Some Auckland secondary schools are blaming the pandemic for a surge in anxiety and behaviour problems among their students.
More students have been in need of support at Papatoetoe High School, where cases connected to the February cluster led to a school-specific lockdown, principal Vaughan Couillault says. Photo: RNZ / Kate Gregan
The city's schools have been through three lockdowns since the first national lockdown a year ago and they are worried they will have to endure more.
Kaipara College principal Steve McCracken said the lockdowns had taken a significant toll on everyone's mental health and it was evident in student behaviour.
He said attendance rates were about the same as last year, but students who disengaged from learning last year were still not engaging.
"They're really over it," he said.
"We're also seeing quite a few instances of unexplained behaviour. Students not necessarily lashing out but students just behaving in bizarre ways. Things that they wouldn't normally do are coming to light, whether that be aggression or walking out of class ... out-of-character behaviour."
McCracken said the school had extra funding from the Education Ministry's $50 million Urgent Response Fund and had hired extra nursing staff with funding from the local DHB.
He said he had talked with other principals and schools were struggling to maintain a sense of normality with more students seeking help for problems including severe anxiety, resilience and online bullying.
"We are absolutely pushed, at the absolute limits for counselling and support services. We have about a four-week wait from the moment a student presents for counselling support service to the time when a counsellor can be seen. The services which we access through our community are at an absolute limit as well and the people that are suffering are our young people."
Albany Senior High School principal Claire Amos said the lockdowns seemed to amplify pre-existing problems for a small number of students, resulting in anxiety and truancy.
"For students who maybe have had a history of school anxiety or concerns around their wellbeing, we're sort of seeing with each consecutive lockdown that these might be more obvious, might be of greater concern," she said.
She said it put a lot of pressure on the school's counselling services and there was a limit to what schools could reasonably be expected to deal with.
"We're increasingly feeling like we're dealing with issues that are potentially beyond the school's control and capacity to support," she said.
"We're reaching the needs of those with very immediate and potentially those with the greatest need, but that is at the expense of meeting the needs of all of those young people who actually have moderate to medium needs."
Amos said ideally schools should be working with teens with moderate needs and triaging more serious cases for help from the health system but it was clear that community health services were also oversubscribed.
She said schools appreciated the ministry's Urgent Response Fund for students who were struggling to return to school following the lockdowns, but it would finish in the middle of this year and more would be needed.
"These are fantastic young people and they deserve all the support that they need, but we also need to recognise that schools can only do so much."
Papatoetoe High School principal Vaughan Couillault said his school had been through one more lockdown than other Auckland schools and it had noticed more students in need of support.
"We haven't seen an increase in the higher-level interventions in stand-downs and suspensions and that type of thing, but we are noticing increased levels of anxiety, students needing greater support than they normally would to get through issues that they are confronted with," he said.
He said his counselling team of two full-timers had asked the school to provide two more days of counselling to meet demand and teachers were also feeling the pressure.
"It is becoming a little bit harder, particularly in our pastoral care team, to provide the level of support that's required at the moment," he said.
Secondary Principals Association president Deidre Shea said schools were reporting a general trend of problems with student behaviour and mental health.
"An increased number of students are displaying signs of elevated stress levels and this is playing out in its various forms. Guidance and pastoral teams are busy," she said.