MYCA JETER, CANDIDATE FOR Durham County School Board, District 4, believes Covid-19 changes the way we should think about public education.
Jeter says current data reveals
achievement dropped during Covid-19, regardless of racial identity. The decline
in academic performance came after Durham Public School’s witnessed an uptick
in achievement district wide prior to Covid-19 restrictions.
“The disparity percentage did
not shift, but, overall, they were starting to make incremental gains on moving
the dial as it relates to the grade level proficiency scores,” Jeter said
during a recent interview with the Rev-elution. “Then COVID hit, and everything
really plummeted, so that leads us to the mental health stuff.”
Jeter, a social worker with
Alliance Health, says her personal experience, as the parent of an academically
gifted middle school daughter, forced her to consider how Covid-19 impacts the
education of students.
“The brightest most capable
student after COVID is not that anymore,” Jeter said. “There were a lot of kids that were padding
the numbers, holding the numbers down because they were sound, they were stable,
they were normal.”
Jeter says her background as a
teacher and social worker provides her a unique perspective related to the
mental health needs of students, parents and teachers. She taught middle and
high school students Spanish before obtaining a Master of Social Work degree
from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She decided to run after
watching a school board meeting on television. Members of the staff gave a report
on social and emotional numbers after professional development training.
“I was talking back to the TV.
OK they had the training but who was
looking at the validity of implementation. How do you know they’re reaching for
those new strategies when things are happening in the classroom,” Jeter said? “What transfer learning processes are in place
to ensure that when you get the new information you have intentional time to
digest and then consider application and then understand how and when to use it?”
Jeter says she’s running to
serve on the school board because of a need for a person like her to ask
different questions regarding mental health issues caused by Covid-19.
“When my daughter started at
Neal this year, she was 13 years old chronologically, but from a maturity,
social and emotional and peer space, she was still a fifth grader,” Jeter said.
“Her hormones are raging. She’s now
dealing with anxiety. She's never had that before, and now she's in this
building with a whole cohort that have this same unknowing. The same gray space,
the same anxiety, fear, whatever.”
Jeter says teachers are also
confronted with a variety of unknowns.
“In a classroom with a teacher
who is typically used to dealing with the mature 7th graders, they are now
confronted with kids who lessen the flow of their classrooms,” Jeter said. “They
have been functioning on automatic for maybe 10 years, and now they have to pivot
and address this classroom with these young, minded kids. They didn't wanna teach elementary school. On purpose, they chose middle, and now they're
left in a classroom with kids that won't sit still.”
Jeter says her concerns for
the mental health well-being of students is triggered by her life as a parent.
“From what I have seen, not
only with my daughter, but her peer group, my nieces and my nephews, is that the
standing foundation that our kids had in terms of their own identity, their own
self-esteem, their own ability to know for sure what they like what they don't like,
it’s no longer a tangible thing for most of them,” Jeter said. “A huge segment
of our children is in the throes of and don't have the language to ask for help. Parents
are seeing their behavior shift - all the sleeping, all the defiance, all the
other stuff. The drug use is crazy.”
Jeter says she’s perplexed by
the growing number of youth contemplating suicide.
“I can listen to my daughter
on the phone with her friends, and so many of them are talking about how unwell
they are. They're desensitized to the sheer value of what's really happening
with them, and I'm worried because as a mom, with the mental health background,
I can then pause and say ‘hey get off the phone and let me talk to you for a
minute. When your friend tells you this - this is not OK.’”
Jeter worries that many
parents and teachers aren’t equipped to meet the mental health challenges
facing students. She says Durham Public Schools needs to take some time to dig
through what is happening across the district. She says some principals have
provided leadership to provide strategies, while others fail to offer support
for students with anxiety and depression issues.
“We have some social workers and
counselors on staff that could be leveraged, in my opinion, to do some coping
skills development training with the kids,” Jeter said. “You don’t have to call
it a coping skill development class, but you go in and you model for kids like,
let me tell you how you are feeling, say who's a little irritated, who's a
little bothered. Let's talk through this strategy of how you bring yourself out
of that. Let me give you some ways to
control how you're feeling so that you could be your best and show up as your
best person.”
Jeter believes everyone needs mental
health support after post-Covid induced trauma
“Those strategies need to be
shared with teachers,” Jeter said. “Because I've seen teachers really lose
their shit.”
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