School Mental-Health Days Teach Avoidance, Not Resilience

There’s a rising trend for states to write legislation incorporating “mental health” as a valid excuse for student absences. Illinois joined the trend this year, following multiple other states in the two previous years. What’s more, some school districts closed early for the Thanksgiving break so that educators too could “rest and focus on mental health.”

Since the start of the pandemic, adolescent rates of depression and anxiety have doubled. While COVID-19 and school closures have had a distinct impact, in reality, student mental health was in precipitous decline even before the pandemic.

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Daniel Buck

Daniel Buck is a research fellow and the director of the Conservative Education Reform Network at the American Enterprise Institute.

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There’s a rising trend for states to write legislation incorporating “mental health” as a valid excuse for student absences. Illinois joined the trend this year, following multiple other states in the two previous years. What’s more, some school districts closed early for the Thanksgiving break so that educators too could “rest and focus on mental health.”

Since the start of the pandemic, adolescent rates of depression and anxiety have doubled. While COVID-19 and school closures have had a distinct impact, in reality, student mental health was in precipitous decline even before the pandemic.