our sessions.

I emphasized that change is a gradual process, and that meaningful transformation requires time, patience and collaboration.

After that challenging initial conversation, I was able to foster mutual understanding. The teacher’s initial skepticism gradually gave way to curiosity and a willingness to work with me and help support the student.

This experience reminded me that we can support students, but we can’t always fix what is wrong. So let us embrace a more compassionate, humanizing approach that helps students to navigate their challenges with confidence, resilience and dignity, rather than making them feel like they need fixing.

Clementina Jose designs sustainable social and emotional learning professional development programs for over 10 schools, providing clinical support to students in collaboration with teachers and assistant teachers.

This story about school mental health professionals was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Ignorance and apathy are not a winning combination when facing down an existential threat. But that’s exactly what Susie Jaramillo, of Encantos Media, found when her team was conducting focus groups with tweens. They were working on their just-released educational video series on climate change, “This Is Cooler.”

“There’s misconceptions around what is actually causing climate change,” she said. “There are so many false narratives: Kids think it’s litter, pollution or a hole in the ozone layer. Zero knowledge in terms of solutions, and zero awareness in terms of the jobs that are available.”

Only two of sixteen 10- to 12-year-olds interviewed could explain the basic facts of climate change; one had done a fifth-grade research project and the other had visited the Climate Museum, a temporary exhibit in New York City.

On top of not knowing the facts, kids this age expressed some pretty dark feelings. Jaramillo said she heard “a lot of lizard brain negativity; doom and gloom. There’s a lot of cynicism, sarcasm — adults dropped the ball. There’s a fatalist mentality — ‘there’s nothing we can do, so oh, well.’”

Meanwhile, teachers report a confidence gap in teaching about climate change. Many say that they feel ill-equipped to tackle it, even as most agree it’s important to teach, and that their students are bringing up the topic and are concerned about it.

One potential ally that could help: educational media. In a 2021 survey of education professionals by the company Kaltura, 94 percent said that video increases student satisfaction and directly contributes to an improvement in student performance.

But a report I co-authored with Sara Poirer in 2022 for This Is Planet Ed, an initiative at the Aspen Institute (where I’m an adviser), found that children’s media is still largely silent on climate. Zero of the most popular family movies of 2021 referred to climate change or related topics, and even when reviewing educational, nature and wildlife-themed TV shows for kids, we found that only nine of 664 episodes, or 1.4 percent, referred to climate change.

Related: Little kids need outdoor play – but not when it’s 110 degrees

To help break the silence, This Is Planet Ed now has a Planet Media initiative, dedicated to encouraging creators to make more scientifically accurate and entertaining media that engages kids on the causes, solutions and even the opportunities to be found in our changing climate.

Planet Media supported the creation of Encantos Media’s just-released “This is Cooler” video series, which is aimed at tweens. It uses a combination of live action and animation, with snappy editing, plenty of humor and positivity, to get across some basic info in terms kids can understand. For example, it compares heat-trapping greenhouse gases to a too-thick blanket making the planet warmer. The series also looks at green career opportunities, like solar panel installer or sustainable fashion designer.

Jaramillo said she was inspired by successful YouTube influencers who inform while they entertain. “It’s super engaging,” she said. “It’s not your typical climate education video.”

Just like the tweens she talked to, many children’s media creators also hold the misconception that climate change equals doom and gloom. I’m currently running an informal survey of people in the children’s media industry for a chapter in an upcoming book on climate change education. More than four out of five of our respondents agreed that “children’s media should cover climate change, its causes, impacts and solutions, in developmentally appropriate ways.”

But when asked why there isn’t more coverage of the topic to be found already, the top three responses were “creators don’t have the background knowledge,” “too scary” and “too controversial.” One respondent, who works in climate change education, said, “My children (ages 6 and 8) no longer want to watch nature documentaries because they always manage to describe how climate change threatens or is killing wildlife and their ecosystems. It’s too scary and they feel helpless.”

Related: How student school board members are driving climate action

One of the most successful kids’ science media creators out there says that doesn’t have to be the case. “It’s important to meet kids where they are. To care about the planet you first have to love it,” said Mindy Thomas, co-host of “Wow in the World” from Tinkercast. The kids’ science podcast reaches about 600,000 unique listeners a month. And at least one in five episodes touches on the environment.

Thomas and her team participated in Planet Media’s recent “pitch fest,” an open call for more content that puts across the core facts of climate change in an age-appropriate way, as well as depicting solutions. “We wanted to use our platform to help elevate this important initiative,” said Meredith Halpern-Ranzer, co-founder of Tinkercast. “Climate activism is always something we’ve been really passionate about.”

