Our 2020 Capital Kids report found that there were 160,000 children and youth in Greater Washington disconnected from formal academic instruction and/or employment, a number that has increased by at least 25% to 200,000 since the pandemic. Recent research has also shown that even for young people in school or working, their well-being deteriorated across various measures during the pandemic, exacerbating existing gaps in academic achievement. Recently, teachers and external researchers have identified student well-being as one of the most important factors in our ability to address pandemic learning loss, in addition to the traditional predictive indicators such as attendance and course performance. However, there is currently no universal tool used city wide to provide school-level well-being data and some schools are not collecting any data for this indicator.
Given recent rates of depression, anxiety, and stress in students since the start of the pandemic, there is an urgency to implement social-emotional interventions in schools. At the same time, the District’s student mental health supports are taxed more than ever. Local Education Agencies (LEAs) in DC lack the data needed to meet the social-emotional needs of their students effectively and efficiently, stressing the system even more. Having this data on hand and available would allow schools to implement broader social-emotional support in schools, help identify early indicators of student distress, and allow schools to target mental health supports to students with the most acute needs.
In response to alarmingly increasing rates of depression, anxiety, and stress in students and the stressed system of mental health supports available to students in DC, Youth Invest partnered with Education Forward DC to launch the District Student Well-being Data Project. The objective is to improve student social-emotional outcomes by providing educators throughout DC with actionable, student-level, and school-level data to support students. This project will also identify and promote behavioral and social emotional intervention strategies and tools for educators and professionals to use with children and their families in schools.
The Data Project uses a multi-phase approach to providing student social-emotional survey data and data analytic tools through Panorama Education to DC LEAs to:
- Collect student social-emotional data citywide;
- Aggregate student responses to develop a comparable dataset to identify citywide trends; and
- Facilitate peer learning opportunities to support LEAs to understand and act on their data to improve social-emotional outcomes
