School principals are responsible for occupational health and safety (OHS) issues that may arise, and they play a critical role in ensuring that health and safety procedures in schools. The purpose of this study is to determine how occupational health and safety practices in schools can be improved with reference to the views of school principals.…

The COVID-19 pandemic created an unprecedented disruption to education and schooling at the end of the 2019-20 school year. Operating in a context of great uncertainty, education leaders were tasked with making key decisions with potentially far-reaching impacts on the educational and mental and physical health of students and families. Drawing on…

The early care and education (ECE) system has been under-resourced and undervalued since well before the pandemic. Low pay and poor working environment have long plagued the ECE industry as key drivers of chronic high turnover rates and teacher staffing shortages in the field. Additional disparities within the system place providers on vastly…

Psychological First Aid (PFA) is a concept that can be traced to an article published by the American Psychiatric Association in 1954 recognizing the benefits of early crisis interventions that relieve stress and human suffering. This fact sheet explores the goals of PFA models; outlines when and how schools can implement PFA, including…

This paper explores the ways in which COVID-19 and the rapid shift to remote education has impacted teachers' mental health. Teachers play multiple roles in students' lives (Cross & Hong, 2012) and already face high levels of work stress. This study, which draws on interview data from a larger pool of interviews conducted with K-12 teachers…

Training is an integral part of school safety, security, emergency management and preparedness; everyone involved in the plan needs to know his or her roles and responsibilities before, during, and after an emergency. As one's emergency operations plan (EOP) planning team develops the training and exercise schedule, keep in mind that the Readiness…

Because of the pandemic and its restrictions on children, a professor and two graduate students employed in early childhood intervention investigated teachers and families in three states to determine if learning and development are affected by inability to physically attend school. The authors also explored if and how academic and…

The pandemic hit the already vulnerable early childhood education (ECE) workforce especially hard, causing almost 40 percent of child care providers to shut their doors and many teachers to lose their jobs. In 2021, enrollment in state-funded preschool also dropped for the first time in 20 years--a nearly 20 percent decline that erased a decade of…

Introduction: Disasters and emergencies adversely influence around 70 million children worldwide. Regrettably, those who suffer the most from the consequences of any natural disaster and do not have any knowledge on how to protect themselves in such situations are children. Particularly, educating and raising the awareness of children in this…

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the reality of life in all aspects of human endeavors. The education sector was not spared--the school system was uprooted and procedures had to be made quickly for the safety of students and faculty. As a result, educators struggled with keeping students engaged academically during online learning and the stress…

This study focused on identifying and describing practices or strategies that emerged in Maine and elsewhere in the US during the pandemic to support teachers' delivery of instruction through remote, online or hybrid modalities. Other types of support, such as mental health supports for educators were also investigated.

Even as the nation's 5 million English Learners (ELs) make up one in ten students enrolled in public K-12 education, federal funding has not kept up with their population growth. The result is a long-standing lack of equitable and adequate federal funding to support ELs' language development and help them thrive academically. When the COVID-19…

Currently, more than 25 million people across the globe live as refugees, having been driven from their countries of origin by crises and conflicts. Although the right to education is articulated in global agreements, national education systems in the host countries are primarily responsible for refugee children's instruction. In one of the first…

During situations in which a gunman is present on a school campus, lockdowns are initiated until the threat is removed. However, there are no data demonstrating an effective teaching strategy to increase students' correct responding during a lockdown. We evaluated the effectiveness of behavioral skills training (BST) to teach three groups of…

Through the American Rescue Plan (ARP), states received an amount of federal funds to address the educational needs of students during and after the pandemic. The stimulus funds created both opportunities and challenges for state educational agencies (SEAs). This brief highlights how the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) has used several…