Two ConVal rising seniors launched a letter-writing campaign urging the School Board to enact better mental health policies. The letter calls on the administration to budget for more available mental health professionals, welcome established Title IX reporting processes, and focus on providing resources for struggling students.
“The point that I’m trying to make is people are only paying attention… when a student has died,” organizer Reagan Riffle said. She and Rosie Crooker said they started the campaign following the death of 16-year-old Liam McCartney, a student in the school district, in June. Riffle said she wants to see more proactive care for students, as existing initiatives like anti-vaping campaigns, encouraging student involvement, and surveys to document students’ drug use, mental health, or exposure to sexual trauma don’t seem to result in real change, she said. “It’s just a lot of thoughts and prayers,” she said.
The campaign has drawn feedback from freshmen through alumni, Crooker said. “Students… have reached out and been like ‘thank you, I knew someone who died or I myself have been struggling and I wish there was something at the school,’” Riffle said.
The School Board is planning to review the current budget allocations in light of the concerns, Superintendent Kimberly Rizzo Saunders said, and that she would be setting up meetings between the students, Student Service Director Cari Coates, incoming high school principal Heather McKillop and herself in order to hear specific concerns directly before determining next steps. The School Board had received letters from 15 individuals as of July 1, she said.
This fall, Crooker waited to see what the school would do after faculty addressed students following another student’s suicide, but she never saw a change in the structure of the school’s counseling program, she said. Crooker said she hopes the school considers bringing in trauma-informed counseling and other resources so that students, including some of her friends, aren’t afraid to come forward about issues they’re struggling with for fear of it escalating too quickly.
When asked to describe what they’ve observed at school, Riffle and Crooker said that the bullying they see is not usually overt. They described a culture of apathy and thoughtless remarks, particularly when the subject isn’t present. “People just say things offhand and I’m like, ‘whoa, you can’t be talking about other people that way!’” Crooker said. Staff have taken note and ask students about how to address it, she said. “A lot of it might also be that students need an outlet to talk so they don’t take it out on other people,” she said.
Crooker helped organize the student initiative to plant yellow tulips for mental health awareness last fall. Riffle founded the student organization End Sexual Violence on Campus and said that many of her current concerns overlap with the earlier initiative.
“A student’s role is that we have to speak to the greater community so that they know,” Crooker said, and urged residents of the ConVal School District to listen to students and understand where they’re coming from. “Especially at this time when we’ve been online, there’s been a lot of big decisions to make but students aren’t always involved,” she said.
“I would hope the voices of the teens participating in these campaigns would be heard by Board Members, as there is a definite need for increased mental health services in school, as well as access outside of school, supported by the school,” Antrim therapist Winter Keeler wrote. “I believe if we, as adults, voters, community members, do not take care of the basic needs of students – children and teens – they will not be able to effectively access the learning and educational opportunities the schools offer, which is a detriment to our whole society.”
Nearby Dublin School has taken recent steps to improve its approach to mental health and bullying. Last year, Dublin School established a task force of students and staff members in order to address mental health issues, Dean of Faculty and chair of the school’s Health and Wellness Task Force Jenny Foreman said. The task force formed at the request of Head of School Brad Bates, she said. “We haven’t solved it,” she said. “We’re never done with supporting mental health, but we need to talk about where the expectations we have for ourselves come from.” Students identified time management and homework as two major stressors. “Interestingly, the same kinds of stressors existed for the adults in the community,” Foreman said. When students heard how the adults experienced stress, it reduced the “us versus them” mentality between students and staff, Foreman said. “It made it feel like something we need to do together,” she said.
The school is still discussing the task force’s recommendations, which means there have been no final decisions on budgetary changes like hiring a second counselor for Dublin School’s 165 students, or designating built space on campus for private telehealth or other mental health-dedicated activities, Foreman said. However, the school has since surveyed students’ and adults’ stress levels and coping strategies, formalized mental health first-aid training into the school’s professional development work, and looked into extending the training to student leaders, Foreman said. Students created a list of apps their peers could use to manage anxiety and stress while separated during the COVID-19 pandemic, and there are ongoing conversations about students’ rigorous schedules, the community’s relationship with technology, and making sure students can eat and sleep right, she said.
Dublin School is also attempting to apply a restorative justice lens to disciplinary issues involving bullying, racism or related harassment on campus, Foreman said. When a student says or does something hurtful, they’re called into a meeting with a committee of trained students, including representatives from organizations supporting students of color, Jewish students, and the gender and sexuality alliance,with oversight by the dean of students and the diversity and inclusion director, Foreman said. The hope is to turn an incident into an educational experience where the offender has an opportunity to explain themselves, learn more about how their action was hurtful, and reintegrating them into the community rather than making them an outcast, she said. Victims of bullying have the choice of getting involved or not, she said, since sometimes it’s helpful to them to be involved and other times it’s not.