Often, Halpern-Ranzer and her team find their “wow” by focusing on emerging climate solutions, like a plant-based substitute for single-use plastic, or white paint that can cool down a city. Last fall, they launched Tinker Class, a National Science Foundation-funded hub for teachers to use the podcasts in their elementary school classrooms, as the instigators for “podject-based learning” activities (the “Wow in the World” team really likes puns). About 2,000 teachers have participated so far. Similarly, This is Planet Ed has created an “educational guide” to reinforce the key messages that Planet Media content is trying to get across.

Ashlye Allison teaches fifth grade in a Title I elementary school in South Seattle. She crafts her own curriculum on climate change, following the Next Generation Science Standards, which seek to improve science education using a three-dimensional approach.

“I want it to be connected to their daily lives and what’s going on in Seattle, and about, ‘what can we do about this?’” She showed the “This Is Cooler” video to her students, and said they found it more engaging than other videos she’s used in class.

Just as Jaramillo found, Allison said her students especially liked the video’s reference to solutions like solar power and electric school buses. “If it’s just doom and gloom, nothing can happen, and so I don’t care. That’s what my kids took out of it: solutions. That’s what they quoted the most, is how to fix it. And I think they would be interested in more ways people are fixing different problems.”

This column about climate change outreach was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Yancy Sanes teaches a unit on the climate crisis at Fannie Lou Hamer High School in the Bronx – not climate change, but the climatecrisis. He is unequivocal that he wants his high school students to be climate activists.

“I teach from a mindset and lens that I want to make sure my students are becoming activists, and it’s not enough just talking about it,” the science and math teacher said. “I need to take my students outside and have them actually do the work of protesting.”

The school partners with local environmental justice organizations to advocate for a greener Bronx. Sanes recently took some students to a rally that called for shutting down the jail on Rikers Island and replacing it with a solar energy farm, wastewater treatment plant and battery storage facility.

Sanes gets a lot of support for this approach from his administration. Social justice is a core value of Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, and the school also belongs to a special assessment consortium, giving it more freedom in what is taught than a typical New York City public high school.

For Sanes, who grew up in the neighborhood and graduated from Fannie Lou Hamer himself, getting his students involved in activism is a key way to give them agency and protect their mental health as they learn what’s happening to the planet. “This is a topic that is very depressing. I don’t want to just end this unit with ‘things are really bad,’ but ‘what can we do, how are we fighting back’.” Indeed, climate anxiety is widespread among young people, and collective action has been identified as one way to ameliorate it.

Related: Teaching ‘action civics’ engages kids – and ignites controversy

Sanes is at the far end of the teaching spectrum when it comes to promoting climate activism, not to mention discussing controversial issues of any kind in his classroom. Conservative activists have already begun branding even basic instruction about climate change as “left-wing indoctrination.” The think tank Rand recently reported in its 2023 State of the American Teacher survey that two-thirds of teachers nationally said they were limiting discussions about political and social issues in class. The authors of the report observed that there seemed to be a spillover effect from states that have passed new laws restricting topics like race and gender, to states where no such laws are on the books. 

The current level of political polarization is having a chilling effect, making civics education into a third rail, according to Holly Korbey, an education reporter and the author of a 2019 book on civics education, “Building Better Citizens: A New Civics Education for All.” “We are living in this time where there’s increased scrutiny on what schools are telling kids,” she said.

She said that, as a mom living in deep-red Tennessee, she wouldn’t be happy to have a teacher bringing her kids to protests. “I really don’t want schools to tell my kids to be activists. I think about how I personally feel about issues and flip that around.  Would I be okay with teachers doing that? And the answer is no.”

Even Sanes has a line he won’t cross. He taught his students about Greta Thunberg and her school strikes, but he stopped short of encouraging his students to do the same. “I specifically cannot tell students, you gotta walk out of school,” he said. “That goes against my union.”

And yet, there is a broad bipartisan consensus that schools have an obligation to prepare citizens to participate in a democracy. And, emerging best practices in civics education include something called “action civics,” in which teachers in civics and government classes guide kids to take action locally on issues they choose. Nonprofits like Generation Citizen and the Mikva Challenge, Korbey said, cite internal research that these kinds of activist-ish activities improve knowledge, civic skills, and motivation to remain involved in politics or their local community. Others have argued that without a robust understanding of the workings of government, “action civics” provides a “sugar rush” without enough substance.

Related: The climate change lesson plans teachers need and don’t have

Even at the college level, it’s rare for students to study climate activism in particular, or political activism more generally. And this leads to a broader lack of knowledge about how power works in society, say some experts.

