We are highlighting examples of Black excellence every day this February….and beyond! Feel free to send us suggestions!
Kent Alexander is a anti-racism & workplace culture co-consultant as well as a poet, playwright, actor, and teacher, based in Western MA. His work integrates somatic practices while utilizing practical tools to investigate and navigate the history of racism, challenge stereotypes, explore otherness, as well as how to cultivate the skills needed to move beyond our biases and toward collective healing.
Kent worked with CTC for several years as well as Elms College, Mount Grace Land Trust, United Way of Hampshire County, UMASS Amherst Theater Dept., Center for Community Resilience after Trauma, TerraCorps, the Western Massachusetts Training Consortium, and the ValleyCreates initiative of the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts.
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence every day this February….and beyond! Feel free to send us suggestions!
André Leon Talley was an American fashion journalist, stylist, creative director, and editor-at-large of Vogue magazine. He was the magazine’s fashion news director from 1983 to 1987, its first African-American male creative director from 1988 to 1995, and then its editor-at-large from 1998 to 2013.
Monday, January 17, 2022 is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, honoring one of the most important leaders and thinkers in American history. Dr. King was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesman and leader in the American civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a great opportunity to reflect on Dr. King’s work, increase our understanding of his legacy, and take action to ensure freedom and justice for all people. Celebrating and building on Dr. King’s legacy is not limited to one day a year! May the momentum from the January holiday carry us into February’s Black History Month celebrations and beyond: into a daily practice of working towards collective liberation.
Here are some resources to explore and share and to inspire ongoing action:
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute supports a broad range of educational activities illuminating Dr. King’s life and the movements he inspired. The Institute website includes links to documents, other sites, curriculum, and opportunities for further connections.
Learning for Justice(formerly Teaching Tolerance) also has some great resources for educators/mentors. Its collection of lessons, teachable texts and further reading helps educators bring the work of Dr. King to life in any learning setting.
“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”
Dr. King is known for his speeches and writings.Here is a link to some of his memorable quotations. Make sure to research the source of the quotation to gain an understanding of the context in which Dr. King said or wrote it.
The Arts provide an embodied connection with Dr. King’s legacy.
Stone Soup Café in Greenfield is hosting its second annual MLK Day Pick-Your-Own Film Festival! Choose from six incredible films. Register at https://bit.ly/3G5Fmri
Check out the movie Selma, a 2014 historical drama film directed by Ava DuVernay and written by Paul Webb. It is based on the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches initiated and directed by James Bevel and led by Martin Luther King Jr., Hosea Williams, and John Lewis.
For nearly two decades, the Communities that Care Coalition has coordinated an annual survey of Franklin County and North Quabbin’s 8th, 10th, and 12th graders. Each year, The Coalition works with local schools to collect and provide valuable data on teen’s relationship with their school, their families, and substance use. With the tremendous changes of the past year, the 2021 survey was adapted to better reflect the questions raised about the impacts of COVID and quarantine on our youth.
The Coalition has just publicly released the first pass at the 2021 data, focused largely on mental health, the fastest growing problem identified in the survey.
A screenshot of some of the people who virtually attended the coalition meeting via zoom.
Accelerated Release Plan
“Our data is always helpful, but this year’s data feels particularly actionable and time sensitive. We have school counselors with more and more students seeking help for mental health struggles. This data highlights the full scope of this crisis, confirming the toll COVID has taken on our youth,” said Sage Shea, who is one of the data analysts processing the results. “While results are anonymous, each school district receives a report on identified trends. In the past, we’ve sent survey results in the summer. This year, we’re releasing data in phases so the schools can act on it more quickly before students leave school for the summer.”
“The pandemic has amplified trends that we’ve been seeing for the past several years as young people have been spending more and more time online and alone and less and less time with peers,” said Kat Allen, the Coalition Coordinator. “This year of quarantine has taken that to an extreme.”
Student reports of symptoms of depression (measured by students answering that they were so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that they stopped doing some of their usual activities) have been on the rise over the last decade. Teen mental health was already alarmingly high in 2019 when 32% of students reported symptoms of depression. This number took an unprecedented jump to 42% of students in 2021. Similar increases were seen in reported symptoms of anxiety with rates jumping from 33% in 2019 to a previously unimaginable 43% in 2021.
A still from the slideshow that highlights a spike in mental health. Symptoms of depression have gone up tremendously while suicidal ideation haven’t risen between 2019 and 2021.
Longitudinal data trends for teen mental health.
When asked what they feel most worried about, students’ top three concerns were (1) climate change, (2) social justice issues, and (3) their appearance. Fears of personally getting sick from COVID ranked lower than the majority of other concerns.
In addition to high rates of loneliness and isolation, the survey examined poor mental health contributors like inadequate sleep (nearly half of students are sleeping 6 or fewer hours per night). Other contributors included tremendous screen time (more than half of students reported spending four or more hours per day in addition to the hours they already spend on their screen for school and school work), and school stress (not surprisingly, the vast majority of students found school to be more stressful and less enjoyable than it was before COVID).
