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Student Mental Health In School

 This is an Action Project for my core class Social Entrepreneurship. In this unit, we have been learning about SWOT analysis and how we can better GCE with it. This Unit, we were also visited by a counselor who works with businesses for legal advice. This helped us figure out what all we need to have prepared for our interviews. Overall it was an interesting Unit. For this project, we were tasked with analyzing our school to look for something that needs improvement in the school. We needed to follow SWOT analysis and interview four people about the school and find what they think can be improved or changed in GCE. For this AP, I decided to focus on the betterment of student outreach in GCE. Right now GCE has done a great job with outreach, yet there is still room for improvement. I will go into more detail in the paragraphs below. 



Student Mental health is something that is one of the most important things when it comes to a school. If a student is not doing well, it can lead to them falling behind in class or socially. GCE Lab School has overall done an amazing job at communicating with students about their mental health. If a student is having trouble mentally, they can reach out to the student counselor. The school also has something called connections. In connections, the student counselor talks with students about a variety of things. For example, some of the topics that they talk about is college, if they have complaints, if they are having trouble in a class, or even what they ate for breakfast. Something else GCE has are peace circles. Peace circles are meant for students and cohorts to talk about problems they have faced with each other. They are typically called when there is an argument or if something intense happens. Overall, GCE does a better job with connecting with their students than any other public school. There is a chance for a tragedy of the commons situation. If one student decides to talk up too much of the resource that is our student counselor, then it would leave less outreach for other students in the school who might actually need help. In my project, I am looking at these from four different perspectives. Two are students, and two are teachers who go to GCE. I chose these people because of how they work within GCE. First I chose a senior student who has been apart of all of the main points I talk about. Second I chose a teacher who is new to GCE so I can challenge his new perspective on GCE. Third I chose GCE's school counselor because she knows and leads connections and peace circles. Lastly, I chose a junior student who has been at GCE since freshman year and is also the junior representative. 

For GCE the main concern is not having enough time to speak with the counselor and not being able to talk to the teachers due to their lack of experience. My proposed "solution" would be to create more days and extended time for connections. This would result in students having more opportunities for them to talk to the student counselor about whatever they need or even just to work on homework if they need to. I also believe that letting a select few of teachers that are open and willing to receive training in order to handle serious situations professionally without harming their mental health even more. I was able to come to this conclusion because of the information that was provided by my four interviews. They all pretty much said that allowing teachers and staff to get training would prove to be effective in GCE. I believe that having more than one Kiley as well would give more opportunities to reach Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is basically levels that show what someone needs. The levels are Physiological, Safety, Love/Belonging, Esteem, and Self-Actualization. They also said that connections is one of the best ways to get students to talk to the student counselor in a safe space. This resulted in them saying more/longer connections would prove to be very effective. I think it's good to have GCE's connections because it is one of the things that sets the school apart from public schools. It makes them more approachable when it comes to mental health outreach.


Overall, this Action Project was a memorable one. It allowed me to take a deeper look into my school and explain how it can improve. Student Mental health is one of the most important things when it comes to a school so being able to research and help the school improve its outreach for it was something I am proud of. If I could change something about this AP it would be my questions for my first interview because I wasn't as prepared for that one like I was for the rest of them. Aside from that, I am happy with my project and I am looking forward to the next one.

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