After spending the last several months working on a campaign called “Health Comes First” as part of the VIP (Violence Intervention and Prevention) Youth Organizing Institute, two Boston Latin Academy students from Dorchester are continuing to implement their vision for a revamping of the exam school’s schedule to better accommodate students’ mental health.
Cecilia Medina, 17, and Niasia Hughes-Polk, 18, were two key members of a youth group that worked with city artist-in-residence Victor Yang to strategize ways to address issues of mental health in schools. Out of a year’s worth of workshops and brainstorming sessions arose the concept of “support blocks,” or chunks of time built into the school day specifically for students to access mental health resources or tend to their own psychological well-being.
Medina told the Reporter that the campaign to rally support for the idea was “not easy,” particularly when it came to convincing certain BLA teachers, but that most of them came around in the end.
“Many teachers thought it was going to take away time from their classes,” she explained. “It took talking with them and explaining that this is not a study period or a free period, this is mental health support since we are a rigorous exam school.”
The new support blocks, set to be implemented for the first time next year, would be about an hour long and occur twice a week. Medina reasoned that these allotted times will help break up the school day, which she said previously consisted of seven straight class periods and a 22-minute lunch period.
“This could be a time when students can go to their social worker, their guidance counselor, or a therapist, and also talk to any teacher as needed for mental health support. We’re also thinking about support groups, or opening up the gym, the weight room, the art studio, the theater, which would be great as many students have acknowledged they deal with their mental health in different ways, some through physical action or verbally or just by themselves,” said Medina.
Hughes-Polk, who has led workshops at VIP for the past couple of years, noted that the strategies and methods she learned there could inform the way support groups function at BLA, where she hopes to see similar workshop models replicated.
“At VIP, we talk about an iceberg model: prevention, intervention, and then recovery, so it doesn’t continue in a cycle and happen again. So, we brainstorm different preventative methods to violence,” she explained. “We have talked about coping mechanisms and being trauma-informed…those things could be a possible workshop for students to go through.”
Normalizing those mental wellness blocks, she added, could help remove some of the stigma associated with mental health for students and families, as well as offer an alternative to families that face obstacles like health insurance.
Yang, who admitted he “felt like a backup dancer where I’m cheering from the sidelines for the vast majority of the campaign,” credited the students for their poise and patience throughout the process.
“I’ve been doing community organizing work for the last ten-plus years now and I’ve worked with a lot of adults who, I would argue, don’t have the capacity or the maturity to be handling the number of sensitive issues as these young people have done,” he said.
Yang, who has a background in creative writing, acted in a guiding role to create a safe storytelling space for group members, many of whom experienced depression, anxiety, and a “deep sense of isolation” during a pandemic-wrought school year in which many couldn’t see their classmates or enjoy healthy social lives.
He referenced a faculty member who called the support blocks “one of the most significant changes to the school in half a century,” and said he hopes other schools will recognize that change as a necessary and long overdue one.
“I think we tapped into something that had been nascent and latent and what people wanted but were unable to give voice to,” said Yang. “Our hope is that if we show this works really well at BLA other high schools or even K-12 institutions in the area would want to replicate something similar.”