All groups appear to be struggling, but who’s hurting the most?
Girls and Trans Students
Girls reported higher levels of depressive symptoms than boys (51% compared to 28%). Similar disparities were seen in rates of anxiety (56% and 26% respectively). Transgender and gender nonconforming students (who make up 4% of those surveyed) had even more alarming rates of mental health symptoms with 77% reporting symptoms of depression and 75% reporting symptoms of anxiety.
Queer and Questioning Students
Queer and questioning students (27% of the total sample) reported double the rates of symptoms of depression and anxiety than their straight peers (66% of queer and questioning students reported depression and 68% reported anxiety, compared to 33% of straight students).
Students of Color
Rates of depression and anxiety were also slightly elevated for students of color and for students from families with lower socio-economic status compared to their white and higher SES peers. When comparing mental health outcomes for specific racial and ethnic groups, Native American students (1.3% of the total sample) and multi-racial students (6.6% of the total sample) had particularly elevated rates of symptoms of depression and anxiety compared to their peers (50% of Native American students and 47% of multi-racial students reported symptoms of depression compared to 42% of white students; 50% of Native American students and 55% of multi-racial students reported symptoms of anxiety compared to 43% of white students).
“We know that even relatively small differences in mental health challenges between groups in adolescence can become exacerbated over time due to the unequal access to resources in our society. We also know those with more intersecting marginalization can be even more vulnerable,” said Shea.
One piece of surprising and somewhat positive news is that the survey did NOT show any change in the percentage of students who reported seriously considered suicide in the last year. That number remained constant at 17%. There remains, nonetheless, significant disparities between different identity groups – girls’ rates of suicidal ideation is twice that of boys (20% compared to 10%), and transgender or gender nonconforming students’ face higher rates still (46%). Queer and questioning students have more than triple the rate of suicidal ideation than their straight peers (33% vs. 10%). Students of color and students from families with lower SES have higher rates of suicidal ideation than their white and higher SES peers (20% vs. 15% in both cases). Again, Native American students were at the highest risk of any racial or ethnic group, with 35% of Native American students reporting suicidal ideation (compared to 16% of white students). Multiracial students also were at elevated risk (22%).
“The data really show how much our students are struggling, and how much we need to increase the mental health supports we have in place for students as we continue to transition to a new normal,” says Allen. “It is more important than ever to support our community counseling programs, to teach social and emotional skills to students of all ages, to help students build connections to their schools, their communities, and their families, and to work to dismantle the system of white supremacy which is at the root of these disparities.”
*Note, the press feature is different than the press release, pulling in more stats that directly mirror the flow of conversation from the Coalition meeting.
The Communities That Care Coalition has released the results of our 2021 Teen Health Survey.
More than 1,500 Franklin County and North Quabbin students from 9 school districts participated in the survey during February of this year, providing valuable insights into COVID-related health behaviors and concerns.
UMass School of Public Health Master’s student Jasmine Inim provided a look at the data on family time spent together in the pandemic. Find her presentation here.
We are delighted to report that over the April vacation, 11 counselors from 6 school districts and Clinical and Support Options participated in a 3-day training in a PreVenture Program Facilitator Training. The PreVenture Program teaches cognitive-behavioral skills and motivational techniques to students in a small group setting, based on their personality type. The program has been shown to be highly effective in reducing mental health problems as well as drug and alcohol use.
The reviews of the program and the training were overwhelmingly positive, and local counselors are very excited to bring this program to their students!
Look4Help is an online search tool for all kinds of services in Franklin, Hampshire and North Quabbin Regions. Look4Help has a range of resources sorted into easy-to-navigate resources including topics like: mental health, addition and recovery, health care, disability services, finances, transportation, domestic violence, and more. It is a project of Community Action Pioneer Valley, together with Baystate Health and the United Way.
Kat Allen’s My Turn column ran in the Greenfield Recorder July 22, 2016. It highlights some of what parents of younger kids can do to prevent substance use.
Of course, I don’t mean to make it sound like this stuff [like locking up alcohol and hiding ’empties’] is all there is to substance use prevention. There’s the all-important emotional skills (how do you handle big feelings like anger and anxiety in healthy ways?) and social skills (how do you make a new friend, or say “no” politely to a request from a friend?) that we’re teaching them — intentionally or not — through modeling and teachable moments.
And I’m delighted to report that nearly all of our local middle schools are teaching this, too, by offering the LifeSkills program.
And there’s the super-protective-factor of the warm, caring, safe relationship that kids have with their parents. These are far beyond the scope of my locking cabinet in the pantry but obviously tremendously important to drug and alcohol prevention and just about everything else in life.
Kat Allen
In case you missed it, you can find the article here.
