ConVal’s director of school counseling presented findings on a nationwide Youth Risk Behavior Survey that high school students participated in last year during a regular school board meeting Tuesday night.
Kim Chandler said about 720 ConVal students participated in the survey last year, which measured things like unintentional injuries and violence, sexual behavior, alcohol and other drug use, tobacco use, dietary behaviors, and physical activities.
“We’re looking for trends,” Chandler explained at the beginning of the presentation held in the SAU office.
She launched the discussion with good news — the number of students who reported drinking and driving has been slashed almost in half since 2013. That being said, 32 percent of students at ConVal reported they drank alcohol in the past 30 days of when the survey was taken, and 17.4 percent reported that they had participated in binge drinking. According to the survey, Chandler said, those numbers are pretty average for the region and the state.
Chandler said one question that was “a little alarming” was that 41 percent of high school kids think it’s OK to take someone else’s medication, while 93 percent of kids reported that their parents would think it was wrong to take a prescription medication without a doctor’s slip.
“So there’s a big gap there between what they know is not appropriate and what they’re doing anyway,” Chandler said.
She said 12 percent of students reported it was easy to obtain prescription drugs that were not prescribed to them, 39 percent reported that it was easy to get alcohol, and 49 percent said it was easy to get marijuana.
Another question asked how many times a student had used heroin, and 19 students reported that they had used the drug. She said statewide nearly 1,000 students have reported to using heroin.
Thirty-five students reported on the survey that they had been forced to engage in sexual activity at some point in their life. Chandler said that number was comprised almost equally of men and women.
She said about 16 percent of students reported to have suicidal thoughts in the last year, a trend that has gone up. She said 79 women, and 36 men reported having suicidal thoughts within the last year.
Forty-six students reported that they had attempted suicide within the last year.
“So what are we doing about this?” Chandler said after rifling off results from the survey.
She said the district has implemented a number of things to help combat the issues that showed up in the survey most notably, a program called Signs of Suicide, which, in part, teaches students how to identify behavioral changes in their friends. She said high school employees have also been trained in Youth Mental Health First Aid, which is designed to teach adults how to recognize mental health concerns in students and gives them “permission to intervene in a way that feels safe for them.”
A group of people who comprise the Substance Abuse Task Force also attended the school board meeting. The group was implemented in 2015 and seeks to “foster awareness and provide support for those affected by substance abuse and addiction,” according to its mission statement. During a presentation, which was given by many people involved in the task force, the group made a connection between adverse childhood experiences and substance misuse later on in life.
Shawn King, a school counselor, said that Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, can be assessed through a series of 10 questions that target areas including, abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction. A score is calculated based on how many of those experiences were part of a person’s life before the age of 18.
She said an ACEs survey of 17,000 people in San Diego showed that 36 percent of people received a zero, meaning they didn’t experience any adverse trauma as a kid, 64 percent had at least one, and 12 percent have experienced four or more. She said ACEs scores have been linked to medical issues and mental health, as an example, research has found that and ACEs score of four could mean people are two times more likely to develop cancer or heart disease over the course of their life, an ACEs score of five means a person is eight times more likely to become an alcoholic, and an ACEs score of six or more has been linked to a reduced lifespan of 20 years.
That means that two-thirds of students in a given classroom have likely experienced at least one adverse childhood trauma in their life.
“Today I sat with a woman who was telling me some of the things that happened to her last night and just in a half an hour conversation, I counted four … she had four, just in that like quick conversation. And I sent her back to class,” King said. “So this is happening here (at ConVal).”
King said neuroscience is now showing adverse childhood experiences are changing the brain.
A projection of two different activation map of a brain was displayed on a screen during the meeting, the one on the left representing a healthy brain and the one on the right an orphan in an adverse emotional state. King explained that the brain can be split into three sections, the back is a primitive part that deals with fight or flight responses, the middle where emotions come from, and the front where people learn. The picture of the healthy organ showed the front portion of the brain lit up with activity, meaning the person is ready to learn. The brain on the right of the screen was primarily lit up in the back or the primitive part of the brain, meaning that person is in fight or flight mode. She said that person is probably in a “hyper-vigilant” stage that’s not conducive to learning.
“It’s really important that we think about this in terms of our students and what they are able to do in a classroom,” she said, adding that’s what people are talking about when they discuss the effects of trauma on the brain.
She said if a kid’s stress response is on all the time “it’s like an uphill battle trying to do what we want them to do in order to pass, to be able to learn.”
In addition, she said, kids who are experiencing chronic stress are looking for relief and often what they turn to are substances like alcohol, marijuana, and prescription drugs.
She said at school teachers can help build relationships and a classroom environment that’s conducive to student learning.
Abby Kessler can be reached at 924-7172, ext. 234 or akessler@ledgertranscript.com.