01 A crisis, defined

The most universal recent example is the COVID-19 pandemic — a year-plus of uncertainty, disrupted routines, and life on pause. As a working school psychologist, I’d like to stop blaming COVID for what it did to our schools and our students. But the honest truth is that its effects are long-lasting, and they’re still walking into our buildings every morning.

02 The numbers we can’t ignore

A 2024 CDC study tracked trends in mental, behavioral, and developmental disorders among children from 2016 to 2021. The headline finding: in just five years, the share of children ages 3–17 with these disorders climbed from 25.3% to 27.7%, and the proportion of children whose care needs went unmet rose by roughly 5% every year..

That data is now two years old. The line hasn’t flattened — and it’s describing the students sitting in our classrooms today. Anxiety and depression are being diagnosed at all-time highs in youth. The pressures driving it aren’t mysterious; they show up in three places at once:

Each of these factors disrupts sleep, social skills, diet, hygiene, and basic life skills — long before they show up as an academic problem.

03 Maslow before Bloom

So how does a district make a dent in a national crisis? It often starts with a single shift in priorities: stepping back from stressful standards and lesson plans long enough to look at a classroom of students whose basic needs must be met before learning can happen.

That idea has a name in school administration circles — Maslow before Bloom — and it is being pushed harder than ever. The phrase asks teachers to consider a student’s physical, health, social, emotional, and cognitive needs before pushing academics. Done well, it creates the foundation a strong Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) depends on.

04 Identifying need at scale

Once that foundation exists, a strong MTSS — supported by school counselors, social workers, and school psychologists — is how districts identify students who need help. Mental-health and social-emotional screeners are a key part of that work, surfacing the students who need support during their school day.

It is worth saying out loud: for many students, the counseling they get at school is the only counseling they get. The reasons are familiar — a shortage of local mental-health resources, the stigma still attached to seeking care, or simply not having the time or transportation to see an outside provider.

05 The staffing bottleneck

What happens when screening identifies a wave of students who need help? That is the moment districts run into the real bottleneck: staff capacity. As demand for mental-health support rises across the country, the supply of providers has not kept up.

Districts need to ensure — in person or virtually — that they have school psychologists, counselors, and social workers ready to provide counseling, review data, collaborate with teachers on behavior interventions, and respond to crises. The National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) publishes two tools for school safety and crisis management that are worth every administrator’s bookmark.

06 A path forward

Focus on students’ needs first, not lesson plans and standards. Once teachers are doing that, district leaders can take an honest look at staffing and decide how to bring mental-health providers — in person or virtual — into the buildings where students already are.

Until the shortage of school mental-health providers eases, this is not a future-state problem. It is a today problem. The good news: the tools, frameworks, and provider networks now exist to make a real dent.