Search

The mental health impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on PK-12 youth is likely an urgent and enduring concern, yet research on this topic is still emerging. To synthesize current knowledge, the researchers conducted a systematic review of empirical studies exploring the mental health impacts of COVID-19. Five themes emerged across 104 included studies: (a) the pandemic proved widely disruptive to PK-12 youth; (b) there was a clear connection between the mental health of caregivers (e.g., parents) and children; (c) the pandemic broadly increased levels of stress, anxiety, and depression in PK-12 youth; (d) students were particularly affected on the basis of age, gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and previous mental health or disability diagnosis; and (e) youth demonstrated negative and positive coping strategies and even saw some positive mental health outcomes during the pandemic. Implications for research, practice, and policy are discussed.

School rezoning, or redistricting, is the process by which school boards draw and redraw school attendance boundaries. These boundaries are key drivers of racial and economic school segregation but can also work to ameliorate it. Using a critical orientation to narrative policy analysis, this study examined the cultural politics of race and whiteness in an urban school district undergoing school rezoning. Drawing on semistructured interviews with 15 school leaders and community stakeholders, findings provide a lens for school leaders and policymakers to better understand how and to what extent race is imposed in school attendance boundary decisions. Our findings expand current literature on school rezoning by shedding new light on racial narratives embedded within the political process. We conclude with policy and practice implications.

School rezoning is the process of drawing and redrawing school attendance boundaries (SABs). However, studies explicitly focused on changing SABs through rezoning or other mechanisms are spread across multiple bodies of literature. Rezoning is also a politically contentious issue governed by local school boards, tying it to conceptual work on the politics of education. This systematic literature review on school rezoning brings together fragmented but related bodies of work to develop a comprehensive understanding of the rationales for school rezoning, the strategies and processes underlying it, and its associated outcomes. Grounded in a contested legal landscape, findings indicate that rezoning involves overlapping and interacting policy issues as well as multiple stakeholders that complicate the theory of action. Limitations in prevailing student assignment plans influence the degree to which rezoning can disrupt racial and socioeconomic segregation in schools. This review highlights the need to reconceptualize rezoning as a transformative tool, rather than one that replicates (or worsens) systems of educational inequity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]