Mental Health Survey Initiative
As the survey lead on my school’s Principal’s Wellness Advisory Team, I conducted a survey that asked students about mental health and its correlation with distance learning (you can find more about my involvement with mental health here:).
After meeting with my team every week, we were able to push out a survey officially on 11/16/20. I organized meetings outside of our usual weekly check-ins so that we could complete the questions on our survey, review it, and update our principal and counselors (both academic and mental health), who worked with us on this initiative. I also spoke at teacher department meetings to tell our teachers about our survey and their role in providing outreach for it (as well as receive feedback from the teacher’s perspective).
When our whole team, including our principal, was thoroughly satisfied with it, we released the survey and every teacher pushed it out onto their classes. There was great encouragement for it to be completed by students, and after about a month, we were able to achieve great progress with it with 1362 responses (last recorded on 12/25/20).
With over 1,360+ responses (wow!), I discovered several trends. The top issue that students were struggling with, that have been exasperated by distance learning, was the development of depression and anxiety. The next leading wellness issues were loneliness/lack of socialization, and staying motivated; there were also an alarming amount of students who are struggling with family and parental issues because of quarantine. Along with their mental health, their physical wellness was also deeply affected; many students felt as if their fitness and physical needs have changed for the worse (in fact, we saw that a majority of the students struggling with their body physically have developed unusual eating & sleeping habits).
From this survey and its analyzation, I learned that shelter-in-place and distance learning has definitely taken a toll on all of our students both mentally and physically, regardless of grade level.
As for next steps, I will show my findings to my Mental Health Matters club (which I am president of) and continue working with my Wellness Advisory Team as the survey lead to look for ways we can help students, whether that’d be implementing new policy, making resources more accessible, or changing something in our day-to-day curriculum to incorporate mental health. I will also continue to advocate for mental health awareness and try to reach out to all of our students; recently, our psychologist has been laid off because of a lack of funding, so I have been trying my best to accommodate for her absence on a student level.
Overall, I am very proud of my team’s hard work. We are determined to help our students at our school, and with over 1360 responses, we were able to kick-start the first step on this journey.
