October 12, 2023
As much of life returns to the patterns and rhythms of the pre-pandemic world, schools and organizations are continuing to observe and experience the effects of the COVID-19 disruption on the academic, social, and emotional development of our students and staff. Some schools have created a Director of Wellness position in an effort to assess the immediate needs of the community and to develop a comprehensive wellness program that will support them. Last year was my first year serving as University High School of Indiana’s first Director of Wellness. The primary function of this role is to create and implement a wellness framework to support students, faculty, staff, and the parent/caregiver community.
Prior to this new role, I served as the Co-Director of College Counseling for seven years and witnessed first-hand how stressful the process of applying to colleges can be for students and families. At University, we emphasize good fit when advising students in creating a college list, which includes not only academic, but social, environmental, and cultural fit as well. For many families, this is a new and intimidating process to navigate, but luckily for independent schools, there are people on staff specifically dedicated to this process. That being said, although the role of a college counselor requires a certain level of social-emotional support, there are still many wellness topics and coping strategies that students could benefit from learning while navigating the process and transitioning to life after high school. This is where a Director of Wellness could further support students and families and although this role is new for me and fairly new for independent schools, I hope that sharing my notes will inspire other independent school leaders to consider building similar roles for their organizations.
Laying the Foundation:
Although the titles may be similar, the Director of Wellness role may function differently depending on the needs and culture of each school. One of the ways I was able to develop this role was by consulting with other wellness directors at independent schools across the country. Each month, a consortium of around twenty of us meet virtually to discuss our roles, functions, and upcoming projects for our respective schools. We learn from each other and get ideas on how we can continue to build out the role to include a department of faculty and staff. Currently, I am a department of one, and that includes also serving as the professional school counselor, meaning I am the main point of contact for students who are in a crisis situation or high-stress moment and need additional support in a confidential setting. One of the challenges for school counselors is that in general, we are responding to situations after students have already reached a point of distress; in other words, it is more of a reactive than a proactive approach. While school counselors certainly do provide education and programs for their schools, their time is often consumed with supporting students in crisis moments, along with other administrative tasks like scheduling classes, supporting students through the college application process, and connecting families to resources in the community.
The Director of Wellness position is consistent with the research that says whole-school interventions have a greater impact than one-on-one counseling when it comes to social-emotional development. However, one-on-one support is needed now more than ever. For perspective, last year I met with about a third of our school and responded to over three hundred individual counseling appointments. This is not a sustainable model when considering the potential for burnout. In a perfect world, The Director of Wellness and the professional school counselor would be separate roles; the latter focusing on the need for one-on-one support, while the Director of Wellness prioritizes systemic interventions. While school counselors are trained to provide social-emotional services, other faculty and staff may not feel fully equipped to support students with their mental health needs. At University High School, all faculty and staff also serve as mentors to a handful of students, who they meet biweekly to check in about academics and social life at school. This is a great way to reinforce wellness themes with students while also assessing their personal successes and challenges. During faculty meetings, wellness professional development topics include helping teachers and mentors recognize signs that their students may be struggling, education about the anatomy of stress and trauma as well as symptoms and characteristics associated with triggers, sharing specific questions to help students reflect and reframe their mindset around stress and anxiety, and exploring strategies that build emotional connection and intuition into classroom learning environments.
The first year of my role meant surveying our school community to get a better understanding of the baseline for wellness. After consulting with other independent schools, we administered the NAIS Authentic Connections High Achieving Schools survey as well as the Faculty Resilience survey that used a combination of verified and open-response questions that produced a detailed report regarding student, faculty, and staff wellness. For instance, stress about the future, hyper-parenting, and closeness with peers were measured through this assessment. This gave us a baseline for how we compared to other public and independent schools and also what programs and interventions would be most needed and effective in addressing wellness gaps. It was eye opening to see the disparities and demographic differences of our student body when it came to themes of belonging, anxiety, depression, and pressure from home. When it came to faculty and staff wellness, the data determined burnout as being the biggest indicator of stress. It was also interesting to discover that the most pressure being felt by adults in the building is coming from themselves, with students, parents and colleagues following in that order. To address the needs of the community, interventions include small groups, school-wide presentations, professional development for teachers and educational programming for caregivers.
Whole-School Approach:
Continuing with the “whole-school approach,” I surveyed each department to determine what their wellness needs were and asked them to include a wish-list for collaboration, which helped to further identify opportunities to establish the connection of individual work to the big picture and colleague interactions. This interdepartmental collaboration is reciprocal, meaning in addition to what the support services the Director of Wellness may offer, each department may also think creatively about how they can continue to weave in wellness themes and improve systems in order to create an optimal environment for all involved. From admissions and learning support to academic and athletic departments, creating a culture of wellness looks like including all individuals, systems, structures, and stakeholders in the school community. Biology teachers can think creatively about incorporating more nature and outdoor education into their curriculum, for instance establishing partnerships with local parks or designing labyrinths for meditation trails on campus. Admissions can work with wellness directors to discuss new freshman and transfer students while having a list of resources readily available to share with families when discussing unique wellness needs. Collaborating with learning support departments on integrating emotional regulation and focused-attention practices with students, or working with the technology department on creating a comprehensive list of media and guidelines for healthy technology use are also ways that the Director of Wellness can interact with departments across campus. By exploring interdepartmental needs and integrating them within the educational philosophy of the school, wellness remains at the heart of the organization. Wellness programming is not a box to be checked but a culture to be nurtured and therefore should show up in all aspects of the school.
