A collaboration among Sixth Formers takes stress management strategies global.
April 10, 2023
In the U.S., teen mental health issues are rampant. St. Paul’s School is finding ways to respond.
BY IAN ALDRICH
During Winter Term this year, the Counseling Services team at Clark House Health Center launched its newest initiative: a grief group for teens to talk to trained professionals and fellow students about whatever issues may be affecting their lives. No topic is off limits. Maybe it’s the death of a loved one; possibly a friend’s illness. Or, in the wake of a pandemic that still hasn’t let go of the world, it’s the grieving of a life that still doesn’t feel like it’s fully returned.
St. Paul’s School has always offered support to students in this area, but not in such a concentrated and coordinated fashion. Meeting weekly at Clark House, the sessions are the fruition of a cross-department collaboration that has become central to SPS’s work around teen health over the last 15 years. Dr. Thomas Peters, director of counseling, and two of his counselors, Ryan Shirilla and Deb Hansen, worked closely with the Rev. Charles Wynder Jr., the dean of chapel and spiritual life, to architect the group sessions; and the meetings include the active involvement of both the chaplaincy and the counseling team.
“We wanted to do something at a higher level and that required a partnership with the chaplaincy,” Peters says. “The counseling team, we have our expertise, but I think we also recognized there were other things to contribute that only the chaplaincy could bring. We’re an Episcopalian school and we have a chaplaincy right here. Why wouldn’t we partner with them and make this something that is more inclusive and conducive to the School’s mission?”
Peters is far from alone in his thinking. At a time when the number of American teens who report feeling anxious or depressed has climbed to alarming levels, schools like St. Paul’s have reoriented not just the kinds of services they offer to students but how those services work together to foster a healthy community for all its members. At SPS, student support staffing has expanded, new programs have launched, and many existing ones have been recalibrated to meet the moment. The work has taken many forms, from incorporating mindfulness practices into student life to establishing phone-free zones around the campus to creating a community-focused curriculum that explores topics such as diversity, cultural competency, personal identity, sexuality and wellness.
“We’ve really put an emphasis on meeting the students where they’re at and supporting them on their journey here,” says Dr. Theresa Ferns ’84, P’19, the vice rector for school life. “It’s a different mindset than what I think existed here when I was a student. Back then in some ways, it was either you belonged here or you didn’t. And now there’s a broader acceptance of different students and where they’re at. The thinking is, you’re a part of this community. Now let’s figure out how we can support you as you continue on your journey.”
Given the rapid pace of change in the world, these students need to develop the skills of thrivers as never before.”
— Rector Kathy Giles
DEVELOPING THE SKILLS OF THRIVERS
Last October, during Family Weekend, Rector Kathy Giles delivered welcoming remarks to a packed Chapel. Giles used the moment to marvel at students’ ability to find their footing in a world that could feel so unsteady. “It is at times perplexing to me to try to figure out how the kids keep it together as well as they do, given the extraordinary inputs they are trying to integrate, at their ages and stages of development, into a perspective on the world that allows them a sense of well-being and the ability to be optimistic,” she said, noting that students’ ability to handle stresses didn’t diminish the difficulties that often shaped their lives. Growth and change, she observed, are at the very core of adolescent life — as is a vulnerability to the pressures that can result from so much upheaval.
“Nature wires kids to be resilient as they grow, probably because everything they do is about learning and growth,” Giles said. “As we address the concerns about mental health, we do so for the kids in the context of their adolescence — an adolescence that at once leaves them uniquely vulnerable and allows them an enormous capacity to adapt to change… . They are determined to be thrivers, and I urge us to do everything we can to encourage them in that direction. Optimizing their response to change is an important part of our work as adults in their lives. This won’t be the last pandemic; globalization isn’t going to go away; doomscrolling has become an element of our lives, and we know for a fact that nature is not kind to those who fail to evolve. Given the rapid pace of change in the world, these students need to develop the skills of thrivers as never before.”
Giles’ embrace of teen mental health as a major theme at Family Weekend didn’t raise an eyebrow, which was at once unsurprising and a marked change from even a generation ago. “Parents, teachers, even kids feel more comfortable talking about those things,” says Dr. John Bassi P’17,’19,’21, the School’s medical director. “We see kids coming who already have therapists on the outside. Ten years ago that almost never happened, or it wasn’t shared with us. Both parents and students are a lot more comfortable talking about these things. Before, it was just like, ‘Buck up Johnny, you’ll do fine.’”
