Scarlett

Hi, my name is Scarlett. I am an 8th Grader from Lowell. I want to talk about mental health and how students and teachers can both work towards making school a safe environment. I want to address the importance of adult support and involvement in student mental health and what negative effects can come from students being left to resolve it on their own.

This issue matters to me because I’ve witnessed students who are experiencing difficulties with mental health, and they have nowhere to turn at school.

I serve as a student mentor in a school program to help students with behavioral intervention plans in the school and classroom environment. In my position as a mentor, students have come to me about mental health problems, and I’ve referred them to the guidance counselors. Afterwards, those students reported that the guidance counselors never followed up with them weeks later. The school claims they are stepping up to the plate, and even one meeting would probably have helped the students. Those students then came back to me to have someone to help them, but I felt overwhelmed and completely unqualified to help them with their problems.

Students who are bullied may also feel like they don’t have a voice or anyone to turn to. As an example, I personally experienced bullying when some students wrote harmful things about me on the bathroom stalls, the assistant principal just spray painted over it to cover it up and never met with the girl who did it or followed up on it. I had to take the initiative to work through the problems with the girl, and the school never intervened. The school offered to call my parents after I reported the bullying, but they never did that either.

I think many adults don’t understand how students are negatively impacted by a lack of strong adult support or guidance. I’ve personally seen that with my peers who vape in the school bathrooms that without support, they are particularly susceptible to peer pressure. This is very common, and the school hasn’t done much to intervene here, other than students occasionally being searched. I used to vape and I feel like it negatively affected my health, and I started vaping because of peer pressure and I wanted to seem cool to my friends. If I had been taught how to avoid peer pressure and received that guidance from adults at my school, I don’t think I would’ve started in the first place.

Student mental health and need for support is often overlooked and dismissed by the adults around them. Some teachers don’t understand that some students don’t have the best at home life or support, and that in order to succeed, they need to have a decent baseline of support. Some teachers need to understand that they can 100% help in supporting their student to succeed. Even small things like checking in on them or even just waving hello could leave a positive impact on not just their learning, but also their attitude and behavior.

I believe that students shouldn’t be left alone to deal with their troubles during such a difficult time in their lives. Guidance counselors should be required to follow through and check up on students when they report difficulties with mental health or matters regarding home life. Teachers should need to intervene if they see indicators that a student’s mental health is suffering. If I and other students had proper support from the adults in our lives, I believe that it would overall improve our mental health and allow us to better perform in the classroom.

Please support safe and supportive schools so that students aren’t left alone during incredibly vulnerable and impressionable times in middle school. By humanizing our school communities, we can better achieve our goal of improving student mental health which would ensure better outcomes for students in the classroom and beyond.