Philly-area students face mental health and educational challenges
Regina Brown is a mom who lives in West Philly. In January, one of her sons was sent to a juvenile justice center on a gun-related charge.
“He was with a group of kids, and one of the kids was carrying a bag with a firearm,” she said. “The kid passed him the bag with a firearm in it and when a cop saw him again when he circled the block, he had the bag on, and basically, when [the cop] opened it up, there was a firearm in there.”
Brown’s son, 17, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor gun charge late last year. He has struggled with ADHD and ADD, she said, and didn’t receive much support from his school, especially in regard to keeping up with his medication.
“I said, ‘Listen, you’re saying that he won’t come to you and take the medication,’ ” she said. “But the whole reason why the medication is at the school is because he needs to be constantly reminded to take it – that’s why it’s there.”
Brown isn’t blaming the school for her son’s arrest, but she thinks the lack of support was a factor.
Brown’s story isn’t unique and it’s indicative of some of the challenges highlighted in a report from the child advocacy group Children’s First that documented how Philadelphia students continue to struggle. The report shows students continually facing issues like poverty and mental health, while the School District of Philadelphia is hobbled by a lack of resources and funding.
In trying to understand the issues at play, Billy Penn spoke to Brown and to a school district employee about the real-life impacts of some of these statistics – in their own lives and through their observations of others.
Children at risk
Brown is not the only parent experiencing these impacts. Children First’s report reveals that while youth violent crimes dropped 51% between 2014 and 2023 in the Philly school district, property crimes rose. Additionally, youth arrests as a whole increased following the COVID-19 pandemic.
The report also shows that there were 1,733 admissions of Philadelphia youth to the Philadelphia Juvenile Justice Services Center (PJJSC) or another detention center in 2023.
However, the report includes a caveat – the only data available is an annual number from the Juvenile Court Judge’s Commission, which is the number of admissions to secure detention centers. Sometimes one youth can count as more than one admission – if they are transferred between detention centers, for example. Even so, Philadelphia youth account for nearly half of all admissions to detention centers in the state.
The report also emphasizes that being held in a detention center is associated with “worse educational outcomes, worse mental health and lower earning potential as adults.”
At court, Brown highlighted her concerns about this impact and charge to a judge. She said it not only affects her son, but also her family.
“I expressed to her my concern about family connections, about how far he’s placed [from his family], about the visitation hours, about him connecting, and victim impact, because they say that we’re victims as well, because we experienced all the things that he went through,” she said. “We experienced the negative side of his action.”
Brown also said the justice system is hard to navigate. She worked with YEAHPhilly to help her family navigate the juvenile justice system, and said it helped her better understand her son’s rights.
“They help youth and parents navigate through the juvenile justice system,” she said. “The judge said that she felt uncomfortable with that person being there because she would inform me of what [the justice system] could do, what they couldn’t do, and they don’t want us to know our rights.”
Brown’s son is on track to be released from detention in a few months.
“They said July 28 as long as he excels,” she said. “So far, he’s been excelling.”
According to the report, youth diversion programs and community-based programs have shown some success in helping students in these situations.
The report recommends diverting youth from the formal legal system when possible, and “providing other evidence-based alternatives to incarceration and mid-level residential programs.”
Mental health concerns
The Children First report also revealed 48% of students in the district feel “depressed or sad most days,” and 24% report having considered suicide. These numbers are up since 2013, when 32% of students had reported feeling depressed or sad most days, and 13% of students reported having considered suicide.
Meghan Smith, the Interim Deputy Chief for the Office of Prevention and Intervention at the School District of Philadelphia, said children struggled greatly during the pandemic, and those levels have remained elevated since then.
“We’re certainly seeing heightened levels of anxiety,” she said. “I feel that that can be attributed to a variety of factors. Sometimes it is academic pressures, other times it’s concerns about personal safety or what they’re being exposed to in their communities. Sometimes, it’s family instability.”
She has also noticed the rise in depression – particularly in low-income or marginalized communities. This can bleed into school presence and performance.
“It’s pretty well documented that we know that these mental health challenges can deeply impact our students’ academic performance, their behavior, their overall well-being that can result in symptoms such as truancy, increased absences, just kind of not connecting to the school environment,” she said.
In prior reporting, Children First’s CEO Donna Cooper said the surrounding environment could be affecting a lot of these statistics. Smith echoed these sentiments.
“A lot of our students are growing up in neighborhoods with high crime rates and high levels of poverty,” she said. “They experience trauma from a multitude of levels or trauma in a multitude of ways, and that persistent stress from what they’re kind of experiencing in their daily lives, that is then what typically manifests in that anxiety and that depression, which then directly causes difficulty concentrating or engaging in school.”
Regarding resources, Smith said there is oftentimes a lack of knowledge and stigma around these issues that can make seeking help difficult.
“There are a lot of things that are outside of the control of us here in the school district – a lot of barriers that our families are experiencing in the Philadelphia area,” she said. “Sometimes that’s due to lack of insurance or long wait times, or a lot of times, it’s simply just not knowing where to seek that help. And as a result of that, often students are not getting the level of support that they need.”
Many schools have incorporated social emotional-learning programs, which help students with their emotions, she said.
“Those programs are integral in teaching our kids some of those coping skills and how to emotionally regulate and how to cope and process when they are faced with adversity,” she said. “So that kind of starts at the low level, at the tier one level, and then we’ve really been working to build capacity in our counseling and mental health supports that we have in our schools.”
There are several such programs available in Philly schools.
“We have STEP programs in 45 of our schools and the STEP program is the Support Team for Educational Partnership,” Smith said. “They are licensed clinicians that are staffed in our schools that are providing individual, group and family therapy directly within the school setting. So that tends to remove the barrier of families having to access care outside of school, because it’s something that we’re able to provide for them right there.”
Smith said the district hopes to expand this program to include more of its 331 schools.
Cooper, with Children First, explains an existing local program partners with schools to provide resources for some school students.
“The city’s nonprofit, Community Behavioral Health, which is a Medicaid-managed care organization for behavioral health, invested and partnered with the school district to [provide], for every school building, a mental health partner,” she said. “Every counselor that sees a kid that is withdrawn or upset, they have a partner right there in their school they can begin to connect children to.”
However, she explained, Medicaid is only available for kids from families with lower income who are “really sick.” She said there are many elementary and middle school students who exhibit the “early signs of mental stress” but don’t meet the threshold for an official mental health diagnosis.
It’s important to focus on the resources the district does have to improve mental health outcomes, Smith said.
“I think that is trauma-informed education, like implementing and ensuring that our teachers and our school staff are able to better understand and respond to the mental health needs of our students and working with the local organizations that currently exist to provide those mental health resources,” she said, “and inside and outside of our schools working to create a culture that encourages our students to seek help without fear or judgment.”
Children’s First recommends more focus and funding on mental health grants and programs to mitigate these issues. Smith said these resources are vital for students.
“Kids these days, they face a lot and they go through a lot, and they really need us as the adults to help guide them through and help them make those connections to the services they need,” she said.
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