Bassi has had a front-row seat to that change. When he joined SPS as medical director in 2008, he oversaw a mental health team of two counselors, both of whom were also full-time faculty members and had other responsibilities that often took them away from Clark House. It wasn’t uncommon that students who came to the health center couldn’t get access to a counselor. Bassi immediately set out to change that by expanding hours and building out the department to meet demand.
“It wasn’t a case of you build it and they will come; they were already knocking on the door, and we just didn’t have the capacity.”
— Dr. John Bassi, medical director
Today, Clark House employs three full-time counselors and one half-time counselor, as well as a department director in Peters. In a typical year, some 40 percent of the student body seeks the assistance of a counselor at some point, for a total of some 2,000 individual visits — more than double what the department reported when Bassi came to SPS 15 years ago. “Now we’re able to see the students within the timeline that they need to be seen,” he says.
In the last two years that includes issues related to COVID-19. For obvious reasons, the onset of the pandemic upended the baseline function of the School. But as students and the contours of community life returned to campus, Bassi says SPS leadership began to do the important work of looking at the mental health repercussions from the virus and the measures taken to ensure the health and safety of everyone at the School.
“I think once we got a feel for how COVID was evolving and the potential impact it had on a young and healthy population, we moved quickly to focus on the mental health of the students,” Bassi says. “We realized how important it was for students to socialize and be together. It’s why we probably removed masks sooner than our peer schools, simply because we saw students’ health decline.” Emphasizing that the School’s incremental mask-optional policies were introduced only when supported by CDC recommendations, he adds, “We had to ask ourselves, what’s more important here: potential physical effects of COVID-19 on a student or the long-term mental health fallout from ongoing social separation?”
Others are also asking the same question. Since his arrival at SPS last August, Peters has been examining how the work of mental health help can be expanded beyond the Clark House walls. That’s included the formation of other kinds of group therapy options like the recent one focused on grief. But perhaps even more significantly, he’s looked to strengthen his department’s relationships with faculty members and heads of house, who often are on the frontlines of student crises. By continuing to work with other members of the SPS community on how to handle the early stages of a problem, faculty and staff have a better chance of positively impacting how that situation plays out. Maybe that even means averting a call to counseling services.
And for those who do need it, Bassi says, the mission of the counseling team is to address the immediacy of the existing crisis while also helping students build a toolkit so they have the ability to better navigate future ones.
“It’s about giving them the tools to learn how to deal with some of those hard feelings,” he says. “So let’s recognize that your anxiety is real, then let’s understand the situations that cause that anxiousness and how your body reacts when those situations happen. We’re trying to teach resiliency because life is going to be full of these situations. If we can teach them to face their fears and those difficult moments, then they can come out on the other side with maybe a completely new understanding of who they are and what they’re capable of.”
CATCHING KIDS BEFORE THEY FALL
As it’s done considerable work to build supports for students who are dealing with the immediacy of a complicated crisis, SPS also has taken a number of measures to help identify and work with students before a deeper problem sets in.
Every two weeks, for example, the Student Support Office, headed by Kate Daniels, director of academic support and the inaugural Kiril Sokolof ’65 Chair, generates reports for Dean of Studies Lori Bohan on students who are struggling academically. The steps that follow can include connecting with other faculty or staff members in the student’s life to understand what may be contributing to the issues. The effect, says Daniels, creates a continuous discussion that allows the School to “put in place a number of systems to catch kids before they fall. That way they don’t get into holes they can’t dig out of.”
At the conclusion of each term, SPS also does a comprehensive review of each of its students to gauge their performance and how they’re connected to the broader School community.
“We talk about celebrations and joys as well as share any challenges or concerns students may be experiencing,” says Daniels. “It’s not the first time those of us in roles of student support hear about these concerns [and] it is done with discretion with invitation to necessary faculty — teachers, coaches, head of house, etc. — to follow up with the adviser if more information is needed.”
