Teachers and Students Are Facing a Mental Health Crisis as School Year Begins

At one point toward the end of the 2023-2024 school year, Michelle Roman, a teacher at a public high school in Brooklyn, New York, began to cry in front of her students.

“The kids were not doing what I was asking, I was preoccupied with things going on at home, and I burst into tears,” Roman told Truthout. “The students went completely silent, and while I tried to make a joke of it, one kid came up and wrapped his arms around me. Suddenly, everyone understood that I’m human, that teaching is a human profession.”

It’s also a stressful one.

The third annual EdWeek Research Center and Merrimac American Teacher Survey, released to coincide with the opening of the 2024-2025 school year, found that during the 2023-2024 academic year, 48 percent of public school instructors reported that declining mental health (typically experienced as anxiety and depression) harmed their ability to teach, an increase of 6 percent from 2022-2023. The survey — which encompassed elementary, middle and high school teachers — found that young teachers from Generation Z reported the highest impact, with two-thirds telling researchers of near-daily panic attacks and other major challenges. Moreover, the survey highlighted the obvious correlation between mental well-being and professional satisfaction, with just 18 percent of public school teachers saying they were very satisfied with their jobs.

The reasons for this vary, of course, but EdWeek found that low pay coupled with large classes, excessive paperwork and administrative demands, plummeting student mental health, a dearth of available resources, and worry about school violence (for example, gun assaults that target students and faculty) topped the list. Small surprise that nearly 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession within five years.

For Roman, the feeling that she was never doing enough increased her unease. Understaffing, she said, meant that she was often required to fill in for absent teachers since a huge budgetary shortfall limited the school’s ability to hire substitutes. “We all work as hard as we can, and we’re spent at the end of the day,” she explained. “But we still have to do two hours of unpaid labor each night to grade and prepare for the next day. Most of us have families, but we also get attached to our students and engage with them. It’s a relationship. Our training does not teach us how to detach with love or suggest ways to separate ourselves from what happens to our students.”

But what happens to students outside the classroom – in their homes and in their communities – takes an enormous toll on educators.

Since 2020, two of Roman’s students have been murdered. “One was killed by her mother’s boyfriend. He not only killed her, but he killed her mother and sister. I shut down after this happened and, for a time, I felt nothing. I’d never had a student die before,” she said.

Then, a year later, another one of her students was shot to death. “He was 19 and planned to do music education with kids on the autism spectrum,” Roman said. “His murder was horrific. I’m not good at compartmentalizing and, once again, I became depressed.”

“One of the kids I taught in third grade drowned. Another took his life when he got to high school. I didn’t know how to help myself when these tragedies happened.”

Likewise, her students were deeply impacted by the deaths, and while she says that the Department of Education provided a few short-term resources — a few days of counseling for students and staff — the high incidence of violence among urban teenagers more generally went largely unaddressed by school administrators.

Therapy for herself, while helpful, was something Roman had to seek on her own.

Like Roman, Rosemarie Miller told Truthout that she has had to deal with several student deaths during the 31 years she spent as a public elementary school teacher (she asked that her location not be disclosed). “One of the kids I taught in third grade drowned. Another took his life when he got to high school,” she said. “I didn’t know how to help myself when these tragedies happened. No one spoke about how best to handle things. I was clueless, but we just moved on and I kept stuffing my pain down. I knew that if I could hold on long enough, I’d eventually be able to retire with a pension and health insurance.”

Miller is no longer teaching but says that the traumas her students experienced continue to haunt her. “I remember one assembly where someone came in and spoke to the kids about violence and mental health. At the end of the program, the speaker told the kids to tell an adult if they felt unsafe,” she said. “This one kid who sat in the back of the room and never said a word raised his hand and asked to speak to me. He told me that he and his 6-year-old brother were being raped by their 16-year-old uncle. I was not equipped to handle this. I didn’t know how to help him. I listened and told my principal who reported it to child welfare, but that was all I could do.”

During her many-decade career, Miller says that numerous kids confided in her; each time she says she internalized the pain of her students’ revelations. This impacted her entire family. “I had so little left for my family when I’d come home from school,” Miller said. “My kids later expressed that I seemed to care more about my students than I cared about them. It was an impossible situation because we had an impossible workload. The administration told us to work smart, not hard, but this was ridiculous advice. My children and I now have a good relationship, but it was a process to unpack everything we’d been through.”

Once more, finding a therapist helped — but like Roman, Miller had to do this on her own.

Neither woman is unique in their struggles as educators.

Teacher and Student Mental Health Are Inseparable

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration, a federal agency, more than two-thirds of U.S. children experience at least one traumatic event before age 16: psychological, physical or sexual abuse; school violence; in-home interpersonal violence; natural disasters; war; forced relocation due to climate change or political repression; the death of a parent or guardian; neglect; homelessness, hunger or extreme poverty; or accidents or life-threatening illnesses that impact them or a loved one.

