AMHERST — Using a role-playing exercise on a recent day at an Amherst elementary school, an upper-grade student was shown ways to build social skills and resolve conflict, abilities that continue to be diminished in the wake of remote learning during the COVID pandemic that began four years ago.

Maureen Fleming, the mental health and behavioral administrator for the public schools, and Doreen Reid, director of the Student Services Office, who recently spent an hour helping the student, explained how social isolation from students not being in school during the pandemic, combined with overuse of social media and cellphones, has fueled high rates of anxiety among students.

“We continue to have very high needs,” Fleming said at a recent Amherst School Committee meeting. “We have lagging social skills from the students being home for over a year during the pandemic.”

At Amherst’s three elementary schools, almost 30% of the 999 students have individualized education plans, or IEPs, based on data presented by Reid.

“Special needs are growing in Amherst,” Reid said. “People are moving to Amherst for our special education programs and our amazing staff, not only at the building level, but at the central office.”

Reid, Fleming and Tonya McIntyre, who leads the Office of Teaching and Learning, were at the School Committee meeting to give an overview of their work with high-needs children amid the challenges faced by the elementary schools, especially with diminished funding for education.

McIntyre said she hopes to do more in promoting what is going well at the schools, in terms of offerings, and better engage the community.

“We want to market our schools as the place to come to really get an excellent education,” McIntyre said. At the elementary schools, the average classroom has about 20 students, which is based on a School Committee policy and is also a selling point to families.

Part of the next year will bring a focus on all student subgroups, not just the overall student body, as well as on attracting teachers through embedded professional learning and making changes to instruction so educators are addressing the needs of all students equitably, McIntyre said.

As part of the work on mental health and behavioral services, the anti-bias Welcoming Schools training recently had 354 staff members participating.

Though Fleming and Reid recently spent time with the student on conflict resolution, the counselors in each of the elementary schools, Wildwood, Fort River and Crocker Farm, are often the ones doing the heavy lifting, and the budget has to continue putting resources into their work with students, they said.

While there has been a centralized district focus on mental health, and each school is doing a really good job on this, Fleming said bullying investigations take a lot of time and effort to navigate the issues, including involving families.

“I don’t see the mental health and behavioral needs of our students going down anytime in the near future,” Fleming said.

“It’s very, very complex work, it’s very involved, and I think the needs are going to be pretty great for the next year or two,” she said.

Reid presented statistics showing that that at Crocker Farm, 103 of 301 students are on IEPs, with 17 accessing accommodations through the 504 process, where students with disabilities are supported. At Fort River, 97 of the 378 students are on IEP and 13 are accessing the 504 services. At Wildwood, of 320 students, 84 are on IEPs and 16 are accessing 504 services.

Wildwood also had seven intensive needs students join the Intensive Learning Center community housed there, which has 16 students, and there were 27 special education referrals for the youngest learners at Crocker Farm’s preschool, Reid said.

Reid said the district’s team tries to find cost-effective ways of managing this. “We are always looking at least restrictive — we want students to be independent, successful and ideally, for some of our learners if not a majority of our learners, to launch from an IEP to perhaps a 504 for life after high school, if they still need to access some accommodations,” Reid said.

School Committee member Irv Rhodes said the numbers for special needs are shocking in some ways. “There’s astounding numbers in there,” Rhodes said.

Rhodes said the demographics have changed “startlingly” over the past 20 years at the schools, in such a way that it has transformed the way classrooms are organized and teaching is done, and the allocation of resources.

“It’s almost going to be your task and the superintendent’s task to educate the Amherst population in what has transpired in Amherst schools, and the needs presented to us,” Rhodes said.

School Committee member Bridget Hynes said there is no evidence that Amherst is unusual in terms of the demands placed on it, and is close to statewide average for special needs.

Superintendent E. Xiomara Herman said marketing of the schools can be done, but there is also a need to understand budget challenges and run adequate programs for schools that are realistic.

“It’s really critical to say how do we expand what we currently have, but how do we take that and also meet the needs of what we are seeing in terms of behaviors (and) in terms of academic supports,” Herman said.

Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.