Educators and school-based staff play important roles in supporting student mental health, often listening to students’ fears and concerns, and helping them cope with stressful events. In addition, educators and staff are working long days and often report feeling overwhelmed by juggling many job responsibilities. The effect of this stress can take the form of compassion fatigue, burnout, or secondary traumatic stress that contribute to lower job satisfaction and educator turnover. With the start of COVID in 2019, its continued dominance in 2020, and its lingering effects, many public school teachers and staff in the Central East region contemplated leaving the profession due to burnout and compassion fatigue. The Central East MHTTC, in its assessment of the State Departments of Education and local school districts in the region, found that the school mental health workforce wanted more training and technical assistance in compassion fatigue.
The opinions expressed herein are the views of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), SAMHSA, CSAT or the MHTTC Network. No official support or endorsement of DHHS, SAMHSA, or CSAT for the opinions of authors presented in this e-publication is intended or should be inferred.