“There is a lot of anxiety”: New Zealand grapples with depression of back-to-school virus | world News

As weeks pass by the strict closure of the coronavirus in New Zealand, Catherine * notes that her 17-year-old daughter, in her final year of high school, is getting more nighttime and less enthusiastic: “I thought,” This will actually said very badly, “she said. “On her daughter’s return to school, which has happened in the past two weeks with the easing of restrictions on closings.

Catherine said: “It led to a lot of difficult situations as she was really upset about the time we spent saying,” Are you doing your assessments? “Her daughter who suffers from ADHD performs better when she can talk to people and work in groups.

Catherine added, “The teacher was emailing and saying,“ We’re really worried, she’s not joining the Google Hangouts we’ve scheduled and we don’t know what to do. ”

Most New Zealand high school students had missed eight weeks of school by the time the restrictions on the spread of Covid-19 had been relaxed to the point where they could return. As parents struggle with the gloom of returning to school, researchers in New Zealand say the accumulated stress and anxiety experienced by students should not be underestimated.

In a country where some students have already faced a series of devastating earthquakes and hours of closure during a deadly terrorist attack, those who have studied the effects on education say that their work may provide clues about how children and teenagers in the world will live after the epidemic – and what can help them cope.

“Research has shown that the accumulation of painful events in childhood is one of the biggest risk factors for many adult health problems,” said Kathleen Liberty, retired child health professor at Canterbury University.

“They found that it was not only the age of the child who was traumatized, but the number of traumatic events in addition to looking at their intensity, duration and intensity that became the indicator,” she said.

“There is no one in Christchurch without events.”

In 2010 and 2011, a series of major earthquakes and thousands of smaller earthquakes destroyed Christchurch, killing 185 people, destroying and destroying 100,000 homes, and placing a city – still rebuilding – on the edge of a cliff.

“Three or four traumatic events during childhood are a very strong indication of the onset of problems in the 1920s and 1930s, or even earlier,” Liberty said. “No one in Christchurch has any events.”

A study conducted by her and her colleague in the aftermath of earthquakes found that children who started school – including those who were in the womb at the time of the earthquakes – were five times more likely to develop PTSD than other children in New Zealand.

Behavioral problems, anxiety, toilet problems, and eating disorders were also more common in students, who are now aged 10 years and over.

For most, this was not the only disruption to their education. When an armed man stormed two mosques in Christchurch last March – killing 51 Muslims during Friday prayers – thousands of school and preschool students remained locked for several hours, a horrific event in a country that has never experienced a major terrorist attack in the modern era.

“After that we had a high level of stress and anxiety among students,” says Thomas Newton, a teacher at Maria College College and spokesperson for the local branch of the Secondary Teacher Union. He said the students were trapped in small rooms without air conditioning during the closing fire, using garbage bins as latrines.

Researchers are urging mental health strategies

The school expected to deal with the repercussions of this event this year. Instead, the epidemic struck.

“We knew the earthquake generation was coming across the college,” Newton said, adding that the school needed additional counseling funding. “There is a lot of anxiety in the current crop of teenagers.”

Since the final year students returned to school after the coronavirus was closed, he was “hearing a few times a day,” how many credits did I get, would I be able to get enough? “The 13 years are really stressful.”

When I studied inequality in education after the Christchurch earthquakes for a master’s thesis at Canterbury University in 2013, Maria Connolly found the absence of other research on how pupils perform in school after urban disasters.

In her fact-finding, she discovered that by 2012, two years after the earthquakes began, student outcomes had returned, to most – but not all – of the wealthiest schools she studied to pre-earthquake levels.

But in some of the poorest schools in Christchurch, the grades took a bigger hit than the wealthiest schools – and grades did not return by 2012 just as the wealthier schools did.

In 2020, Connolly, now a teacher at Lincoln High School outside Christchurch, said teachers felt “better prepared” for the consequences of the epidemic “because of their past experiences in 2011”.

In fact, there is a lot to learn from the Christchurch example, the researchers said.

“The most important thing we learned from the Canterbury earthquakes is that we haven’t known or dealt with the after-effects of the trauma,” said Carol Match, a professor of education at Oakland University. She said that not even after another major earthquake in 2016, a large-scale program was developed “to deal with the consequences of unmet mental health needs in schools”.

Liberty said the good news is that some Christchurch schools have managed to improve student behavior and achievement through a series of actions that have encouraged them – and she hopes there will be more interest in publishing them after the Covid-19 closure.

She said that one of the strategies that made a big difference in the quake-hit classrooms is to change student schedules so they eat morning tea and lunch after playing outside, not before. The teachers also rearranged the classrooms to successfully calm students down; Liberty said that some colors generated pressure and should be avoided, and the hanging objects were exiled from the ceiling.

University principals are urged to ease entry rules

Meanwhile, school administrators such as Ragne Maxwell, of Porirua College – a school located in a disadvantaged area of ​​Wellington – Radio New Zealand say that some students’ harvest this year may leave school without qualifications.

She said, “There are students who will fail at Level 2 and Level 3 and enter university this year because of this situation,” referring to assessments completed by students in the last two years of high school.

Each director who spoke to The Guardian urged the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to reduce or eliminate student requirements to achieve a certain number of “credits” to qualify for entry to the University of New Zealand standard.

The authority said in a statement that it has implemented a number of changes – including a 10-day delay on end-of-year exams – and plans to ensure that students “who are still participating in learning” are still able to receive their qualifications.

The statement added that the authority is consulting with universities on whether entry rules should be relaxed.

Catherine says her daughter may be one of those who rely on such a move.

“If you see children for the rest of the year who don’t care well, is it because they just can’t disturb, or are they traumatized, or because they’re going through something?” She said. “I think it will take a long time before they really reveal what is really going on.”

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* The name has been changed to hide the identity of her children.

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