“Having visited many, many departments in many schools over the years, I’m shocked at how few places, particularly policy schools, teach social movements,” said sociologist Dana Fisher. Fisher is currently teaching a graduate course called “Global Environmental Politics: Activism and the Environment,” and she also has a new book out about climate activism,“Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.”She’s taught about social movements for two decades at American University in Washington, D.C., and the University of Maryland-College Park.

“It’s crazy to me that, given that the civil society sector is such a huge part of democracy, there would not be a focus on that,” she added.

Through empirical research, Fisher’s work counters stereotypes and misconceptions about climate activism. For example, she’s found that disruptive forms of protest like blocking a road or throwing soup on a masterpiece are effective even when they’re unpopular. ”It doesn’t draw support for the disruption. It draws support for more moderate parts of the movement,” she said. “And so it helps to expand the base.”

As an illustration of the ignorance about disruptive action and civil disobedience in particular, Fisher noted K-12 students rarely hear about the topic unless studying the 1960s era, and “a very sanitized version. They don’t remember that the Civil Rights Movement was really unpopular and had a very active radical flank that was doing sit-ins and marches.”

In 12 years of public school in Shreveport, Louisiana, for example, Jada Walden learned very little about activism, including environmental activism. She learned a bit in school about the Civil Rights Movement, although most of what she remembers about it are “the things your grandmother teaches you.”

Related: How do we teach Black history in polarized times?

Walden didn’t hear much about climate change either until she got to Southern University and A&M College, in Baton Rouge. “When I got to college, there’s activism everywhere for all types of stuff,” she said.

She’d enrolled with the intention of becoming a veterinarian. “When I first got there. I just wanted to hit my books, get my degree,” she recalled. “But my advisors, they pushed for so much more.” She became passionate about climate justice and the human impact on the environment, and ended up majoring in urban forestry. She was a student member of This Is Planet Ed’s Higher Education Climate Action Task Force (where, full disclosure, I’m an advisor.) 

If it were up to her, Walden would require all college students to study the climate crisis, and do independent research to learn how it will affect them personally. “Make it personal for them. Help them connect. It will make a world of difference.”

Korbey, the “Building Better Citizens” author, would agree with that approach. “Schools exist to give students knowledge, not to create activists,” she said. “The thing we’re doing very poorly is give kids the knowledge they need to become good citizens.”

This column about teaching climate activism was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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When we’re young, playing and learning are inseparable.

Simple games like peekaboo and hide-and-seek help us learn crucial lessons about time, anticipation and cause and effect. We discover words, numbers, colors and sounds through toys, puzzles, storybooks and cartoons. Everywhere we turn, there’s something fun to do and something new to learn.

Then, somewhere around early elementary school, learning and play officially become separated for life.

Suddenly, learning becomes a task that only takes place in proper classrooms with the help of textbooks, homework and tests. Meanwhile, play becomes a distraction that we’re only allowed to indulge in during our free time, often by earning it as a reward for studying. As a result, students tend to grow up feeling as if learning is a stressful chore while playing is a reward.

Related: Want resilient and well-adjusted kids? Let them play

But in recent years, educators have begun to rethink this separation. Some are even taking concrete steps to reverse it by reintroducing play into their lessons, expanding learning to include spaces outside the classroom and incorporating practical learning opportunities within playful pastimes. The root of this change can be traced back to the concept of play theory, the idea that play and learning are fundamentally intertwined and that children benefit from a healthy balance of both.

Psychologists such as Jean Piaget, a pioneer in play theory, observed that play is vital to a child’s cognitive and language development and advised that opportunities and environments for play should evolve as a child matures. Pediatricians such as Hillary Burdette and Robert Whitaker believe that unstructured active outdoor play is more beneficial for children’s physical, social and emotional health than indoor play. And Russian developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposed that imaginative play is fundamental to children’s ability to become responsible and self-regulate.

And now, innovative city planners are beginning to adopt play theory, and the results are helping transform America’s cities into fun, engaging, life-size learning opportunities for the whole family.

For example, when a West Philadelphia bus stop added new features such as a hopscotch grid, a puzzle with movable pieces and artwork with hidden images, families began to interact with the space — and each other — much more often, and the community worked together to keep the area clean and approachable. Similar interactive learning experiences are popping up in urban areas from California to the East Coast, with equally promising results: art, games and music are being incorporated into green spaces, public parks, transportation stations, laundromats and more.

