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Reading this article on USA Today, it goes into how Covid came with a bunch of setbacks for students. This included not only academic growth, but also mental and emotional growth. Students are now seeing a positive increase in mental health since returning to school. This can be due to the lack of face-to-face social interaction during the lockdown. Benefits of teachers teaching healthy habits and support tactics for mental and emotional health are a must in today's classrooms. Society has developed in many ways, and with this higher level expectations of academic success and technological improvements; society is at an all time high pertaining to stress. To keep up with societies changes, education needs to adapt as well and teaching the common cores is not enough to prepare students for the "real world".

Citation:

COVID set students back, but there’s good news on mental health as new school year starts. (2023, August 19). USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2023/08/16/school-improves-kids-mental-health-need-classroom-support/70589677007/

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Reading this article on Education Week, I noticed that New Jersey recognizes the growing crisis of grief within students. At a young age when you are afflicted with loss of a parent, relative, friend, etc. Children may not understand how to cope with this. Schools in New Jersey are now being required to teach lessons on grief in order to assist students with these emotional tolls. The benefits of teaching younger audiences how to handle grief can help them learn "healthy support behaviors" and use these tools for the rest of their lives'.

Citation:

Blad, E. (2024, January 12). Teaching About Grief and Loss: One State’s New Requirement for Schools. Education Week. https://padlet.com/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.edweek.org%2Fleadership%2Fteaching-about-grief-and-loss-one-states-new-requirement-for-schools%2F2024%2F01

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A new state law will require New Jersey schools to incorporate lessons on grief into health education classes to help students understand the physical and emotional effects of loss and identify healthy coping strategies.

The law, signed Jan. 4 by Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, will make New Jersey one of the few states that specifically mentions grief in its learning standards. Connecticut and Massachusetts also have such requirements.

While grief and loss are universal human experiences, they are too often overlooked in school programs and teacher training, child psychologists said.

"Making it part of the curriculum normalizes talking about it, and that's an important thing," said Dr. David Schonfeld, director of the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement at Children's Hospital Los Angeles.

Childhood grief has long been a concern for educators, but it has taken on increased prominence since the COVID-19 pandemic, he said. About 379,000 U.S. children had lost a primary or secondary caregiver to COVID by June 2023, researchers estimate.
Many more experienced the death of family friends or relatives during the pandemic.

And countless other students have faced more routine encounters with loss, like the death of a family pet.

"This is content that people wanted and needed at a time when it was most pressing," Schonfeld said. "But now that the pandemic is sort of receding, we are seeing that grief was always a common issue in schools."

And, even if students have not yet dealt with grief, understanding it can prepare them to support their peers and face losses that come later in a healthy way, he said.

Taking a skills-based approach to health education

New Jersey's new requirement comes as health educators around the country have worked to broaden their lessons to incorporate concepts like addressing mental health concerns and making responsible decisions.

While the Society of Health and Physical Educators, the professional organization for health educators, doesn't specifically include grief in its model standards, the group hopes the skills-based approach to identifying and managing emotions it recommends will help students learn to cope, said Sarah Benes, the organization's president.

"By focusing on skills, it supports transfer across a range of emotions and building the toolbox students can access when managing difficult situations, including grief," she said.

New Jersey's law requires the state's board of education to amend health-education standards for 8th through 12th grades to include "the physical, emotional, and behavioral symptoms of grief; coping mechanisms and techniques for handling grief and loss; and resources available to students, including in-school support, mental health crisis support, and individual and group therapy." The bill also requires the state to provide schools with age-appropriate resources to support students.

Students' "exposure to stress, loss and trauma has increased in recent years, making them more vulnerable to the negative consequences that can impact their lives," state Sen. Joseph Cryan, a Democrat and one of the bill's sponsors, said in a statement. "Making them aware of the symptoms of trauma, informing them of available resources, offering coping techniques and giving them the opportunity to express their grief can make a real difference in their health and well-being. In fact, it can save lives."

A spokesperson for New Jersey's education department did not respond to questions about the process for drafting the new standards.

The state has frequently forged the path on new learning standards. In 2022, for example, it became the first to require lessons on media-literacy starting in kindergarten.

School districts around the country have sometimes resisted state mandates for professional development or student lessons on social issues, arguing that, however well-intentioned, they pile more obligations onto schools' already over-full plates. But groups like the New Jersey School Boards Association supported the new grief requirement.

Students benefit from more discussion of death, psychologist says

Schonfeld also helps lead the Coalition to Support Grieving Students, a growing network of child advocacy and education groups that has worked for 10 years to helps schools address student grief.

Much of his recent work has focused on professional development for teachers, who are often eager for answers to very practical questions, like how to avoid "saying the wrong thing" when a student faces loss.

In the earliest days of COVID-19, Schonfeld held virtual trainings for New York City teachers as their city became the U.S. epicenter for the pandemic.

"They found that, if they were given the language and knew what to say, they really wanted to say it," he said.

Schonfeld said the New Jersey law is a good step. While students of all ages can benefit from discussions of grief, they can actually start much earlier than 8th grade, the youngest level for which standards are required in the legislation.