Dr. Lori Desaultes, a leader in applied educational neuroscience, is best known for helping educators create trauma-informed schools, and she is often quoted saying: “dysregulated adults cannot effectively regulate students.” Through her work alongside Dr. Stephen Porges, who discovered the polyvagal theory, we know that social engagement is the most contemporary branch of the autonomic nervous system and humans experience a wide range of emotional and interpersonal experiences between fight and flight. Because emotional connections impact cognitive learning, it is critical to extend wellness offerings beyond students to include the adults in the building and community and this strategy aligns with current public health trends. The U.S. Surgeon General recently released a framework for workplace mental health and wellbeing in response to the declining mental health crisis and mass exodus of workers from certain fields, including education. “Protection from harm, connection and community, work-life harmony, mattering at work, and opportunities for growth” were listed as essential practices to support the health and wellbeing of all workers. Through this framework, I am able to make suggestions for systemic changes that make space for more autonomy and work-life balance in an effort to address stress and burnout.
In a recent article titled “The Power of Doing Less in Schools”, Justin Reich makes the case that if schools want real change, they should start by subtracting things. So often the initial response for school leaders has been to add programs or accelerate current systems in an effort to catch-up on lost instructional time, especially throughout the ongoing pandemic. The issue with this thinking is that creating systems and processes can often add to the exhaustion and overwhelm. What if systemic change began by asking the question: “what current systems can we let go of?” For example, looking for opportunities throughout the calendar year to implement more space for breathing room and free time to focus on individual tasks, adjusting the length and frequency of faculty meetings, and potential policy changes around technology use and homework loads could be places to start. While continually looking for opportunities to channel the power of subtraction, schools can also think more creatively about connecting colleagues to meaningful professional development opportunities that can rejuvenate and inspire staff in addition to creating time for them to participate in activities not related to their work. That’s not to say each of these suggestions will come into fruition, but with a Director of Wellness on staff, it helps keep these items on the agenda while sustaining a culture of gratitude and normalizing support focused on mental health.
When it comes to student wellness, in order to move from a one-on-one counseling model to a whole-school engagement model, I look for opportunities to reach students in small and large group settings. At University High School, we begin each day with a morning meeting that includes the entire school community. This is a great way for me to engage the school in relevant wellness topics, ranging from focused-attention practices that support neuroplasticity, to adolescent brain development and sleep hygiene, while reiterating ways we can better support ourselves and each other. With respect to small group interventions, some of the offerings include supporting students through grief, split-family households and gender identity. All of these efforts have at the root of them the theme of “belonging” which is perhaps the most important predictor of health and longevity.
Belonging:
The foundation for creating connection is fostering cultures of belonging. We know from the discovery of mirror neurons in the 1990’s that human brains are soft wired for empathy, which stems from the fundamental need to belong. Loneliness is now considered a serious mental health hazard and the call to create opportunities for social connection has never been louder. Research tells us that social isolation is more dangerous than smoking fifteen cigarettes a day and is a significant predictor of poor health and premature death. Social connection has a direct impact on biology, psychology and behavior which all contribute to adult health outcomes, and of course we know how the pandemic exacerbated these already known challenges. Belonging is also directly linked to improved academic outcomes such as school attendance, test scores and a higher likelihood of graduating from college. Now more than ever, schools and workplaces need to focus on fostering social connection in order to create healthy and thriving work and learning environments which includes looking at the structure, function, and quality of the relationships within the school community. Most independent schools lead with a set of core values, and this is an opportune time for schools to connect those values to the science of belonging to create more buy-in from their students and community. Weaving in values and themes throughout the year and connecting them to brain science and healthy adult outcomes resonates with young people who are experiencing unprecedented levels of stress, anxiety and depression.
Thanks to the research of Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and other pioneers in neuroscience, we know that the relationship between emotional connection and cognitive learning is interdependent and without emotion, learning is impaired. To stay current, schools can focus on supporting teachers with strategies to help students make deeper connections with each other as well as to the content they are learning in class. Stress impairs learning and memory, and a lack of coping skills has left us with definitions and data, but not necessarily solutions to the youth mental health crisis. A wellness director can provide coping strategies for managing stress, teach brain-based practices that help strengthen neural pathways, and share empowerment practices that help strengthen intuition and self-awareness so that deeper connections can be made.
As the role of a wellness director continues to develop, we can think of wellness in schools as a living framework that provides both structure and fluidity in order to adapt to new science and the ever-changing educational landscape. Year two of my role will look like establishing monthly wellness themes (next month will focus on values & purpose), strengthening community partnerships with mental health therapists, fitness instructors, and engaging speakers, and utilizing the school’s resources to think creatively about establishing a culture of gratitude while continuing to build policies and curriculum centered in belonging. The case for wellness in schools has been validated by science and public health trends; the question now is how will independent schools establish their own baseline and framework for wellness. Creating a Director of Wellness position could be the best next step.
You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Lade Akande for Intrepid Ed News.
