Editorial: Rework Wellness Education Evergreen Sta the

Once every few weeks, Upper School students receive wellness lessons during advisory time. For 25 minutes, we learn about topics ranging from healthy relationships, to coping with stress, to identifying the signs of anxiety and depression.

Typically, these sessions include 20-30 PowerPoint slides that the Upper School counselors speed through to cover as much information as possible before our next class begins. More o en than not, there is little engagement, re ection or retention of the information, simply because we are not given the time and space to fully process what we’re learning.

Organizing wellness programming in this way is not e ective, nor is it sustainable.

Each of these topics is incredibly important, especially for teenagers. ey provide a crucial foundation that will set us up to live the rest of our lives in socially and emotionally healthy ways. As students, we need to know how to set priorities, navigate stressful situations and resolve con icts.

ese 25-minute advisory sessions don’t provide the necessary health and wellness curriculum we need. Trust us: students do want proper sexual health education, they want to learn how to manage relationships that turn abusive and how to have healthy, positive experiences in high school, college, and beyond.

But the way our wellness curriculum currently works does not allow us to cover these topics adequately. It leaves little room for conversations around how they apply to our lives. Bringing up topics concerning mental and physical health in these isolated sessions, among other things, only raises questions that don’t get answered.

Without comprehensive coverage and engagement with wellness, students must turn to other sources to get answers. is is redundant; Greenhill has more than enough resources to adequately meet student needs and demands. But it also runs the risk of students absorbing misinformation about their own health, which is dangerous and counterproductive to the school’s mission.

To really address student needs, our wellness curriculum requires a multi-faceted approach.

First, there should be a semester-long class required for freshmen that intricately explores these topics.

“A lot of the time that I spend with students is really just providing them skills and guidance on how to make big decisions, and that can be done in a wellness class so successfully and give a really good foundation,” Upper School Counselor Kathy Roemer said. “If we spent more time doing prevention work, we would probably do even less intervention because students would have the skills to manage on their own.”

But this shouldn’t stop a er ninth grade.

We want to see these topics discussed in our curriculum. We know this is a bit complicated, so here are some ways we see this as a possibility: in chemistry classes, talk about substance abuse; in English classes with content dealing with sexual assault, talk about consent; when discussing reproductive biology in Upper School biology classes, talk about contraception, how to access it and why it’s important.

All of this is already part of Greenhill’s 2025 Strategic Plan, which calls for comprehensively “developing the whole student.” Additionally, the plan says, “Greenhill aims to become a leader in supporting student health and wellbeing.” Under this section, the plan aims to “implement a comprehensive, integrated, PreK-12 student mental health and wellness curriculum.”

Not only is this a more comprehensive wellness program supported by our Upper School counselors and even the upper levels of our administration; it’s also supported by students.

Students need e ective and well-rounded exposure to these subjects. We urge the school to implement the comprehensive, integrated Upper School curriculum that the strategic plan