What’s Showing Up This Year: A Look at School Avoidance, Screens, and Big Feelings

September 14, 2026

Three experts in digital wellness research, a district mental health leader, and a student mental health clinician break down what's actually driving screen conflict, school avoidance, and behavior challenges in the classroom this fall.

When Drew Rosenshine and his team at Lowell Public Schools looked at their post-pandemic attendance numbers, they knew they had to reshape how the district approached school avoidance for years afterward. Traditional tools like truancy letters helped with the most extreme cases, Rosenshine said, but rarely moved beyond them. “It moves the needle when you get to those really extreme cases, but it wasn’t moving the needle for many kids,” he said.

That kind of specific, practitioner-level insight ran through a recent Cartwheel panel featuring three experts who each see a different piece of what’s showing up in schools this fall:

Devorah Heitner, Ph.D., author of Screenwise and Growing Up in Public
Drew Rosenshine, Director of Mental Health, Behavior, and SEL at Lowell Public Schools (Massachusetts)
Julie Jungman, LICSW, LCSW, Vice President of Clinical Care at Cartwheel
Sarah Shoff, Cartwheel’s Vice President of School Success [Moderator].

How Screens and Social Media Are Showing Up for Students in the Classroom

Heitner’s central point reframed how the panel talked about screens for the rest of the hour: a phone or an app rarely creates a new problem for a student. It amplifies whatever is already there. “If a kid is already struggling with high conflict with a peer group, or feeling really disconnected from peers, they may then use social apps or group texts... in a less healthy way,” she said. “A lot of times what we see is an amplifier of what’s already going on with a kid.”

That distinction matters for how schools respond. Heitner was direct that restricting access alone rarely solves the underlying issue, and that some students rely on phones as a genuine accessibility support, not just a distraction. Her advice to educators wasn’t to become experts in every app, but to build enough working literacy to have a real conversation: know that Roblox is a suite of games, not one game; know what disappearing-message apps make possible; know the developmental realities kids are actually navigating.

The panel also unpacked the recent Meta settlement, in which the company agreed to pay close to $17 billion to resolve claims that Instagram and Facebook fostered addictive use among minors. New daily time limits and stronger age verification are coming, but Heitner cautioned schools against treating it as a fix: “All you have to do is change the time zone you’re in,” she noted of the overnight-use restrictions.

Her read: the settlement will shift culture over time and free up funding for education programs, but it won’t touch what happens in a group chat after the bell or a student’s underlying relationship with their phone. That gap is exactly where she sees an opening for districts — a moment when families are already primed to have the conversation schools have struggled to start.

On what to do with that opening, Heitner pointed to giving students something to do instead of a screen, not just a rule against one. Cartwheel’s Amazing Generation Challenge is one example built for exactly that: a literacy-based challenge schools or families can run any time of year that gets kids off screens together rather than apart. For a starting point with families this fall, Cartwheel’s Resetting Screen Habits guide is a practical companion.

What Is Driving School Avoidance in Students and What Is Actually Working

Rosenshine’s approach at Lowell started with a shift in the question the district was asking. Instead of assuming they already knew why a student was out, his team started asking why, specifically, and treating the answer as data. “We can assume we know the answers to why kids are absent and not coming to school,” he said, “but we really need to talk to both the kids and the parents about what’s driving that process from their perspective.”

That shift led to a comprehensive build: multi-tiered outreach, home visits before the school year even starts, and a partnership with Cartwheel’s School Avoidance Program for students already showing signs of avoidance. The results, per Rosenshine: a 34% drop in chronic absenteeism and a 61% drop in behavioral suspensions among students engaged with Cartwheel.

Rosenshine also described a reframe that changed how his staff approaches behavior tied to avoidance: “We tend to try and view a lot of these behavioral issues through a skills deficit lens... No one wants to blow up. No one wants to act the way they are acting when they’re dysregulated. So what skills do we need to put in place, and what are we not understanding about a student?” One tool his team leans on directly is a school refusal assessment, used with both students and families to surface two perspectives on why a student is struggling to attend, since those perspectives don’t always match.

How Teachers and Counselors Can Recognize When Student Behavior Signals a Deeper Need

Jungman, as a behavioral health clinician, walked through the two signals she watches for when deciding whether a behavior is typical stress or something that warrants more support: frequency (a big behavior showing up once a week or more starts to cross into a pattern) and impact (is it affecting a student’s ability to keep up with schoolwork, keep friends, or communicate with parents).

She also offered specific, low-lift strategies teachers can use in the classroom itself, without pulling a student out of the room. For younger students, a “bubble breath,” a deep breath in and a slow breath out, taught the same playful way schools teach any other skill. For students of any age, a rainbow mindfulness exercise: naming what you see in each color, slowly, as a way to redirect attention without leaving the instructional environment. “Teaching kids in the moment ways that they can use strategies to calm without having to leave the room,” Jungman said, “without having to leave that instructive environment.”

