The scale of the population involved is striking. In 2024 alone, nearly three million children in the United States were the subject of a CPS investigation, which can be triggered by suspicions of abuse, neglect, parental substance abuse, or domestic violence. Cumulatively, the researchers note, more than one third of American children will have some contact with CPS before their eighteenth birthday. For Black children, that figure rises above half. Despite these numbers, Ansari observed that the absenteeism literature has almost entirely overlooked this group, a gap he described as surprising given how extensively school absence has been studied in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To close that gap, the team drew on the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal project that has followed 3,334 adolescents across twenty large American cities from birth through age fifteen. The researchers compared families’ reports of school attendance for adolescents who had experienced CPS contact by age fifteen against those who had not, and they paired these attendance records with students’ own reports of how connected they felt to their schools. This dual focus mattered because school connectedness, the sense of being safe, valued, and relationally embedded in a school community, has emerged in prior work as one of the few malleable levers schools can pull to combat absence.

The findings were unambiguous. Students with CPS contact were more likely to be absent from school than their classmates, whether those absences were excused or unexcused, indicating that the disparity is not simply a matter of families failing to prioritize attendance. The differences extended beyond raw absence counts. These students were fourteen percentage points more likely to have teachers reach out to their families about attendance problems, a signal that educators perceive and flag the issue even when its structural roots lie outside the classroom. They also reported feeling measurably less connected to their schools than their peers, a psychological distance that the authors argue both reflects and reinforces the attendance gap.

Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing at least ten percent of instructional time, has long been a concern in American education. In the 2018-19 academic year, fifteen percent of K-12 students were chronically absent. The pandemic then drove national rates to twenty-eight percent in 2021-22, and although they have since declined, they still stood at twenty-four percent in 2024. Against that backdrop, identifying subgroups of students at especially elevated risk has become a central task for researchers and district leaders alike, and the new study suggests that CPS-involved youth belong near the top of that list.

Ansari is careful to frame CPS contact itself as a source of adversity rather than a neutral administrative event. An investigation, even one that does not confirm maltreatment, places a family under heightened surveillance and can strain the very routines, including regular school attendance, that support a child’s development. He describes two common parental responses to that surveillance. Some families disengage, pulling further away from institutions and keeping children home more often to avoid scrutiny. Others react by becoming more diligent, ensuring their children attend school every day. The net effect across the population, however, is a clear elevation in absence risk for CPS-involved youth.

The study also probes whether school connectedness can narrow the attendance gap, and the answer is nuanced. Greater connectedness did explain part of the difference in absences between students with and without CPS contact, confirming that relational factors matter. Yet on its own, school connectedness did not effectively close the gap, because the benefits of feeling connected accrue broadly rather than disproportionately. Interventions that build connectedness, such as fostering positive teacher-student relationships, cultivating inclusive school climates, and expanding access to extracurricular activities, help all children roughly equally. That is valuable, Ansari argues, but it means connectedness programs cannot be expected to single-handedly compensate for the adversity CPS-involved children carry with them through the school door.

Instead, he positions school connectedness as one piece of a larger toolkit that must also address the material conditions shaping attendance. Housing and income instability, food insecurity, and mental and physical health disparities all weigh heavily on the families in the study’s sample. Ansari points to concrete examples: families cutting meals so that children arrive at school hungry and disengaged, or students without bus service who must walk routes their parents consider unsafe because of traffic or crime. These barriers, he notes, are largely driven by poverty, and no school-based relational intervention can fully counteract them. For children dealing with potential abuse or neglect at home, school can serve as a resource and a getaway, a pathway toward higher education and greater opportunity, but it cannot, in his words, counteract all the historical and ongoing forces operating at the same time.

The practical implications cut in two directions. For schools, the message is that attendance strategies should not treat CPS-involved students as simply unmotivated or their families as indifferent, since the absences often track adversity and surveillance dynamics beyond the school’s control. For child welfare systems, the findings suggest that educational continuity deserves explicit attention during and after investigations, given how consequential regular attendance is for grades, test scores, future educational plans, career opportunities, and economic mobility. Ansari also emphasizes the social-relational dimension of schooling, arguing that relationships among students, teachers, and peers are essential to any strategy for tackling absenteeism, and that educators should keep this in mind as they design engagement efforts. The study was co-authored by Kierra M.P. Sattler of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and together the authors call for attendance research and policy to finally account for the millions of children whose lives intersect with the child welfare system.