As part of an early-career fellowship, Schonfeld piloted lessons on grief for children as young as 4 and 5 in a Baltimore elementary school. While some skeptics said those children were too young to discuss concepts like mortality, Schonfeld said the lessons helped them better process ideas they were already grappling with and demonstrate healthy support behaviors for struggling friends.

In one class, students insisted Schonfeld pause a video lesson when they noticed a classmate was crying as he remembered the death of a family dog a year prior.

"They all offered really appropriate support, which is atypical for 2nd grade," he said. "When you help kids figure out how to support someone, they can use that and they want to use that."

New Jersey's new standards will be most effective if they focus on providing students with practical skills, rather than theoretical concepts, Schonfeld said.

"Death is a really hard thing," he said. "But it's going to happen to everyone. If you can decrease the stigma, that helps."

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Teaching About Grief and Loss: One State's New Requirement for Schools

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Schools can play a key role in helping students understand and process grief, experts say.

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Reading this article on CNN health, it talks about the struggles of teaching healthy eating within the classroom. I think that mentioning, "'healthy eating' curriculum can do more harm than good" isn't the right attitude. However, I do like that this article mentions a lot of the issues that teachers may not think about when teaching this subject. Health class is definitely an area where teachers need to be on higher alert with their diction; students at a young age don't have the wisdom learned from time and may take someone's word at face value. That being said, "healthy eating" can be thrown out of proportion through extreme means in order to achieve a certain "physical appearance". These stipulations need to be considered when teaching the topic and maybe support strategies should be given to students that are experiencing the negative sides of this topic. All in all, the main goal of the topic is to achieve a longer and healthier life by starting good habits at a young age.

Citation:

Hanson, O. (2023, October 9). “Healthy eating” curriculum can do more harm than good. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/09/health/unhealthy-school-nutrition-lessons-wellness/index.html

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Reading this article on nea-today, I learned the positive impact physical activity has on students academic careers. The positive come from not only physical health, but students happiness, confidence, and mental well-being. Even at the youngest ages of education, students need physical activity to build certain motor functions. As we age, we need this activity to keep certain functions and improve our overall physical health. An additional benefit to this is the ability to get higher quality of sleep after physical activity. Good sleep leads to higher focus and performance while also maintaining mental health. Teaching physical education is and will always be an essential in education.

Citation:

Fitzgerald, S. (2023, August 28). How PE Boosts Student Mental Health | NEA. Www.nea.org. https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/how-pe-boosts-student-mental-health

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Safety & Preventing Unintentional Injury

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Safety & Preventing Unintentional Injury

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While reading on the National Library of Medicine('s) site, I found an article that had statistics on the success of different safety prevention actions. These preventions varied for a wide set of concerns, between emotional health and dating violence to bullying and gang violence. This site has data on all of the topics and more. Teaching preventions that we find the most effective can be a great way to support the larger portion of the student body. However, if the funding and time exists, I believe in teaching multiple methods because every student and person learns differently. Some methods may work for some and other methods may work for others. Therefore, I believe the best safety prevention is a wide-net approach to teaching.

Citation:

Miller, G. F., Wilson, L., Rice, K., DePadilla, L., Mercado‐Crespo, M., & Jones, S. E. (2022). Injury Prevention Activities in US Schools, School Health Policies and Practices Survey 2014. Journal of School Health. https://doi.org/10.1111/josh.13190

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Reading an article by MUSC.edu, I learned how the active wellness efforts of schools help lower average BMI for students. In today's day and age, students are spending more and more of their free-time on games or tv. Technology advances and post-covid(lockdown) have limited the amount of physical activity within our youth. Schools taking the initiative in making up for this lost physical activity can help with mental health, and overall personal health of students.

Citation:

School-based wellness initiative shown to reduce average student BMI. (n.d.). Web.musc.edu. Retrieved January 19, 2024, from https://web.musc.edu/about/news-center/2023/02/28/reducing-student-bmi

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While reading through CDC's blog, the topic of intentional injury and workplace violence for school teachers has raised some alarms for the career. When thinking about violence in schools, many think about student to student violence; however, student to teacher violence is another big concern that is sometimes overlooked. Having lessons on these topics for students and lessons for teachers can help benefit all parties. Support can be given to those that need outlets before having an incident. Also, post-incident actions are most important as the violence is occurring. Making sure teachers and students know how to handle the situation can save further injuries.

Citations:

says, W. (2023, August 10). Safety for Workers in Elementary and Secondary Schools | Blogs | CDC. https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2023/08/10/safety-for-school-workers/

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While reading Insight-into-Diversity, I found an article that talks about trauma support within schools. Education is always developing and improving as our society changes. With the recent pandemic, a lot of our core teaching principles are being looked into, and education as a whole is expanding to cover more than just the general education topics. Teachers and staff are expected to develop students on more than just academics and with that we hope to create positive life changes for our students. The improvements of adding more to health curriculum like trauma support and mental health can allow us to further our students academic growth in a positive manner. Topics that used to be left to either families or for students to figure out themselves are now being brought into the classroom.

Citation:

Stewart, M. (2022, March 16). Trauma-Informed Education Becomes Popular Response to Stress of COVID-19, Racial Strife, and More. INSIGHT into Diversity. https://www.insightintodiversity.com/trauma-informed-education-becomes-popular-response-to-stress-of-covid-19-racial-strife-and-more/