A Massachusetts program has become a model for helping kids return to school after mental health-related absences. It's run in a dedicated classroom, where students receive emotional and psychological support and assistance catching up on schoolwork.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Ava had always felt comfortable at the small, private K-8 school she attended just north of Boston. But in high school everything changed. Ava first began to experience anxiety and depression after her parents divorced, when she was still in grade school.
These problems increased as she entered her teen years, and became even more severe in ninth grade, when she enrolled at Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, a vast campus with nearly 2,000 students. Faced with large, noisy classrooms, Ava froze with fear. By her sophomore year, she felt unable to cope. When her mother dropped her off one morning, Ava looked out at the school building, but couldn’t open the car door to go inside. She began to miss two or three days of school a week. In April of that year, she stopped attending altogether. “Some days I couldn’t even get out of bed,” said Ava, who is 17 with light auburn hair. “I’d find anything to hold on to physically, so I wouldn’t have to move.” Ava’s physician suggested she look into BRYT, or Bridge for Resilient Youth in Transition, which helps students return to school after extended mental health-related absences. Ava, now a junior, was skeptical at first. But eventually she agreed to transition back to school while spending one period a day in the program’s dedicated classroom, where she received emotional and psychological support and assistance catching up on the schoolwork she’d missed. Ava was fortunate. As many as one in five children need help with a mental health condition such as anxiety or depression. These students often have trouble processing information or focusing, which can contribute to a cycle of increased anxiety, dropping grades and missed school, say experts. Yet schools typically lack the money and staff to help students cope with what experts describe as a mental health epidemic. One study found that nearly of students failed to receive the mental health care they needed, and more than 50 percent of students ages 14 and older with emotional and behavioral disabilities drop out of school.“Districts that are less resourced might be sharing one psychologist for the entire school district, or one psychologist who is responsible for 3,000 kids,” said Kelly Vaillancourt Strobach, policy director for the National Association of School Psychologists . “When you have these shortage of these professionals, you’re really only able to serve those kids who are in extreme crisis.”Absent a national blueprint for helping students cope with mental health conditions, states are scrambling to identify potential prototypes. The BRYT program, which was founded and pioneered in a Boston-area school in 2004 by the nonprofit Brookline Center for Community Mental Health, has emerged as a successful model for helping kids re-enter school after a mental health crisis.* The Brookline Center works with school districts to help them plan and implement BRYT programs, which are staffed by school employees. Although the center doesn’t finance programs, it helps schools identify potential sources of funding. Ninety percent of students in BRYT remain on track to graduate, and their attendance rates have increased from 52 percent before participation to above 80 percent after. The program itself is expanding. BRYT’s director, Paul Hyry-Dermith, said 137 schools in Massachusetts now employ the program and pilots are starting to roll out in Rhode Island, New York and New Hampshire. Partnerships are also in the works with school districts in Washington state and Oregon. At Cambridge Rindge & Latin, an ethnically diverse school that in 2018 sent 82 percent of its graduates to college, the BRYT classroom is tucked at the end of a quiet hallway. Blue parchment covers the fluorescent ceiling lights, showering the space in a balmy azure. A walnut-stained rocking chair with an embroidered cushion that reads “Be Kind” rests in one corner. In another corner, a noise machine beckons for attention before it’s soon forgotten. Eleven students spend one assigned period a day here, where they chat with counselors, prepare for and work on homework assignments with the program’s academic liaison, or simply rest and relax. Students are also welcome in the room any time they feel overwhelmed. “Many of the kids in our program are coming out of a psychiatric hospitalization,” said Ashley Sitkin, BRYT clinician/program leader at Rindge & Latin. “Some of the kids haven’t been hospitalized but they’ve missed a lot of school because they’ve gotten stuck in this avoidance cycle, which is really common for kids who struggle with anxiety and depression.” At Rindge & Latin, Sitkin and her colleague, academic coordinator Nkrumah Jones, disrupt that cycle with a three-to-four-month reintegration plan that includes emotional support and mental care coordination. That includes a clinical diagnosis of students before they enter the program, and constant contact with outside health providers who also provide each student with care. Sitkin and her staff also reach out to parents and keep them informed. Academic coordination is crucial, too. Both BRYT coordinators and teachers acknowledge it is unrealistic to expect students who miss weeks of school to make up all class work, so care coordinators serve as a liaison between student and teacher, indentifying key assignments and ironing out a make-up plan. Eli, a trans student at Rindge & Latin, began to battle with depression in eighth grade, a condition that worsened the following year when he entered high school. By his sophomore year, therapy and medication proved fruitless. Eli stopped going to school. He checked into a psychiatric hospital, an experience that his mother said replenished Eli’s hope and helped him kick his meds. But the thought of returning to school tormented Eli. Unable to walk into the building, he met Sitkin and Jones at the school door before being escorted to the safe space. “I was dealing with pretty severe anxiety and depression. I would miss school, which would make me more stressed, which meant I would want to miss more school,” said Eli. Before participating in BRYT, Eli, now a senior, would attend just three or four classes a day, he said. Gradually, with help from Sitkin, he returned to classes full time. “I was behind on school work before I left, so the academic coordination, having someone else deal with my teachers, was really, really helpful.” At Rindge & Latin, the mental health challenges students contend with have become more severe in recent years. Student suicide is a growing worry. Several students attempted suicide this semester, teachers and staff said. “I had a student today tell me she’s feeling very suicidal,” said Sitkin. That’s part of a national trend. The suicide rate for children and young adults, ages 10 to 24, rose by
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