Subject of Research: The relationship between child protective services contact and school absenteeism and school connectedness among United States adolescents.

Article Title: Kids involved with child protective services miss much more school than their peers

Article References: Kids involved with child protective services miss much more school than their peers. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: child protective services, chronic absenteeism, school connectedness, child welfare, educational inequality, school attendance, adolescent development, child maltreatment, poverty and education, student engagement, Ohio State University, Children and Youth Services Review

A brief questionnaire designed to capture whether adolescents feel accepted, supported and safe at school has received a substantial psychometric overhaul. In a study of 621 Portuguese teenagers, researchers found that the widely used five-item School Connectedness Scale performed better after one question was removed, producing a four-item version with strong statistical properties and consistent performance across male and female students. The revised scale was also linked to higher quality of life, stronger mental well-being and a greater sense of social safety. The findings suggest that a carefully calibrated measure of school connectedness could give researchers and educators a faster way to identify how students experience their school environment—and how those experiences relate to mental health.

School connectedness is more than simply liking school or attending classes regularly. It refers to the degree to which students feel that they belong, are respected and supported, and have meaningful relationships within the school community. Adolescence is a period when social relationships become particularly important, as young people increasingly orient their attention toward peers and wider social groups. School is often the main setting where those relationships develop. When students feel integrated into that environment, previous research has associated connectedness with stronger engagement, better academic adjustment, greater life satisfaction and lower levels of risky behavior. Yet the scientific measurement of the concept remains complicated because terms such as belonging, attachment, bonding, engagement, school climate and teacher support are sometimes used interchangeably.

The new study, published in School Mental Health, focused on the five-item version of the School Connectedness Scale originally derived from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The researchers recruited 621 adolescents aged 11 to 18 from public schools across northern, central and southern Portugal. The sample included 315 males and 306 females, with a mean age of 13.53 years, and most participants were enrolled in the seventh through ninth grades. Students completed anonymous online questionnaires during school hours, with the participation of researchers or clinical psychologists. Written consent was obtained from the adolescents and, where required, their parents or legal guardians.

The participants answered questions assessing school connectedness alongside measures of social safeness, positive mental health, anxiety, depression and quality of life. The connectedness scale uses a five-point response format, from strong disagreement to strong agreement, producing scores that indicate the strength of a student’s perceived relationship with school. The other instruments were also structured self-report measures. Positive mental health was assessed across emotional, social and psychological well-being; anxiety and depression scales measured symptom severity and interference with daily functioning; and the KIDSCREEN-10 assessed perceived health-related quality of life across family, peer and school settings. The researchers reported good internal reliability for these measures in their Portuguese adolescent sample.

To test whether the scale measured a single underlying construct, the team used confirmatory factor analysis, a statistical method that examines how well observed answers fit a proposed latent structure. In this case, the proposed structure was a single school-connectedness factor. The original five-item model did not fit the data well: its root mean square error of approximation, or RMSEA, was 0.089, above the level generally considered acceptable. Statistical modification indices suggested that some items shared unexplained variance, particularly questions about teacher fairness and school safety. Allowing certain residual errors to correlate improved the model, but one question continued to perform poorly.

That problematic question was “The teachers at this school treat students fairly.” Its factor loading—the strength of its relationship with the underlying connectedness factor—was below 0.50 in the full sample and in both sex groups. Its corrected item-total correlation was also the lowest, at 0.39, meaning that answers to the question were less closely aligned with students’ overall connectedness scores than were the other items. The researchers argue that the item may be measuring a different psychological target. The remaining questions focus on students’ own feelings, while the teacher-fairness question asks them to make a broader judgment about how teachers treat students collectively. It also shifts from a personal perspective, such as “I feel,” to an external evaluation of the school’s staff.

Removing the question produced a much stronger one-factor model. The revised four-item scale achieved an RMSEA of 0.046, and all remaining factor loadings exceeded 0.50. Internal consistency, assessed using both Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega, was generally between 0.80 and 0.85 across the full sample and the male and female subgroups. The researchers also tested measurement invariance, a crucial step when comparing groups. Configural invariance indicated that the same general factor structure applied to both groups; metric invariance showed that the items related to the factor in comparable ways; and scalar invariance indicated that score comparisons were meaningful because item intercepts were equivalent. In practical terms, the four-item scale appeared to measure the same construct in males and females.

