In the midst of a nationwide teacher shortage, mental health challenges in the classroom make teaching more difficult.
By Arieon Whittsey
Chicago Teachers Union members listen as members of the public speak during the public comment portion of a Chicago Board of Education meeting at Jones College Prep in 2024. (Talia Sprague/for City Bureau)
Editor’s note: This story discusses issues around mental health struggles and suicidal ideation. If you or someone you know needs help, the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours per day by dialing 988.
Destiny Harris’ teaching journey begins and ends in the Austin neighborhood. As a sixth-grader at Francis Scott Key Elementary in 2013, Harris’ public school was part of the largest mass closing of schools in U.S. history, showing her how the education system could negatively affect students.
“I grew up in [Chicago Public Schools], a byproduct of CPS, and also a byproduct of CPS school closures,” Harris said. “I saw how detrimental that was to the community, to my peers.”
As an adult, Harris was drawn to teaching as a way of positively impacting the lives of students, she said. She began working as an organizer before teaching at a charter school, then an alternative school, and finally, as a contract teacher at a CPS partner school in Austin. But within a year, Harris needed out.
“I just feel the way in which I wanted to show up for young people was limited in the classroom by the structure of it,” she said.
Harris is not alone; in the 2022 fiscal year, CPS saw an 85% increase in teacher resignations or retirements, according to Chalkbeat Chicago. In August 2024, the Illinois State Board of Education launched a $6 million campaign to recruit more teachers throughout the state. More teachers are coming into classrooms, but 87% of teachers surveyed for a recently released state report said teacher shortages are still a problem.
The issue predates the pandemic, as have attempts at finding solutions. Chicago has previously launched diverse recruitment initiatives, teacher residencies, a teacher diversity committee as well as programs pairing early-career teachers with high-needs schools.
More recently, CPS and school leaders have tried to navigate the mental health challenges of not only students, but also teachers. Telehealth benefits for Chicago Teachers Union members were expanded to include mental health and behavioral health services in 2020. A 2022 state law requires all state school districts to provide full-time employees five paid days off to use for mental health reasons.
Still, some early-career teachers told City Bureau they found it difficult to balance their needs along with those of their students.
“People don't understand our workloads,” said Quintella Bounds, a CTU representative and a veteran Chicago school teacher. “Because as educators, you're expected to come in and be prepared to perform in front of students who require everything.”
‘I felt really frustrated’
The pandemic made life increasingly difficult for teachers and their students. Once schools reopened, teachers struggled to address learning gaps and losses, decreased attention spans, and an increase in youth experiencing mental health challenges such as depression and anxiety.
Layla Claremont was six months into her teaching career at a magnet school on the South Side when she crossed paths with a 7-year-old who she said told her, “I don't want to be alive anymore.”
She didn’t know the student before this encounter, but she attempted to be a supportive presence anytime they crossed paths, such as on the bus or in the hallway, she said. But trying to get the child more support proved challenging, she said.
“In terms of getting a child real mental health services within the boundaries of the school, I felt really frustrated,” Claremont said. “It was almost like, ‘Oh, they're kids, they say things.’”
Claremont had similar interactions during the pandemic with other students in distress, including ones suffering from an eating disorder, acute depression and other issues, she said. In those cases, Claremont couldn’t check in with students during lunch, in the hallway or on the bus. Instead, she had to navigate their emotional and mental distress virtually. Students still confided in her, but the lack of in-person contact to ensure they were safe made their confessions frightening and more difficult to address, she said.
Claremont tried to connect students to counselors, but she wouldn’t get a response from them. In other cases, parents would hesitate to collaborate with the behavioral health team or to have their student evaluated for emotional disabilities, she said. The situation took a toll.
Claremont had what she described as a “spiritual awakening” that led her to start meditating and seeing a therapist, she said. As a teacher working 70 hours a week, finding ways to cope and take care of herself has been a learning curve, she said.
“Sometimes, my emotional response would arise, even months later during the pandemic,” she said. “When we were remote, I had dreams about my classroom every night.”
Chicago Teachers Union vice president Jackson Potter speaks during a Chicago Board of Education meeting at Jones College Prep in 2024. (Talia Sprague/for City Bureau)
CTU representatives say there is increased demand for teachers to educate students and navigate their mental health needs. When the district launched a $24 million, three-year plan to address student trauma in 2021, it highlighted how “school personnel are uniquely situated to identify, respond to, and be impacted by students’ traumatic stress symptoms, due to their central role in children’s lives.”
Teachers of all experience levels are managing lesson plans while supporting students through traumatic experiences such as homelessness – and they’re doing it with limited support, Bounds said.
