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As school administrators map out curricula, schedules and priorities for the next school year, they should be thinking holistically about what kids actually need. Because honestly, young people are not doing well, and education systems aren’t doing enough about it.

The describes what young people are experiencing right now as a mental health crisis, and the numbers back it up — rates of anxiety and depression among young people have been climbing for years, and the pandemic only accelerated what was already in motion. While schools have responded as best they can, from added counselors to expanded mental health resources, those solutions don’t quite reach far enough. 

Earlier this year, our organization, the Kind Campaign, distributed a to thousands of educators across 311 school districts in the United States to find out what they’re observing in their classrooms. More than half (52%) said student friendships are more fragile and conflict-prone than they were just two or three years ago, and nearly two-thirds (62%) reported a notable increase in student loneliness and social isolation in the past year alone. When asked whether students have the skills to navigate friendship conflict in healthy ways, 59% of educators said no and 38% said only somewhat. Virtually no teacher surveyed said yes.

Peer conflict has also moved online in ways schools weren’t built to handle. While adults often picture bullying as something that happens face-to-face, 41% of educators said conflict most often originates on social media, with group chats and texting accounting for another 17%. Only 28% said it starts primarily in person. By the time a student walks through the school door in the morning, whatever happened in the group chat or online the night before has already taken root.

While so much of this conflict might originate outside the classroom, it certainly doesn’t stay there. When students are quietly devastated by something that happened between friends, that pain doesn’t wait politely outside the classroom door. It follows them into every lesson, every interaction, every moment that requires them to show up and engage. The social and emotional health of students is inseparable from their academic lives, and yet the responses from schools rarely reach its peer-level roots.

That is what social-emotional learning and kindness education are for. Not as soft programming layered on top of the real curriculum, but as ongoing, structured instruction in skills that can genuinely be taught: how to handle conflict without cruelty, how to repair a relationship, how to notice and reach out when someone feels isolated and alone. 

In practice, this can look like where students are guided through honest conversations about exclusion, conflict and the impact their behavior has on others. These programs let students see that they are not alone in what they’re experiencing, while practicing exercises in accountability, apology and how to recognize when someone is struggling. There are also that teach students empathy, emotion management and how to navigate peer conflict in healthy ways.

Both these approaches, and others like them, give young people the language and the opportunity to do something they already want to do but don’t always know how.

Through our work with Kind Campaign, we have seen what happens in schools where this work is taken seriously, where students are given consistent tools and language for what they’re experiencing and real opportunities to practice. For almost two decades, Kind Campaign has hosted assemblies in over 3,200 schools across the country. We’ve personally spoken at more than 780 of them and have witnessed these types of programs spark real change that makes an immediate impact. We’ve seen kids who were feuding find their way back to each other — just last year, two girls whose conflict teachers had been trying to resolve for years walked out of one of our assemblies hugging and talking through it in tears. We’ve also seen students who felt invisible start to feel seen — like one girl who walked out of one of our assemblies with over 20 apology cards given to her by her peers. 

That sort of repair is life-changing and can sometimes even be life-saving. 

We’re not the only ones seeing it: 79% of educators in our survey said they witnessed a small act of kindness between students that had a meaningful impact in the past year. The capacity for kindness is already in young people. It doesn’t need to be invented — it needs to be nurtured and it needs to be taken seriously by the adults responsible for their education.

The academic case for kindness education is also well-established. One study found that schools prioritizing social-emotional development had double the positive long-term impact on students than those focused solely on test scores, with higher graduation rates and better college attendance to show for it. It’s clear that when students feel connected, supported and equipped to navigate their relationships, they excel in the classroom, too.

As administrators lock in their priorities for the coming year they should consider this: Kindness education doesn’t work as a reaction to a crisis. It works when it’s built in from the start, treated as a priority rather than an afterthought and given the same consistency and intention as any subject worth teaching.

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