According to a February 2019 study by the Pew Research Center, teens identify anxiety and depression as significant issues for themselves and their peers—more significant than bullying, drug addiction, alcohol use, poverty, teen pregnancy, or drugs. The results cut across gender, racial, and socio-economic lines, with roughly equal shares of teens across all demographic groups reporting similar levels of concern.
Schools, too, have seen a similar trend and are responding in unprecedented ways:
- NAIS has established a Student Anxiety, Depression, and Self-Harm working group
- Schools are developing policies and procedures regarding mental health accommodations, including self-harm and harming others, eating disorders, depression, anxiety, and addiction
- Mindfulness education is exploding across the K-12 landscape
- Comprehensive school wellness programs seek to counter toxic stress
The theme of this year’s Episcopal Schools Celebration is “God is at work in you.” As we watch many young people suffer with anxiety and depression, unsure of themselves and their worth, Episcopal schools can lean into our missions as life-giving institutions. Here are three characteristics of Episcopal schools that can and should advance this important work.
Connection
According to Dr. Scott Poland, an expert on at-risk youth,“The 4th ‘R’ in schools is relationships. School connection is the key to everything for adolescent health and well-being. The feeling of safety, security, and belonging is the foundation of all other learning.”
Episcopal schools are purpose-built to be places where every student feels known, loved, and cared for. Chris Wilson, former head of Esperanza Academy, once wrote, “You can have the best lesson plans and the best curricular materials and the best facilities; but if your school doesn’t have a soul, it will be ineffective. Relationships demonstrate the value of human contact and love—not cars, houses, and the endless pursuit of ‘things’ that has milled so much of the spiritual void in our culture with so many empty and loud messages. Our moral compass is about relationships, about human understanding and engagement, about how we carry ourselves and what we value. Our students and all of us wander through the wilderness of our modern culture. We provide the space—in our classrooms, around the lunch table, in the daily routines and rituals of the day—for people to connect. Our job is to bring life to all with whom we engage, where space is made for God to enter in.”
Prayer
Prayer takes many forms: silence, meditation, walking prayer, song, thanksgivings, blessings, prayers of the people, laying on of hands, the offering of gifts, and more. We may pray together as one voice or pray alone, in silence. Regardless of how or where prayer occurs, however, it is a powerful balm for the soul. Episcopal schools have the privilege to be places of prayer. Young people—all people—yearn for the chance to put one spiritual foot in front of the other and listen for the “still small voice of God.”
Chapel can be a singular place that signals that we are enough just as we are, for we are God’s beloved. The Rev. Barbara Talcott, Chaplain at St. Marks’ School in Southborough Massachusetts, puts it this way: “I try to ensure that everything about the chapel space speaks belovedness to the students. Chapel is not a place for either adults or students to chastise. It should be a place where every child can feel completely safe, welcome, and affirmed. I feel strongly that the least we can do is to make sure that teenagers have one place that does not hold memories of stress, disappointment, or inadequacy.”
Pastoral Care
Episcopal schools have the gift of school chaplains who bring unique skills and training that allow for pastoral care at all levels of school life. Chaplains are a resource for all members of the school community in times of personal or community need, whether the death of a student, teacher, or parent; a local or national tragedy; a painful event in the school community; or attending to individual concerns, large and small.
Skilled chaplains help the school community to live more fully into a call to love and care for ourselves and one another. They often serve as the “conscience” for an institution, calling it back to its basic mission while challenging and encouraging the community to become more of what it can be. At times a chaplain plays the role of truth-teller, doing this in love, support, and compassion for the school, but nevertheless helping the school to grapple with how it goes about its daily life with integrity and compassion. Have we sacrificed relationships for efficiency?
Do students have time to reflect on who they are, or are they frantically building a college résumé? Do we notice who is suffering in silence?
“If we are striving for a sense of belovedness in school communities that are also by their very nature focused on accomplishment,” notes Talcott, “we will have to teach our students—and ourselves!—how to uncouple the one from the other. In academically rigorous schools, as in Western society in general, that is no easy task. As an educator at a selective, high-pressure high school, my greatest grief is seeing how confused our students can be about the sources and signs of their worthiness. The work we do to clear up that confusion is the most important work we do.”
In his letter supporting this year’s Episcopal Schools Celebration, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry writes, “God doesn’t want us not to be successful. However, we can’t overlook the fact that as the pressure to succeed is greater than ever [and] our students strive for accomplishment, they will inevitably at times struggle. It is our job to make sure that, in that struggle, they never lose sight of the fact that they are a precious child of God. So I encourage you this year—as you inspire and equip your students with the tools and academic rigor needed to truly change the world—to also help them see the world in the light of this year’s Episcopal Schools Celebration theme. Because God is at work in us, it is so important that we love ourselves as well as each other.”