Distress following the COVID-19 Pandemic among Schools’ Stakeholders: Psychosocial Aspects and Communication

Abstract

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments ordered school closures as a containment measure, with Israel being among over 100 countries to do so. This resulted in the abrupt shift to online and remote education for many students. Despite attempts to minimize the effects of disrupted education and create a dynamic virtual learning environment, the literature highlights various challenges including lack of communication with implications of distress faced by key stakeholders (students and their parents, teachers, and principals). In this cross-sectional study, we assess the perceived levels of communication and psychosocial aspects during both distance and frontal learning, as well as the long-term impacts (following over two and a half years of an ongoing pandemic) on distress among the key stakeholders of the Israeli education system— high school students, parents, teachers, and principals. The study findings demonstrate severe implications of distance learning on communication and psychosocial aspects, with lingering long-term impacts on distress, among all stakeholders (particularly among students). This reveals the need for tailored capacity building and resilience intervention programs to be integrated in the long-term response to the current ongoing pandemic to improve well-being and reduce distress among the various stakeholders, with particular attention to those that are most vulnerable and were hit the hardest.

An innovative tool to assess the functional resilience of a school system: learning from the COVID-19 pandemic

“…In our earlier research using the same dataset (Kaim et al, 2023), we explored the perceived levels of communication and psychosocial aspects among high school students, parents, teachers, and principals during both distance and frontal learning in the Israeli education system. The results highlighted significant consequences of distance learning on communication and psychosocial aspects, resulting in enduring long-term distress, especially among students.…”

“…After the final development of the tool, it was distributed crosssectionally in October-November 2022, approximately two and a half years following the initial closure of in-person learning in the Israeli school system on March 15, 2022. The research enlisted a comprehensive group of 1802 individuals, encompassing the primary stakeholders in the education system: 1000 students in grades 10 through 12, 301 parents, 449 teachers, and 52 principals, all hailing from 890 high schools within the Israeli Jewish community (Kaim et al, 2023). This sample dataset is the same as in the earlier research conducted and reported in Kaim et al (2023).…”

“…The research enlisted a comprehensive group of 1802 individuals, encompassing the primary stakeholders in the education system: 1000 students in grades 10 through 12, 301 parents, 449 teachers, and 52 principals, all hailing from 890 high schools within the Israeli Jewish community (Kaim et al, 2023). This sample dataset is the same as in the earlier research conducted and reported in Kaim et al (2023). Participants voluntarily agreed to take part in the study.…”

“…A total of 1802 participants were included in the study, comprising 1,000 students, 301 parents, 449 teachers, and 52 principals. The same sample dataset here is explored as in Kaim et al (2023). 2 Table 3 displays the demographic characteristics of all four stakeholder groups in the surveyed population.…”

“…The largest proportion of sampled schools, accounting for 29.6% (n = 261), were located in the Central region of Israel. The schools included in the sample are similarly those featured in the Kaim et al (2023) research.…”