6 minute read
Measuring what we think we know
Pitt-Bradford faculty quantify problems with children’s mental health to help schools and providers make better choices for students
By KIMBERLY WEINBERG Portraits Editor
Three Pitt-Bradford professors are trying to measure something very hard to quantify – what factors have detrimental effects on children’s mental health.
One professor is analyzing how the COVID-19 school closures affected students’ mental health and academics. Two others seek to increase the flow of information between service providers of at-risk children.
Dr. Shailendra Gajanan, professor of economics, spent his most recent sabbatical analyzing three years of Pennsylvania Youth Survey data to figure out how the pandemic may have affected student mental health for the Center for Rural Pennsylvania. The center is a legislative agency of the Pennsylvania General Assembly that pays for studies to help government groups and organizations maximize resources for the state’s 3.4 million rural residents.
Unlike other grant-giving organizations, the center puts out an open call for proposals to study topics of importance to the state. After the center selected Gajanan to perform the study, it sent him the youth surveys.
Gajanan notoriously loves data. “Big data is my friend,” he said. His last book taught graduate students and economists how to analyze statistics to evaluate outcomes for policies involving poverty and nutrition. He literally wrote the book.
“This particular data set crashed my computer,” he said. “Every other year, every student in grades 6, 8, 10 and 12 in Pennsylvania has to answer these 300 questions.” Questions include demographic information and attitudes toward drugs and weapons, academics, their families and mental health. He had three years’ worth of such data.
At first, he wasn’t sure how to use this massive data set to answer the center’s question. Then he realized he could borrow a method from his extensive research on global hunger.
With the data safely installed on an external hard drive, he began giving each student’s answer a value of 0 or 1 to create a mental health index for students showing their stress level. For example, when asked to respond to the statement “I ignore the rules that get in my way,” Gajanan assigned a 1 to students who answered “somewhat true” or “very true” and a 0 to students who answered “very false” or “somewhat false.”
He then used the index to examine changes in students’ stress levels by school district over three years of data –tests conducted in 2017, 2019 and 2021.
Gajanan found that compared with 2017 and 2019, the number of rural counties with many students experiencing high stress levels in 2021 increased significantly, while the number of urban counties with many students experiencing high stress levels remained consistently lower.
In general, Gajanan said he found that both rural and urban students whose families had lower incomes suffered more than their more financially stable peers during the pandemic, both mentally and academically. However, students from low-income, rural backgrounds suffered more mental distress than their urban counterparts because of fewer resources.
Rural students were less likely to have access to mental health services and technology needed to attend school online. Other considerations were the generally lower education level of rural parents, which made it harder for them to help their students with schoolwork.
Gajanan also found that in counties with higher levels of mental stress, students’ academic performance was negatively affected. Once the study was published and reported on by Spotlight PA, Gajanan was invited to be the keynote speaker for the Pennsylvania Association of County Administrators of Mental Health and Developmental Services.
Following his presentation, several counties followed up with Gajanan, and he has provided their offices and commissioners with individual data so that they may start plans to lower levels of mental stress for students.
Another team, Dr. Patricia Lanzon and Dr. William Clark, both assistant professors of education, are focusing on how kids get mental health services as they grow up. They have been collaborating with educators and those who provide social services in McKean and Warren counties.
Their goal is to improve the mental health of children as they grow by finding gaps across childhood mental health services and developmental stages.
“Social and emotional challenges in high school students are often related to mental health issues that were identified when these children were infants and toddlers,” Lanzon said.
We have to do better at educating parents on how to educate their teens.
The pair found that there’s good mental health support for babies and young kids, but things get patchy for children over age 8.
To learn more about this, they are collaborating with mental health agencies and schools in McKean County, where Bradford is located, and neighboring Warren County, where Clark lives and is the former superintendent of schools.
In talking with these professionals, Lanzon and Clark developed the idea of a shared, centralized childhood mental health database that tracks a child’s mental health history from infancy all the way through high school.
They found that children who become depressed often first show signs between the ages of 11 and 14. If teachers, therapists, doctors and everyone who helps a child had all the information they needed in one place, they could spot kids who might be struggling with depression or other problems.
For Clark and Warren County officials, the need to do something to help student mental health is personal: three students and a teacher took their own lives in separate incidents from 2021 to 2024. “When something like that happens, everybody rallies,” he said.
Once at-risk students can be better named using an accessible mental health database, Clark and Lanzon envision a new system in which a school official or service provider checks on those at-risk students and their families as they age in a helpful way – providing age-appropriate parenting support and services for the student, if needed.
“We have to do better at educating parents on how to educate their teens,” Clark said.
With a goal established – an accessible mental health database and continuing education for parents – Clark and Lanzon are now seeking funding to create a pilot program.
“There’s definitely a need,” he said.
While rural school officials and mental health professionals might have sensed youth mental health problems at a gut level, thanks to Pitt-Bradford researchers, many have a more exact perception of what those problems are, their severity and how they might be solved.