The work is proactive in other ways, too. In recent years SPS has integrated different practices, including meditation and yoga, into campus life as a way to help students build habits that can mitigate stress or anxiety. Daniels, who heads the all-boys Manville House and coaches the girls cross country team, has used mindfulness with many of her students, from race prep to exam study.
“These are kids who are working with pretty intense schedules, so it’s important that they find ways to just slow down, even if it’s just for a few moments,” says Daniels, who also advises the school’s yoga and mindfulness clubs. “Whenever I meet with a student, I’ll say, ‘let’s just sit and center ourselves before we jump right into things.’ I do the same at my house meetings every week. The boys know to expect that the first thing we’re going to do is to put our technology away and close our eyes. The act of being quiet for a moment and making that transition from a busy day to this time when we’re all gathered together is important. It’s subtle but it’s valuable.”
So much so, in fact, that SPS has integrated mindfulness into its curriculum. This year the School began a pilot program for Third Formers that requires them to take an interdisciplinary course that explores the spiritual, psychological and medical benefits of mindfulness and meditation. Meeting once a week over the course of a single term, students don’t just learn how to meditate but go deep on the neurology behind its benefits. Following the course’s conclusion students are then provided guidance for self-guided meditations so they can continue the work. Daniels says the student feedback has been positive and the program’s early success has led SPS to consider expanding it to other form years.
“There were a lot of us who felt this was important for our students to experience because there is so much evidence that shows how mindfulness can be helpful,” she says. “And coming out of the pandemic there was a real impetus to help students relieve their stress, improve their sleep and learn how to address any anxiety or depression they’re feeling. But we also want to help them find ways to strengthen their own relationships by practicing compassion and loving kindness.”
CREATING A ROADMAP FOR GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT
Mental health, in other words, can’t be divorced from the health of one’s immediate community. To understand how St. Paul’s School believes the two go hand-in-hand you have to look no further than its Living in Community (LinC) curriculum. Launched nearly a decade ago, LinC is a 21st century reboot of a residential life program that had changed very little from the time when Theresa Ferns was a student at SPS in the early 1980s.
Then, says Ferns, “we tried to do typical preventative work and character-building that occurred during house meetings once a week. But it was kind of one-and-done. ‘Today we’re talking about drugs and alcohol, next week we’re going to talk about sex.’ They weren’t linked by an overarching framework and there weren’t a lot of skills that were being passed on to the young people to help them deal with those areas.”
In 2013, Ferns and several others began work to rethink not just how SPS could engage with its students but also how students could engage with each other. At its core, the LinC curriculum centers on five critical areas: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship-building and positive decision-making. Using those interconnected themes, faculty members and student LinC leaders then lead student groups on focused explorations of topics like cultural competency, diversity and inclusivity, personal identity, sexuality, drugs and alcohol, gender and wellness.
As students move through SPS, their relationship to LinC evolves. Third and Fourth Form students, for example, attend small, topic-focused classes. Trained Fifth and Sixth Formers, meanwhile, help mentor their younger peers in the classroom. Additionally, a group of student LinC leaders meet regularly to discuss programming, from guest speaker events to special LinC Days that focus on topics of importance to the student body.
Ferns says LinC has given the School an “important roadmap for student growth and development.” The fact that it is now so central to the School’s overall curriculum, she says, also signals just how serious SPS considers the issues that influence teen mental health.
“How you spend your time really reflects the values you have in a school community,” she says. “When you push a conversation on alcohol and drugs to Monday at nine o’clock during house meeting you’re sending one message. When you have it as part of the content of your regular school day you’re sending a very different message about how you think about those things.”
For many who work at the School and are central to the lives of its students, how they think about these issues has also taken multiple points of view. Ferns, for instance, is both an alum of SPS and the parent of a recent graduate. All three of Bassi’s children passed through the School. As SPS leaders they’ve helped shape how the School handles issues around mental health. As parents, they’ve had a personal view of the positive impact those changes have had on the School’s community.
“To watch a student go from 14 years old to 18 is really something,” says Bassi. “It’s a time of real discovery for them and they’re going to challenge you. They want to know why we’re doing what we’re doing. But that’s why I like adolescent medicine. It’s absolutely rewarding.”
Learn more about student health and wellness initiatives at SPS »