Related: In elementary classrooms, demand grows for play-based learning

Pittsburgh is about to celebrate the inherent potential of play theory as a design feature with its new Let’s Play, PGH! initiative, which has invited 27 municipal and educational organizations in southwest Pennsylvania to plan, pitch and implement play-focused urban elements. In partnership with Playful Pittsburgh Collaborative, the nonprofit Remake Learning, where I serve as executive director, is granting $1.5 million to participating organizations to brainstorm, develop and install their interactive features around the greater Pittsburgh area. The work, which is supported by the Grable and Henry L. Hillman foundations, will be guided by 10 local advisers with years of experience in play theory, learning science and urban design.

Adding time and space for play throughout the rhythm of the day sends a powerful reminder that it’s okay to play and that learning happens everywhere. Play is natural, which is something children inherently know — and a lesson that parents, educators and city planners would benefit greatly from remembering.

Tyler Samstag is the executive director of Remake Learning.

This op-ed about play was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Consider this a head’s up: This week’s newsletter is about poop.

Specifically, potty training.

In January, Utah Rep. Doug Welton introduced a bill that would require kindergarten students be potty trained before parents enroll them in school. Children who aren’t potty trained would be referred to a social worker or counselor.

Potty training — or the lack of it — clearly strikes a nerve with teachers.

“The fastest and number 1 way to get parents to potty train their kids at home is to call them to the school every time the child needs a diaper to be changed,” said a self-identified kindergarten teacher in one potty-training focused Reddit thread.

“My friend just started teaching kindergarten and says she has at least 1 in a diaper and probably another 2 in pull ups. I cannot fathom this,” said a daycare teacher in another Reddit thread that drew more than 1,000 comments.

So, are more children coming to school in diapers?

It’s a difficult question to answer, in part because it’s not data that is tracked, and also because there aren’t a lot of recent studies on potty training and the average age of children who master it. In the 1940s, toilet training generally started before children were 18 months old, according to an article in the magazine American Family Physician. Around 60 years later, in the mid-2000s, the same article said parents were generally starting toilet training when a child was 21 to 36 months old.

Those numbers haven’t significantly changed in the last couple of decades, according to Dr. Ari Brown, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a pediatrician of 28 years, based out of Austin, Texas. Typically developing children will be day trained between ages 2 to 3 1/2, and night-time training can take a few years longer, she said.

By 5, most children know how to use the bathroom. But having an accident at that age isn’t uncommon, and there are plenty of medical and behavioral reasons for these mishaps that have nothing to do with knowing how to use a toilet, Brown said. They can include physical complaints like constipation, fear of loud auto-flushing toilets, anxiety about large, crowded school bathrooms, or worry about asking a teacher for permission to leave.

“This is not a ‘toilet training’ issue and it should not preclude a child from attending school,” Brown said.

Although the legislation proposed in Utah allows for exceptions among students with a documented disability, Brown said medical issues like constipation might not show up on an individualized education program.

The Utah Department of Education does not track bathroom incidents in classrooms, and several local districts said they also have no data on this. The communications director for Alpine School District, the largest school system in Utah, said potty training incidents in the classroom is “not a trend that has surfaced as a concern (knock on wood).”

A communications administrator for the Nebo School District — located in an area represented by the bill’s sponsor — echoed that sentiment. “According to the teachers we have heard from, the rates are the same as they have always been, and there has not been a noticeable change,” he said.

But state leaders have heard otherwise.

Christine Elegante, a K-3 literacy specialist with the Utah Department of Education, said she heard from school districts that potty training kindergarteners was not a concern.

But she heard a different story when she had a statewide meeting with kindergarten program leaders.

“I was really taken aback by how many said that it was a problem, that they were seeing more and more kids that did not have the skillset they needed to be able to toilet themselves. If they had an accident, they weren’t capable of changing themselves,” Elegante said. “It was a bigger, more widespread problem that we hadn’t really heard of.”

After that meeting, Elegante said she heard from more elementary school principals who reported that potty training has become a bigger problem in kindergarten classrooms since the pandemic, particularly during this school year.

Elegante doesn’t know why students might be struggling with potty training more this year than any other, but she said schools have increased the number of full-day kindergarten classes they offer starting this year. Last year, 46 percent of kindergarteners in Utah were in a full-day program. This year, 77 percent attend full-day kindergarten. A full-day program essentially doubles the amount of time students are at school, from being in class for two to three hours a day to six or seven hours.

The increase in the amount of time in class could account for the rise in the likelihood that a child will have an accident at school. However, it doesn’t explain the claim that more kindergarteners do not know how to use the bathroom.

