“At times I think I’m no good at all,” is what 42 percent of ICSD students believe according to a survey conducted by the Tompkins County Youth Services Department in 2018. This result is, of course, massively concerning for ICSD and IHS staff. As the school‘s psychologist, Shawn Goodman, stated during an interview with The Tattler, “Recently, [my job has] become much more difficult and challenging as the incidents of mental health problems in kids has exploded.” Despite the efforts that IHS is making to address mental health, many students think that IHS doesn’t do enough. According to the 2018-19 for Students Goals and Priorities Survey, 38 percent of ICSD students disagreed with the statement “ICSD attends to student mental health issues” (while an additional 21 percent were unsure). So while IHS may have the resources to properly address mental health issues, it does not do a good enough job promoting them, and it may even lack the ability to keep up with the needs of the high number of mentally distressed students within the school.
High schools, in general, are notorious for their social and athletic pressures, and IHS is no exception. Of course, the most stressful aspect of life at IHS, in particular, is academic pressure, as there is intense academic competition among students to excel in both the top classes and the most classes. The high number of AP classes students take is a good example of this need to succeed academically: a much higher percentage of students at IHS take AP classes compared to the state average. According to GreatSchools, a nonprofit organization that provides parents with information about PK-12 schools and education, IHS has a student AP math course participation percentage of 11 percent and 18 percent for AP science courses, over double the New York state’s average in both cases (4 percent and 6 percent respectively). In addition, 23 percent of IHS students participate in other non-STEM AP courses, compared to the New York State average of 14 percent.
AP classes, of course, are meant for college-level students, and having multiple AP classes at one time can add up to excessive amounts of work for a typical high school student. Consequently, in order to compensate for these classes, many students choose to opt-out of lunch periods. As of 2019, 17 percent of IHS students (224 out of 1345) do not have a lunch period, meaning about one out of every six students do not have an official time in their school day to eat food. Lunches are usually the only time in a student’s day when they get to relieve some stress and refuel for the second half of the day.
The school administration and teachers are aware that these types of pressures can impact students’ mental health, and they have taken measures to help us. For example, they require us to take a health class before graduating, which contains material on mental well-being. In addition, the school also has two social workers, five counselors, and one psychologist, who all work to assist students in need. However, these people are not easy to find for most students. As Shawn Goodman puts it, “We were all spread out, and nobody knew where we were, who we were, [and] what we did.”
The school is aware of this problem and is working to make mental health services more accessible and adding additional staff. As Goodman noted, “We are in the process of bringing in an outside therapist from Tompkins County Mental Health to work in the school and see more kids.” He also optimistically added, “In a year or so, we will be even better. I know the new construction plan is to put us all [social workers] in an improved space . . . it will be in [the] activities [building]. Nurses and social workers will all be in the same place.”
These are great steps in the right direction for IHS. It is particularly crucial for the school to follow through on Goodman’s points. Such progress will increase the mental health workforce and relocate them to a more visible and central place within the school so that they can better provide support to students in need. But doing so will not mean much if students continue to be unaware that these services exist.
The key problem is that the school does not make it all that easy for students to be informed of the mental health resources it is providing. For example, the school’s website does not contain easy-to-find links to mental health resources, nor do the student handbooks mention much about mental well-being, let alone how to achieve it. More recently, the school held a Mental Health and Wellness 101 class on November 19 to provide participants with “basic knowledge of mental health wellness and recovery in an effort to reduce stigma.” But the announcement for this event was made through an email to parents, not to the students themselves.
The school needs to do much more to raise awareness of mental health issues and provide support and assistance to those in need. An appropriate step in this direction would be for IHS to follow the state guidelines for educating students on mental health. The New York State Education Department outlines the four following components for a student’s emotional well-being and success. “1. Understanding how to obtain and maintain good mental health; 2. Decreasing stigma related to mental health; 3. Enhancing help-seeking efficacy (know when, where, and how to obtain good health with skills to promote self-care); and 4. Understanding mental disorders (i.e., anxiety, depression) and treatments.”
Fully developing policies in line with these guidelines should include the following steps. First, the school website should be improved to allow easy access to good and reliable mental health information. Second, the Mental and Emotional Health Unit in Health class should be expanded, with less time spent on tests and assignments, and more on real-life experiences surrounding the issue through the use of interviewees or documentaries. Third, the school should continue to add more social workers to the staff so that people won’t have to wait to try to get help when in times of stress and anxiety. Fourth, IHS should follow the lead of other schools in the country that have begun putting into place “mental health recovery days” as excused absences, so that students who are struggling with mental health challenges have the time to seek treatment and get support without falling behind in their classes. IHS has and will continue to help students in mental need, but it must also be aware of how important it is to inform those students that they are still there to help.