University of Arizona in the News

School psychologists from the University of Arizona are helping teachers get their students readjusted to learning after the pandemic. The Arizona Department of Education awarded a $2.3 million grant to the school psychology graduate program at the University of Arizona. The funding will enable the university to deliver its expertise to school districts in Tempe, Florence and Mesa. Professor Marsha Spencer explains some students are still finding their way back to the classroom environment after months of remote learning. "Our young people have some unmet needs, and we need to come together as a community and be aware of that," she said. "Rather than looking at young people and expecting them to be resilient and just bounce back without any after-effects of a really distressing couple of years."

The University of Arizona is one of nine schools receiving recertification of a Seal of Excelencia, from Excelencia in Education, an organization focused on Latino college completion. The group included the university among its inaugural cohort of seal recipients in 2019, as recognition for offering programs, policies, leadership and institutional culture for supporting Latino student success.

For years, many cities have sent social workers, medics, trained outreach workers, or mental health professionals to calls that previously were handled by police officers. But crisis response teams have been slower to catch on in rural areas, even though mental illness is just as prevalent there. Arizona has crisis response teams available throughout the state, including in very rural regions, because settlement of a 1980s class-action lawsuit required better options for people with mental illnesses. It also recently launched the 988 crisis line, whose operators can help coordinate such services. "There's a lot of things to disagree on still with police reform," said University of Arizona associate professor of psychiatry Dr. Margie Balfour. "But one thing that everybody agrees on is that law enforcement doesn't need to be the default first responder for mental health."

After virtually disappearing for two years in the U.S. as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down society, there are hints that the flu could reemerge this fall, potentially causing an unusually early and possibly severe flu season. As a result, many experts are urging people to get their flu shots right away to make sure they are protected. The usual flu season starts in November in the U.S. and peaks in January or February. "In normal years, it makes sense to hold off on the flu shot until late fall, as protection really doesn't last more than a few months and late fall/winter is when the flu wave usually hits here," says Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson. "So in a normal year, I would probably try to wait until mid-October and get the flu shot then," he says. But this year, he says, "flu cases are already starting to go up, so it makes sense to get it sooner – i.e., now."