This isn’t the first time in recent years potty training in school has come up — pre-K teachers in Buffalo, New York, petitioned the school district to create a policy on potty training in 2019 because they said diaper-changing was taking up class time.

Unlike Utah, New York and New Jersey have laws that prevent schools from barring children from class because they are not potty trained.

Child care workers have always dealt with potty training, but schools are increasingly dealing with this for a simple reason: Children are coming to school at younger ages because there are far more pre-K classes located in schools than in years past, said Zeynep Ercan, president of the National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators.

“You have public school teachers who are not used to seeing this kind of variation in development, and now they feel as though they have to be the caregivers [as well as] educators. These two concepts are always a conflict in child care and education systems,” Ercan said.

The expansion of pre-K is a good thing, Ercan said, but it also requires schools to adapt their environments.

“The issue is, how can we make our environments more developmentally appropriate for children? How are we ready for the children, versus how are children ready for it?” Ercan said.

Even though it’s unclear if schools are seeing more kindergarten students attend class in diapers, teachers can help prevent accidents by being flexible about when children go to the bathroom, said Brown, the Austin pediatrician.

“Teachers can play a pivotal role in normalizing the need to use the bathroom when the urge occurs and not stigmatizing a child who needs to stop their learning to do so,” Brown said.

This story about potty training was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Students at Bessemer Elementary School don’t have to go far to see a doctor. If they’re feeling sick, they can walk in to the school’s health clinic, log on to a computer, and connect with a pediatrician or a family medicine provider. After the doctor prescribes treatment, students can in many cases go straight back to class – instead of having to go home.

The telemedicine program was launched in fall 2021 by Guilford County Public Schools, North Carolina’s third largest school district, as a way to combat chronic absenteeism. The number of students missing 10 or more days of school soared in the district – and nationally – during the pandemic, and remains high in many places.

Piloted at Bessemer, the program has gradually expanded to 15 of the district’s Title I schools, high-poverty schools where families may lack access to health care. Along with other efforts aimed at stemming chronic absenteeism, the telemedicine program is helping, said Superintendent Whitney Oakley. The chronic absenteeism rate at Bessemer fell from 49 percent in 2021-2022 to 37 percent last school year, an improvement though still higher than the district would like.   

“It really doesn’t matter how great a teacher is or how strong instruction is, if kids aren’t in school, we can’t do our job,” she said.

Oakley said district administrators focused on health care access because they were seeing parents pull all their children out of school if one was sick and had to visit the doctor. Rates of chronic absenteeism were also higher in areas where families historically lacked access to routine medical care and had to turn to the emergency room for non-emergency health care needs.

The telemedicine clinic is also a way to relieve the burden on working parents, Oakley said: Many parents in the district’s Title I schools work hourly wage jobs and rely on public transportation, making it difficult to pick up a sick child at school quickly.

Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a nonprofit that combats chronic absenteeism, said that early research indicates that telehealth can improve attendance. According to one study of three rural districts in North Carolina that was released in January, school-based telemedicine clinics reduced the likelihood that a student was absent by 29 percent, and the number of days absent by 10 percent.

Some districts are also turning to virtual teletherapy services to fight chronic absenteeism. Stephanie Taylor, a former school psychologist who is now vice president of clinical innovation at teletherapy provider Presence, says the company’s work has expanded from 1,600 schools to more than 4,000 in recent years as the need for mental health services grows. Therapy can help kids cope with emotional issues that might keep them from attending school, she said, and virtual services give students more choice of counselors and a greater chance of finding someone with whom they mesh.  

At Guilford County Public Schools, the district plans to expand its existing mental health services to eventually include teletherapy, according to Bessemer Elementary Principal Johnathan Brooks. The district is also planning to roll out its telemedicine clinics to all of 50 of its Title I schools, said Oakley.

The clinic is staffed by a school nurse who helps the physician remotely examine the student and ensures that prescriptions are quickly filled. The program is funded through a partnership between the district, local government and healthcare providers and nonprofits, which allows for uninsured families to still access treatment and medicine, Brooks said.

The biggest challenge in launching the clinic was getting parents’ buy-in, he said. The district held meetings with parents, particularly with those who don’t speak English as a first language, to communicate how it would help their kids. To access the program, parents must opt in at the beginning of the school year.

Of the 300 students who received care at Bessemer’s clinic last year, 240 returned to class the same day, said Oakley. Without the program, she said, “all 300 would have just been sent home sick.”

She added: “School is often a trusted place within the community and so it helps to bridge some of those gaps with medical providers. It puts the resources where they already are.”

This story about telemedicine in schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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