COVID trauma won’t stop when kids return to school, say two women called to serve them
It’s never an easy job. It always takes a toll.
Talk to Jenna Buswell and Megan Clark, both family support liaisons with Tacoma Public Schools, and they’ll offer a long list of challenges they face on a daily basis, even during the best of times.
When a child falls into homelessness, Buswell and Clark swoop in to help catch the family. When the electricity gets turned off for nonpayment, it’s often one of them making the calls to get it restored. When an undocumented parent gets detained by ICE, they’re left to try to navigate the hurt at home.
For both, the job is more than a job — it’s a calling and a passion. Clark said she’s guided by a “village mentality.”
Her mantra: “We’re all the same family.”
That doesn’t make it any easier.
“It’s heavy work,” Buswell acknowledged.
Since March, when the COVID-19 pandemic upended the country and shut down schools, the lift has been even greater, Buswell said.
The day-to-day challenges the liaisons deal with illuminate the continued strain the coronavirus is putting on local families, she suggested, and as the pandemic drags into a new school year, they also help to reveal what’s at stake.
Buswell and Clark both anticipate that the trauma will be lasting, and the mental health impacts will reverberate long after children return to the classroom. Whether it means broken families or increased occurrences of domestic violence, the coronavirus has produced harmful ripples the scope of which we don’t yet know.
They also believe a proper response will require a sustained, community-wide effort, and anything less threatens to leave children, families and neighborhoods behind.
Clark, who works primarily out of Birney Elementary in Tacoma’s South End, described the potential mental health toll of the pandemic as one of her “biggest fears.”
“The trauma that this has caused with adults has been so high, let alone how it’s trickled down to their families,” Clark said. “Families have experienced tremendous grief and loss. Families that were extremely stable prior to this are now not — they’ve lost employment, they have jobs that have disappeared, they’re business owners who have lost their business.
“People really feel like the rug was pulled out from underneath them, and it creates this sense of loss and unknown. ...The stress on families is huge right now.”
Clark shared her perspective late last week by phone on her way to distribute food to South End Tacoma Public Schools families.
It’s all in a day’s work.
Clark said food insecurity is just one of many issues family support liaisons are helping families navigate the pandemic.
Buswell, who works out of Bryant Elementary on Hilltop, also said housing — or the lack thereof for too many families — continues to be a familiar hurdle. So does paying the bills.
Meanwhile, as has been jarringly apparent since the pandemic’s outset, both noted that a pronounced technology gap makes it difficult for many students to connect not just with school but the fragile support system that’s quickly being cobbled together.
Clark and Buswell also warn an eventual return to the classroom won’t magically solve all the problems the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the forefront and thrust onto kids and families.
Buswell fears a “premature” return to the classroom could ultimately be worse for families.
“If we do go back prematurely we pose the risk of potentially creating less consistency and more chaos for families,” Buswell said. “The idea of opening and then getting case surges that puts educational staff, children and families at risk all while re-closing buildings seems awful.”
Regardless of when Tacoma schools return to in-person instruction, Buswell and Clark are adamant it’s going to take more than people with jobs like theirs to get kids through the pandemic and pick up the pieces once it finally subsides.
If there’s one thing the coronavirus has taught us, Clark said, it’s that supporting Tacoma’s children and their families takes all of us — in good times and bad.
She’s hoping that the partnerships she’s watched emerge in response to a crisis will be sustained, and that those who’ve been inspired to help will stick with it for the long haul.
Bushwell agrees.
In a difficult job, it’s one thing that gives her hope — and keeps her going.
“I just think staying together and trying to be as collaborative as we can — between home and school — is the critical piece,” Bushwell said.
“Hopefully we make it out of all of this stronger than we were before.”