When the panel turned to a question about families choosing remote learning out of fear for their child’s safety, Jungman added a clinical layer to Rosenshine’s answer about building trust with families. Once a therapeutic relationship is in place, she said, the work is often less about addressing a checklist of safety measures and more about helping a parent’s own protective instincts feel more manageable. “They have... the value that I want my child to be able to cope,” she said. “Parents around the nation, and urban and rural and all communities, want their child to be healthy and to be okay.” Helping a parent learn to sit with their own worry, she added, rather than needing constant reassurance, is sometimes the most impactful thing for a child’s progress.

Why Family Engagement Matters When Addressing School Avoidance and Screen Challenges

Across all three topics, the panel kept landing on the same throughline: none of this works without families as partners, not just recipients of information. Rosenshine described leading with curiosity rather than assumptions when a family isn’t engaging, especially with families who’ve had difficult histories with schools. Heitner pointed to parent affinity groups as a way to give families a place to learn from each other, not just from the school. And Jungman’s team builds psychoeducation directly into its school avoidance program, so parents understand the anxiety-reinforcement loop before they’re asked to change how they respond to it.

For districts looking to extend that family-partnership work beyond this conversation, Cartwheel runs a free monthly Family Webinar Series built specifically for bringing families in as partners. The next session, Growing Together: Supporting Your Child’s Mental Health This School Year is Wednesday, September 16th.

Where to Go From Here

Screens, avoidance, and behavior challenges can look like three unrelated problems from the outside. What this panel made clear is how much they overlap, and how much progress districts like Lowell have made by getting specific about the why behind each one instead of waiting for a clearer moment to act.

If your team is thinking through how to support students and families around any of these challenges, we’re glad to talk through what that could look like for your district.

Learn more about Cartwheel’s Care Programs and available funding

Audience Questions: What District Leaders Wanted to Know

What staff do districts need to combat chronic absenteeism?

Rosenshine described Lowell’s approach as a team, not a single role. Social workers anchor the district’s attendance teams, which review data together and conduct home visits directly. Community school managers support that outreach, and school administrators are involved at every level. A dedicated attendance office handles Tier 1 and Tier 2 casework and takes on the more intensive Tier 3 cases where a court process may eventually be necessary, “but before we get to that point, we have had multiple, multiple meetings with families,” Rosenshine said, “trying to understand the process, and what’s going on and what’s getting in the way.”

Do incentives like pizza parties or field trips actually improve attendance?

“Oh yeah, we’ve most definitely tried that,” Rosenshine said. His caution: incentives work when they celebrate progress, not just perfect attendance. Lowell sends families notes when a student’s absences drop month over month, not only when a student hits a perfect-attendance mark, and the district is currently piloting PBIS incentives at a Tier 2 level specifically for students who’ve struggled with attendance.

How has Lowell navigated a phone-free policy?

Rosenshine called it “a constant battle,” pointing to consistency as the biggest lever: phones aren’t banned from the building, but they come out of classrooms, and the expectation gets repeated “over and over and over again... it’s a slippery slope once you go down it.” Heitner added the broader context many districts are weighing right now, the tradeoffs between a full day-long ban and a more targeted, class-to-class restriction, and cautioned that a policy built purely around restriction can miss students for whom a phone functions as a genuine accessibility support. Her framing: the goal is helping kids be present with each other and their teachers, not simply taking a device away.

What about families choosing online learning over concerns about school safety?

Rosenshine’s approach starts with inviting families into a real conversation rather than dismissing the concern. “I understand families’ concerns about safety. Everybody wants their kids to be safe,” he said, noting that having a phone in a pocket doesn’t actually guarantee it, and pointing families toward clearer ways to check in with the school, like a scheduled call with the front office, rather than needing constant reassurance throughout the day. Jungman’s clinical perspective on this same question is above, in the context of helping parents manage their own protective instincts.

What happens when school itself becomes a trigger for a student’s anxiety?

Jungman named this pattern directly: an anxiety-reinforcement loop, where avoiding the thing causing distress, in this case school, feels protective to a parent but actually teaches a child’s brain that school is something to fear. Cartwheel’s parent guidance service was built specifically for support for parents in understanding their child’s emotional and behavioral needs, paired with a school avoidance program that moves a student back into the building through small, incremental steps rather than all at once.

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What’s Showing Up This Year: A Look at School Avoidance, Screens, and Big Feelings

What’s Showing Up This Year: A Look at School Avoidance, Screens, and Big Feelings