Dealing with Stress

Last Friday, we had Olympic Gold Medalist Samantha Arsenault Livingstone on campus to work with our faculty on ways to cope with stress. As an 18 year old, Samantha won the gold medal at the 2000 games in Sydney, Australia as a swimmer for Team USA. Samantha founded Livingstone High Performance in response to the mental health crisis impacting our country. Her initiative is to provide support to individuals, teams and organizations to elevate mental health and improve performance.

One of our strategic goals centers around the health and wellness of our school community. This was our focus last Friday when we had Samantha on campus for our in-service day. 

Our faculty and staff well-being is always on my mind, but so is the health and welfare of our students. I recently read an article about student well-being.

The author is a high school principal in Virginia. The principal asked three colleagues to ask their students what they wished their parents knew about them. There were 130 students who responded that the #1 issue they wanted their parents to know was that they were highly stressed. When they delved into the reasons for the stress, the answers included taking multiple AP courses or advanced courses. They also indicated they were stressed because of cyberbullying and mentally preparing for the college application process.

Stress will always be a part of life. We know this as adults. As educators, it behooves us to teach our children how to manage stress in a productive way. One of the easiest ways is to get plenty of sleep. Unfortunately, almost 75% of high school students aren’t getting enough sleep during the school week.

In addition, our own local paper covers the problem in this week’s issue. The lack of sleep is having a profound impact on the mental and physical health of ourselves and our children.

While I am a proponent of students working hard to achieve their goals in life, I do believe in a balance in getting there. If we can steer those hard-working students to work hard on getting adequate sleep, their goals may seem easier to achieve, and they will be healthier as a result!

I look forward to seeing you around campus!

Stuart