Despite these dire circumstances, the National Center for Education Statistics found that last year, fewer than half — 48 percent — of the nation’s public schools provided mental health services and supports to every child who needed them, down nearly 10 percent from 2021-2022.

Equally troubling, even when schools have trained counselors on staff, caseloads average 408 students per counselor. Moreover, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation does not require mental health training for aspiring educators, despite the well-established fact that the mental health of students impacts the mental health of teachers and vice versa.

Then there’s politics.

“What happens in schools reflects what’s happening in our communities. We need universal health care, including universal mental health care.”

New York City teacher Martina Meijer, now in her 17th year in a public school classroom, told Truthout that the mental and physical well-being of school communities is typically treated as inconsequential. This, she said, intersects with decades of underfunding and neglect.

“Some schools have peeling lead paint but the Department of Education has not prioritized removing it if students are older than 6. It’s frustrating because there is no acceptable level of blood contamination. The whole educational system is geared to efficiency,” she said. “But for early childhood education to succeed, teachers need to build trust. By its nature, this is often not efficient. No one listens to teachers and I feel that many of my efforts go into a black hole.”

Although Meijer has no plans to seek other work — like Miller, she is holding out until she can collect a pension — she admits that she frequently finds herself in tears and has resorted to self-medicating to cope with her frustration. The school year had not yet started when she spoke to Truthout, but she already sounded exhausted.

Demanding Too Much, Giving Too Little

John Russell, a 9th and 10th grade language and literature teacher (and debate coach) at a New Mexico tribal school, is similarly frustrated. “The expectations placed on teachers in this country are wildly out of whack,” he told Truthout. “For me to teach a 90-minute class, I need an hour of prep time followed by an hour of grading. Both prep and grading are done outside of class. If there was a healthy balance, teachers would be in front of the classroom for half the time. The other half would be spent grading and planning. People always say, ‘You have your summers off,’ but I’d rather have the time I need during the school day in exchange for summer break.”

This is not his only recommendation for improving teacher mental health and overall job satisfaction.

Russell says smaller classes would help, as would a reduction in bureaucracy — for example, “some professional development meetings could be an email. Both would make the job more manageable, but it’s the way society views teachers that bothers me the most,” he said. “Unlike a country like Finland, which treats teachers on par with doctors, teachers in the U.S. are not respected. Few jobs are more challenging than teaching a room full of teenagers, but people still act as if ‘those who can, do, and those who can’t teach.’”

Rachel Zemach, a former California public school teacher and author of The Butterfly Cage, a memoir about being a Deaf woman teaching Deaf children in a mainstream public school, says that the disrespect is elevated further in so-called special education settings. When she began teaching, she says, she found herself caught in an ongoing debate over the best way to instruct hard-of-hearing and Deaf children.

“Deaf education is complicated. Some of us use American Sign Language (ASL) to give students a sense of pride and connection to the Deaf community and Deaf culture. It’s effective and powerful,” Zemach told Truthout. “Other people, including many of the administrators at my school — none of whom were Deaf — believed that teaching lipreading and speech, and relying on hearing aids and devices like cochlear implants, was the best way to teach Deaf kids. In my experience, this leaves Deaf students fending for themselves. Although I understand the desire for assimilation, not using ASL means Deaf students miss out on social connections. They begin to pretend they know what’s happening and, over time, they can begin to see Deafness as a deficit. This can be brutal and lead to demoralization and hopelessness.”

Conflict over ASL versus assimilation impacted Zemach’s ability to teach — and increased her anxiety. “I felt unable to penetrate the system,” she said. “I was eager to work with these language-hungry, smart, inquisitive children. I knew how to help them thrive emotionally and linguistically, but being in a system that wanted them to pretend they were not Deaf felt like being in a twilight zone.”

Several years ago, in frustration, she resigned.

Wayne Au, dean and professor of educational studies at the University of Washington Bothell, told Truthout that in addition to absorbing secondary trauma from their students, many teachers are still grappling with the isolation and disjuncture of pandemic school shutdowns. “The generalized attacks on public education, long-standing school underfunding and under-resourcing, plus the stress of [anti-critical] race theory and anti-LGBTQIA+ attacks, make this a tough time to be a teacher,” he said.

Like Meijer, Miller, Roman, Russell and Zemach, Au wants educators to be listened to, respected and valued.

But how to get there?

In 2023, Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici (D-Oregon) introduced HR 744, Supporting the Mental Health of Educators and Staff Act, to authorize the Department of Health and Human Services to fund school mental health care and promote resilience for school personnel. Natalie Crofts, communication director for Bonamici, told Truthout that the legislation is pending. It does not yet have a Senate sponsor.

Au summed up the situation U.S. educators face as indicative of larger social problems. “Basically, what happens in schools reflects what’s happening in our communities. We need universal health care, including universal mental health care, affordable food and an ample supply of affordable housing,” he said. “These are issues that have to be tackled by society. Teachers can’t be expected to fix them.”