The analysis nevertheless uncovered a difference in average connectedness scores. Male participants reported higher school connectedness than female participants, with mean scores of 15.46 and 14.49, respectively. The difference was statistically significant and had a small-to-medium effect size, with Cohen’s d equal to 0.32. The authors stress that research on sex differences in school connectedness has produced mixed findings, with some studies reporting higher connectedness among females, some finding no difference and others, particularly in certain cultural settings, observing higher scores among males. The result should therefore not be interpreted as a universal pattern. It may reflect differences in peer relationships, perceived school safety, teacher interactions or the social context of Portuguese public schools.

The strongest evidence for the revised scale came from its relationships with other aspects of adolescent well-being. Higher connectedness scores were associated with greater quality of life, positive mental health and social safeness—the perception that social environments are warm, reassuring and supportive. The largest simple correlation was with quality of life, at r = 0.553. Connectedness was also negatively correlated with anxiety and depressive symptoms, as expected. However, when the researchers entered all five outcomes into a multiple regression model, only quality of life, positive mental health and social safeness remained significant independent predictors of school connectedness. The model explained approximately 34.8 percent of the variance in connectedness, and quality of life showed the strongest unique association, with a standardized beta of 0.339.

That distinction matters because correlations do not establish direction or causation. A student who feels connected to school may experience greater well-being, but a student who already feels safe and satisfied with life may also be more likely to view school positively. The study’s cross-sectional design cannot determine whether school connectedness protects against poor mental health, whether mental health shapes perceptions of school, or whether both are influenced by other factors. The authors note that anxiety and depression were not significant independent predictors in the regression despite their negative correlations with connectedness. One possibility is that emotional symptoms and perceptions of school relationships operate through different pathways. Another is that the overlap among well-being measures altered the unique contribution of symptom scores when they were considered together.

The study has several additional limitations. All information came from adolescent self-reports, which can be influenced by memory, social desirability or a tendency to answer related questions in similar ways. The sample was drawn from public schools and included mainly students in grades seven through nine, so the results may not generalize to private schools, younger children, older adolescents or different educational systems. School-level characteristics—including size, culture, leadership and local norms—were not controlled for, even though they could affect students’ experiences. A ceiling effect was also observed for most of the connectedness items: more than 15 percent of participants selected the maximum response for several questions. Such clustering at the high end can make it harder for a scale to detect improvement among students who already report strong connectedness.

Despite those caveats, the revised measure could be useful in both research and practice because it reduces respondent burden while retaining strong reliability. A four-question tool can be incorporated into broader school surveys, repeated during intervention studies or used alongside mental-health screening without taking substantial classroom time. The shortened scale is focused specifically on students’ personal sense of belonging and connection to school. That focus is also its limitation. By removing the teacher-fairness question, the instrument no longer directly assesses whether students believe teachers treat them or other students fairly. The researchers recommend using an additional measure of student–teacher connectedness when that relationship is a central research or intervention target.

The findings point toward a broader shift in adolescent mental-health research: schools are increasingly being viewed not only as places where problems may be detected, but also as social environments capable of supporting well-being. Measuring whether students feel that they belong can help identify vulnerabilities that may be invisible in academic records or symptom checklists. The authors call for longitudinal studies involving multiple informants, including teachers and parents, as well as research in more diverse school settings and cultures. Future work should also test whether the four-item scale is sensitive to change after programs designed to improve school climate, peer relationships, mental well-being or quality of life. For now, the Portuguese validation provides evidence that a leaner measure can capture an important dimension of adolescent experience—while underscoring that connection to school and connection to teachers may not be exactly the same thing.

Importantly, the study distinguishes between bullying experiences occurring in childhood versus adolescence, uncovering a pronounced difference in psychological vulnerability between these developmental stages. Adolescents exposed to peer bullying exhibited more severe anxiety and depression symptoms compared to those bullied during earlier childhood. Dr. Heard-Garris attributes this heightened susceptibility to adolescence to increased social sensitivity during this period, when peer acceptance assumes paramount importance and influences self-identity formation. The researchers emphasize that adolescents’ complex social dynamics can amplify the emotional toll of bullying, thus necessitating protective factors like school connectedness to counterbalance these effects.

