Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor spoke to The 74 about new federal data showing that troubling student behavior — from a lack of attentiveness to threats made to classmates in person or online — has continued years after the COVID-19 pandemic triggered disruptions to learning. The Department of Education research indicated that students’ well-being has been impacted by high rates of trauma, a fraught political climate, and the feeling that they are unsafe or unseen in school. “Look what these students have gone through … not only the pandemic, through wars. Through a tumultuous, divisive political environment in the last six or seven years that’s only intensifying between right and left, between Black and white, between immigrant and non-immigrant,” said Astor, an expert on school violence and campus culture. Students are also witnessing state legislatures and local school boards limit what classrooms can and cannot teach, leading them to question whether they belong in their school, he said.