Talawanda students lead the way in school’s mental health campaign

Julie Watt is in her senior year at Talawanda High School. Memories of her time as a student will be marked by the usual things — classes, hanging out with friends, prom. Mixed in with the day to day, Julie also took an active role in making her school a comfortable and safe environment. 

Julie joined the Youth Initiative Team (the YITs), a student group focused on addressing youth issues, in her first-year and is now a senior leader. At first, she worked on different programs targeted towards helping her peers with issues they could relate to, like struggling with a vaping addiction. Then, at the start of her junior year, a grant from Interact for Health, a nonprofit focused on improving the mental health of communities, changed the trajectory of her work.

Amy Macechko, health and wellness coordinator at Talawanda, said after Talawanda received the grant in May 2023, they started putting it to use at the beginning of the next school year. The YITs and the Talawanda Middle School Brave Initiative Team (the BITs) got to researching what issues were affecting their peers. 

“We were very excited about the opportunity,” Macechko said. “We just thought this could be a really cool opportunity for our youth to really take a deep dive into better understanding the mental health needs of their peers.”

Macechko said the students started with three questions. What are the key stressors in the lives of middle school and high school students in today's world? What are their stress relievers that help them be mentally well? And what is it that they want to make sure that the caring adults in their lives know?

Both teams then did a random sampling of their peers at each school and asked them those questions. Most importantly, though, they listened. 

“I think that mental health is a huge thing now,” Julie said. “So focusing on that and just being able to give this resource just felt really important to me.”

Since the initial listening sessions, the YITs and the BITs have created two campaigns: “Be the Calm in Our Storm” and “There are Many Ways We Manage Stress.” The first focused on educating the adults about how they can support the kids in their lives through times of hardship. The second focused on the different ways youth might relieve stressful feelings.

They also added a new mental health resources page on the Talawanda Schools website. There parents and students can easily find tips to stress less, substance use disorder treatment options, suicide and crisis lifeline number and more.

The teams also initiated Sources of Strength or suicide prevention programming and QPR Training. QPR or Question, Persuade, Refer is training geared a learning to recognize when someone is suicidal, and the youth leaders decided it would be helpful for them to have those skills. As a result, teachers and administrators at the school will also participate in the training starting next school year. 

“The principal has said, ‘Well, if we are training the students in this QPR training, we need to make sure all of the adults are trained,’ and so we already have a date on the books to make sure our adults have the same knowledge as our students are going to receive,” Macechko said. “And so that's like the icing on the cake that I did not anticipate as an initial outcome, but once again, when you give youth the power and the voice, they let us know what they need.” 

Julie said she’s glad that in her time in YIT, she’s been able to make the high school a better place for her peers. She said the best part of it has been the friends she’s made along the way. 

“It’s been nice, not only to spread the campaign but to meet new people.”