School connectedness was operationalized through multiple parameters, including how inclusive the school culture feels, the closeness of student relationships, overall happiness, and the perceived safety of the school environment. The analysis shows that fostering these elements does not merely create a pleasant school atmosphere but tangibly serves as a psychological shield for vulnerable youths. High school connectedness notably correlates with lower depression symptoms, suggesting that when students feel genuinely embedded and supported within their school community, they are better equipped to withstand the detrimental effects of bullying.

The study’s methodology involved a substantial sample size of 2,175 adolescents, representative of populations born in major U.S. cities between 1998 and 2000. The researchers strategically focused on two critical ages—9 and 15—to assess bullying’s immediate and cumulative psychological outcomes. This longitudinal approach allowed the identification of victims of bullying exclusively in childhood, exclusively in adolescence, and across both periods, thereby addressing a common gap in bullying research where a single time-point evaluation risks overlooking long-term effects.

Significantly, approximately 12 percent of participants reported experiencing bullying at both 9 and 15 years old, indicating chronic victimization, while 43 percent experienced bullying solely at age 9, and nearly 6 percent only at age 15. Nearly 40 percent had no self-reported bullying history at these ages. The data underscore the intricate nature of bullying exposure and its temporal dynamics, which can differentially influence mental health trajectories. These distinctions are imperative for tailoring effective interventions and preventive strategies targeting youth mental health.

Dr. Heard-Garris highlights that the adolescent period emerges as a particularly sensitive window for psychological distress associated with bullying. Although bullying incidents were statistically more frequent during childhood, the associated mental health consequences were markedly more severe when bullying occurred during adolescence. This finding counters some longstanding assumptions and reframes how clinicians, educators, and policymakers understand risk periods for mental health deterioration following peer victimization.

Moreover, the study advocates for a shift in school policy and educational practice emphasizing the creation and maintenance of school connectedness as a frontline defense against adolescent depression linked to bullying. Practical recommendations include enhancing teacher-facilitated peer support systems, encouraging collaborative learning projects, and promoting social inclusivity to foster interpersonal understanding and reduce isolation or exclusion among students. These strategies align with emerging pedagogical models that prioritize socio-emotional learning alongside academic achievement.

The research also brings to light the critical limitation in existing literature on bullying victimization: the frequent reliance on single time-point assessments. This approach risks underestimating prolonged or cumulative effects from bullying across childhood and adolescence. By incorporating a dual-time point analysis, the current study establishes a nuanced understanding of how persistent, repeated victimization can exacerbate mental health vulnerabilities, and how school connectedness can modulate these trajectories.

Looking ahead, Dr. Heard-Garris calls for longitudinal studies extending into early, middle, and late adulthood to delineate whether the mental health impacts of adolescent peer bullying endure beyond youth. Understanding the long-term psychosocial sequelae is vital for developing lifespan mental health interventions and could inform public health strategies aimed at early identification and support of bullying victims.

This research emerges from the robust institutional infrastructure of Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, a nationally recognized leader in pediatric medicine and child health research. Through the Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute, the hospital advances transformative pediatric research aimed at addressing complex physical and mental health challenges confronting children and adolescents. The partnership with Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine underscores a commitment to integrating clinical expertise with innovative scientific inquiry.

Bullying remains a pervasive social challenge with profound implications for youth mental health and well-being. This study reinforces the crucial role of the school environment not just as a site of risk but as a potential site of resilience. By fostering strong, inclusive, and supportive school communities, educators and policymakers can create conditions that protect vulnerable adolescents from the psychological harms associated with bullying. The findings compel stakeholders to prioritize school connectedness as an essential dimension of youth mental health promotion and bullying prevention.

Ultimately, this research expands the scientific discourse around the psychosocial dynamics of bullying and mental health in adolescence. It bridges a critical knowledge gap regarding the timing and cumulative effects of peer victimization while foregrounding school connectedness as a modifiable protective factor. The implications resonate across domains of pediatric healthcare, educational psychology, and social policy, providing a scientifically grounded roadmap for mitigating adolescent depression in the face of bullying.

Subject of Research: The psychological effects of peer bullying during childhood and adolescence and the protective role of school connectedness in mitigating depression and anxiety symptoms.

Article Title: Not explicitly provided in the content.

News Publication Date: Not specified.

Web References:

• BMC Public Health Article
• DOI: 10.1186/s12889-025-24002-6

References: Not explicitly listed in the content.

Image Credits: Not provided.

Keywords: Adolescents, Depression, Peer bullying, School connectedness, Anxiety, Mental health, Pediatric psychology, Social sciences