On a recent weekend morning, I woke up to an alarming text message from a school staff member. It read: "Good morning, Ms. Sandy. I hope you are doing well outside of this unfortunate news I have: One of the individuals killed in downtown Minneapolis was a former student. I'm sorry to have to share this news with you."
As a superintendent, my worst fear is waking up to a phone call or text message that a student was killed. Since January, I have received eight such messages about the death of a student or former student.
Whether by suicide, drug overdose or community violence, their deaths point back to one thing: Our young people are not OK, and their mental health is severely at risk.
Getting students back in school is the tip of the iceberg for our communities "returning to normal." Yet for our students, there likely will not be a "return to normal."
2020-21 was a school year where race, trauma and the pandemic collided. A year ago, George Floyd was murdered. Students, especially Black students, needed connection and support to process all that would transpire in the year since, but staying home and safe during the pandemic took precedence. This meant little to no regular connection to their school community for over 11 months for many.
We all knew that students would return to school with exponentially more trauma, and we are now beginning to understand exactly what this means for students' mental health. In the past three months of in-person school, we have experienced 150 critical incidents in my school district, which serves the top 1% of highest-needs students in the west metro.
Critical incidents are things like suicide attempts, assaults on staff requiring hospital treatment, or a student engaged in self-injurious behavior so severe that emergency medical services considered using ketamine to sedate them.
In Minnesota, almost twice as many Black children (58%) experience trauma than their white peers (31%), and suicide attempts among Black adolescents increased 73% in the past 30 years. I hear stories from families turned away by emergency departments with no inpatient beds and mental health treatment programs with monthslong waiting lists.