On Wednesday, June 16, 2021 YouthTruth joined the Grantmakers for Thriving Youth webinar “AAPI Youth on Safety, Belonging, and Thriving” to present new insights into the experiences of Asian Youth from our Students Weigh In data set. Students Weigh In is a 3-part report that has shared insights from half a million secondary students in 952 schools across 37 states.
Read on for the new key points and to watch the webinar.
As students spent most of their time physically distant from their peers, the percentage of students overall who reported being bullied or harassed sharply decreased overall from 22% pre-pandemic to 10% since the start of this past school year. There was also a 50% drop in the percentage of Asian students being bullied or harassed from 19% to 8%.
While harassment rates overall fell, the portion of those students who reported being harassed because of their race or skin color actually increased.
We see this rising trendline of racialized bullying was particularly pronounced for Asian students from 36% reporting race or skin color as their reason for being bullied prior to the pandemic, jumping up to 52% in the 2020-2021 school year. The same upward trend of racialized bullying was also reported by Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander students and Black or African American students.
While the percentage of Asian students agreeing that they feel safe during school remained flat, this percentage actually improved for all other groups. Why didn’t Asian students also get a safety bump?
Asians students were the only ones who experienced a diminished sense of belonging through the pandemic, all other students perceptions of belonging actually improved during the pandemic.
The top 3 obstacles for Asian students: feeling depressed, stressed or anxious about students’ own mental health; distractions at home or family responsibilities; students’ own health or the health of their family members.
To explore this list further, YouthTruth looked at over 5,000 qualitative responses from Asian and Pacific Islander students.
How do API students collectively describe the sources of their number 1 obstacle to learning, their stress and anxiety? We sought to learn from students’ perceptions so that we might better support them in the coming year.
As one student evocatively described their social isolation, a feeling of isolation was echoed by many students, “I feel like a cut log in a forest.”
To add to this feeling of social isolation and diminished belonging in their school community, many students also described a relational deficit with their teachers. Many described pain at literally not being seen when cameras had to be turned off and there was an overwhelming sense of not being known as the learning relationship was reduced to a list of independent assignments. As one student reported, “I’m pretty sure some of my teachers don’t even know how to say my name.”
Some students, particularly those interested in STEM, also opined the lack of labs and experimentations, and there was a consensus that learning had become a kind-of Groundhog’s Day — so that “Even though the school day was shorter, it felt longer.”
As a result, for that student who felt “like a cut log” there was the added sadness of feeling “like nothing was happening.” One student described the experience with the version of a phrase used by many to describe their school experience: “Time feels like it’s running out.”
After noting their lack of connection to peers and teachers, their boredom and the self-awareness that they had lost motivation, many students concluded with the same phrase “it’s a me problem” and, over and over again they wrote the same phrase, “school can’t help.”
With this we suggest there is an opportunity this fall to foreground teaching students that social-emotional skills like resilience, motivation, and growth mindset can be taught and that school can help.
