Earlier this month, Livingston Public Schools superintendent Matthew Block wrote a letter to families explaining the toll that the return to full-time in-person learning has placed on students. To mitigate this stress, he announced several days that no outside schoolwork will be given to children, to allow them to decompress from the rigors of the classroom.This sense of stress among students tracks with what the data says we are all currently feeling.It can be easy – at times – to forget that we are still in the middle of an ongoing pandemic. Through rose colored glasses, many things can start to look normal. But COVID-19 is still raging, and cases have slowly started to increase again over the past few weeks. Earlier this summer, it appeared that the pandemic might have been in retreat, but the delta variant took hold and sparked a new wave of cases and hospitalizations.An article in The Atlantic last week, “The Pandemic Is Still Making Us Feel Terrible” by Caroline Mimbs Nyce, delved into the difficulties people are facing trying to adjust to the “new normal” when that “new normal” is constantly evolving.The article notes that, since April of 2020 the U.S. Census Bureau has been tracing the number of Americans reporting signs of anxiety or depression. In the first half of 2021, the number of people reporting symptoms was starting to decline, reflecting the sense of optimism of that time, when millions of people were receiving vaccinations. At the end of January of this year, one of the roughest points of the pandemic, 41 percent of Americans reported symptoms of depression and anxiety. But by Fourth of July, that number had fallen to 29 percent. Since delta took hold (and children have returned to classrooms), however, that figure has again started to creep up, most recently to 32 percent.“Think of it this way,” Mimbs Nyce said in her piece. “About one in every three people in the country is feeling fragile, in some way, right now.”Many of our students (and faculty, staff, and parents for that matter) are certainly among that 32 percent, and we are glad to see school district officials are doing what they can to support them during this difficult time.
