By Macy Meinhardt, Voice & Viewpoint Staff Writer
Team Hoover at Hoover High School has been busy in the last few weeks. Back in February, the group of eight students was challenged to create a community-focused campaign that helps their peers navigate their mental health journey.
The task comes from the nationwide conference known as “The Aspen Challenge.” The program travels to districts across the country to empower students to have a voice and exercise agency on critical issues happening around them. Last February, the Aspen Challenge paid a visit to San Diego Unified, hosting the kick-off for 19 different schools across the district at Prado Hall in Balboa Park.
The experience featured inspirational and informational panels from a select group of speakers. This included members from the “All Black Men Need Therapy” podcast, Alliance San Diego, San Diego Housing Commission, and more. The conference focused on five core issues happening within the community for students to choose their campaign from: mental health, climate change, homeless population, immigration, and chronic absenteeism in schools.
For team Hoover, their campaign of choice is to focus on mental health. For the past two months, these eight students —Ann, Khanh, Damian, Chris, Nhan, Kally, Andy and Anthony, who is one of the African American students on the team —have been working on developing a website and app with mental health resources that their peers can use. The final presentation will be unveiled May 1st at the Aspen Challenge Solutions Showcase.
Ellen Towers, the Hoover High teacher leading the team, has worked in education for 25 years. In an interview with Voice & Viewpoint, she describes the current landscape of mental health among students as grim.
“I think the whole thing is students are more attached to their phones, than they are to each other,” Towers says, pointing to factors such as COVID-19 as a primary trigger to the shift in recent years.
In her view, the circumstances of isolation during the pandemic allowed mental health ailments such as depression and anxiety to fester among teens. As they no longer were getting daily experiences crucial to normal development.
Recent data released by the CDC backs up what Ms. Towers has been seeing in her classroom. Since 2017, rates of anxiety and depression among California’s children have shot up by 70% and one-third of California adolescents experienced serious psychological distress between 2019 and 2021, including a 20% increase in adolescent suicides.
In response to this, the team at Hoover High has built a campaign coupled with a digital platform titled M.I.N.D, serving as an acronym for Mind, Illness, Notice, and Disrupt. For the past eight weeks, these students have been hard at work putting the finishing touches on their presentation, meeting in person multiple times a week, collaborating, and contributing to an initiative that is bigger than themselves.
Student team members Kally and Damien spoke with pride as they told me that their app slogan is, “Made for teens BY real teens”. The idea came from a survey the students sent out to the student body at Hoover asking about their mental health. From there the team utilized the data as their guide to create the tools and resources that would be imputed within the app.
“We know that the biggest struggle youth face happens in high school. And so we’re like, let’s stop this here, and let’s try to help kids who want help, not just from adults, but something that teenagers created for teenagers. And that’s the premise of our app as well as our website,” said Damien, a Junior at Hoover High School.
Kally, a Sophomore, shared that one of the things she has learned throughout this experience is the diversity among mental health solutions and needs for students; it’s far from a one size fits all solution.
“The process made me understand how different people’s experiences with mental health are,” said Kally. “So we needed to consider how to implement features and methods that can reach multiple people rather than a very specific group, like most apps tend to do.”
Meanwhile, with their app and website crafted by-teens-for-teens, Team Hoover exemplifies the power of youth-driven solutions in addressing pressing societal challenges. As they prepare to share their work with the world on May 1st, Voice & Viewpoint looks forward to following along with Hoover, as well as the 19 other schools in the San Diego Unified School Districts who are planning to compete.