“I've seen teachers break down, cry and leave in the classroom,” Bounds said.
Some of CTU’s proposed solutions involve increased investment in resources across all schools and making teacher salaries more competitive, Bounds said. Those resources range from readily available social workers and mental health experts to teacher-centered wellness support.
If the district offers the support and resources that every classroom should have in every school, in every building, teachers and students will happily come, Bounds said.
“And I don't think that's asking for a lot,” she said. “We're asking that we receive the resources that we need.”
In a statement to City Bureau last summer, Ben Felton, CPS’ chief talent officer, and Adam King, director of Healing-Centered Supports, said the district was developing a comprehensive employee wellness strategy as part of their expansion of staff benefits through negotiations with CTU. Contract talks between the district and teachers union are ongoing as of March.
But there aren’t enough psychologists and social workers in the workforce now to address those specific staffing needs, King said. The district is investing to ensure staff have at least a minimum level of resources that they can tap into to shift their practice with students, he said.
As an example, King pointed to the district’s Office of Social Emotional Learning’s classroom community handbook, available to all of their district educators. It includes basic practices that are grounded in relational trust and shared agreement development and restorative practices.
In the past, CPS was a passive consumer of teacher talent from universities, Felton said. The district’s teacher recruitment and retention resource, Teach Chicago, focuses on attracting licensed teachers, providing opportunities for student teaching and teacher training, and prepping former CPS students to become CPS teachers. District officials estimate they have added around 3,000 staff members since the program's inception in 2017.
“We played a much more active role in shaping who gets to be the next generation of CPS teachers,” Felton said.
Nico Darcangelo, associate director of the Disability Cultural Center at University of Illinois Chicago, believes there are opportunities to better support everyone in the classroom through teacher preparation. Darcangelo has researched teacher education programs in the state and found that the curriculum about mental health is lacking.
“There’s only a few places in Illinois that have classes specifically about mental health, and all of them were focused predominantly on the medical model,” Darcangelo said. The medical model focuses on mental health diagnosis and intervention, but does not contextualize how poverty, race, gender and other factors affect mental health, he said.
The lack of conversation and teaching around mental health leads to some teachers feeling uncomfortable confronting the topic, Darcangelo said. A participant in their study brought up mental health during class, and their professor “went pale, like they had seen a ghost,” they said. “They had no idea how to respond to a student openly talking about mental health in the classroom.”
Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez (right) speaks while seated next to former Chicago Board of Education member Michelle Morales during a meeting in 2024. (Talia Sprague/for City Bureau).
As teachers say they need more support, CPS is shifting away from its longtime funding model. Instead of relying on student enrollment, the district is adopting a strategy to give all schools a baseline of staff, which would then be bolstered with additional resources based on needs such as higher percentages of students with disabilities, who are learning English as a new language or who come from low-income families, according to Chalkbeat Chicago.
Still, CPS is facing a massive funding crunch, which has been a stumbling point in contract talks as the union pushes for pay increases, more staffing and guarantees of no layoffs. Last fall, Mayor Brandon Johnson and CPS CEO Pedro Martinez clashed over funding issues for the district, particularly how CPS should cover pension and teachers' contract costs. City Hall has pushed CPS to take out a short-term loan or refinance debt while the district officials wanted the money to come from a surplus of tax-increment financing dollars. The Chicago Board of Education is set to vote on the issue this week. Martinez was fired late last year, but he continues to lead the district until his contract expires.
Hannah Gross, a graduate of the Urban Teacher Education Program at the University of Chicago, taught at a Southwest Side public school for five years. Though she felt supported in addressing the mental health challenges of her students, she began her teaching career during the pandemic and was unsure how to address larger emotional needs that weren’t discussed during her prep program, she said.
Looking forward, Gross hopes the CPS budget changes will lead to more support for schools, to support “smaller classroom sizes [and] to allow for budgets to focus more for diverse learners, therapists, counselors and social workers,” she said.
Overall, she is proud of the ways she and her school were able to support students, from daily meetings with a culture coordinator who leads students through meditation, to partnerships with mental health clinics for students in need, she said.
“When they look back at our school, they will feel like it was not a system against them, but a system that was really for them and loved them [and] cared [for] them,” Gross said.
As for Harris, while she stepped away from teaching in the 2023-2024 school year, she wants to go back to the classroom eventually and find ways to support young students outside of teaching, she said.
“I plan to return to teaching, but I would like to have more personal and career development first,” Harris said. “I just recognized that, as an organizer, I'm able to still show up for young people, but … in a capacity that allows me to show up for them in the ways that I feel like they need to be shown up for.”
City Bureau Engagement Reporter Jerrel Floyd contributed to this story.
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