Meeting the Emotional Needs of Underserved Learners

We often notice a familiar pattern when we look at a school’s behavioral referral data. The students most frequently flagged for behavioral concerns (students who spend a fair amount of time in the principal's office, receive suspensions and detentions, are consistently described as defiant, disruptive, and disrespectful) tend to share something in common: they are often the same students who have the least access to resources, support, and opportunity outside of school.

This isn't a coincidence. And it also isn't destiny.

Understanding why this pattern exists,  and what we can actually do about it, starts with understanding who underserved students are, what they're carrying, and what they need from the adults in their lives at school.

Who are we talking about when we say “underserved students”?

The term "underserved" is sometimes used loosely, so it's worth being precise. An underserved student is one who, for any number of reasons, does not have equitable access to the resources and opportunities necessary to succeed academically. That word - access - is doing important work in that definition. It has nothing to do with ability or intelligence or potential. Underserved students can and frequently do succeed academically, often in remarkable ways. But they do so with less support, fewer safety nets, and more obstacles than their peers from different backgrounds.

Students typically described as underserved include those from low-income households, English language learners, students with disabilities, students from historically marginalized racial or ethnic groups, and students navigating compounding risk factors such as foster care, parental incarceration or loss, housing instability, or interrupted access to education.

When students from these backgrounds show up in behavioral referral data at disproportionate rates, it tells us something important, not about their character or their capability, but about the gap between what they need and what they're currently getting.

Three Things Educators Can Do

None of this means that the outcomes are fixed. Proactive practices (the kind that happen before a student is in crisis) can shift the trajectory. Here are three of the most important places to focus.

1. Build Bridges to Opportunity

The first and perhaps most consequential thing educators can do is serve as a bridge. There are meaningful programs, resources, and opportunities that specifically exist to support underrepresented and underserved students: scholarships, enrichment programs, academic supports, community resources, mentorship opportunities., and more The problem is that these programs often don't reach the students they're designed for, simply because no one connected the dots.

Families navigating financial stress, language barriers, or distrust of institutions are less likely to independently discover and access these resources. School staff who are close to students and aware of their circumstances are uniquely positioned to change that. Making sure information gets communicated clearly, proactively, and in a way that actually reaches families can support students immensely. 

2. Widen the Lens

I once attended a presentation wherein a man described his experience growing up as the eldest child in a household where he effectively helped raise his younger siblings. By the time he was in high school, he was functioning as the man of the house: making decisions, managing responsibilities, holding things together.

Then he'd walk into school, and be told what to do.

It's easy to imagine how his teachers might have experienced him: non-compliant, resistant to authority, difficult to manage. What's harder (and arguably more important) is to imagine what he was experiencing. A young person who had demonstrated enormous capacity for responsibility was being treated as though he had none. The dissonance would be real, and it would be felt.

That story is a useful reminder that behavior rarely exists in a vacuum. When we widen the lens to include the full context of a student's life, we often find not defiance, but complexity. We find students who have developed skills, coping strategies, and survival mechanisms that don't translate neatly into the expectations of a traditional classroom — but that represent genuine strength. 

When we widen the lens, we can approach the situation with curiosity and creativity. The question worth asking isn't why won't this student comply? It's what might this student's life be asking of them right now, and how can I approach this collaboratively? A shift from directive to collaborative can make a meaningful difference, particularly for students who have had to grow up faster than their peers.

3. Earn Safety Before Expecting It

We know that every student needs to feel safe and supported in order to learn. What's less often acknowledged is that safety is not a feeling all students arrive at school already possessing.

Some students walk in the door with an implicit baseline assumption of safety: that the adults around them are trustworthy, that the environment is stable and predictable, that relationships are reliable. Other students walk in with their guard up, for reasons that have nothing to do with the classroom they're entering, and everything to do with what they've experienced before arriving.

A student from a marginalized racial group may have already been shaped by encounters with racism — in school, in their community, in systems they've had to navigate. When they see an adult who reminds them of those experiences, wariness is a reasonable response. It is not an obstacle to manage; it is information to receive.

A student who has lost a parent or experienced repeated abandonment by caregiving adults may have learned that it's not worth attaching to authority figures, because authority figures leave. Emotional distance isn't a character flaw, here; it's a protective strategy.

What both of these students need, before almost anything else, is for the adults around them to earn their trust rather than expect it. That happens through relationship building, consistency, being seen, through an adult showing up in the same way over and over until safety becomes something the student can actually feel rather than just be told about.

Relationships aren’t a cure-all for the structural inequities that make students underserved in the first place. But they are foundational for every interaction in a school setting. A student who feels safe is a student who can be reached.

The Bigger Picture

Underserved students are not defined by their circumstances. They are defined, like all students, by their potential, their strengths, and their capacity to grow in environments that support them.

Our job, as the adults in the building, is to be honest about the gap between the environment that exists and the environment these students need; and then, we must do the work to close that gap. That starts with access, continues with context, and is held together by relationship.