As the school year progresses, students tend to encounter more stress and general issues with their mental health. A mental health awareness week was hosted in hopes of helping students cope with their problems.

In Wednesday advisory lessons, students were provided with extra resources, presentations and encouragement to reach out if they needed help with any aspect of their life, whether that be school or home related. It’s easy for staff and administrators to say that mental health is an important subject that they care about, but do they do enough to make sure that the information they are sharing is being heard by the student body?

While presentations are being shown in class, it is common to see students scrolling on their phones, talking to their friends and not paying attention to the information on the screen ahead of them. It is also not unusual to notice home room teachers skipping through the slides quite quickly in order to be done with the advisory lesson and get on with things they have to deal with. Though the teachers are meant to be helping their students and giving out information, they often do not bother to correct the passive behavior of their students. Both parties are equally uninterested in the information presented to them and seemingly would rather be doing anything else. “Typically the students will go on their phones or talk with their friends while the lesson is being taught and the teacher does not do anything about it and continues teaching,” freshman Ksusha Uliyanova said.

Administrators claim that mental health is a top priority for them but seem to have little enforcement when getting these resources out to students. “In my homeroom people don’t pay attention to the presentations or videos on the board at all and often they see it more as an inconvenience rather than something helpful to them,” sophomore Eli Kertesz said.

One thing that was definitely done right by the administration was creating a Be Well 365 page, which is seen directly at the top of the school website. This page is a place that combines all of the most important information a student, staff member or parent can refer to when it is needed. Essential information like phone numbers for hotlines, websites and ways to reach out for professional staff can all be found on this page, as well as general information like what Be Well 365 is and what their goal is. “I am very glad that a page like this exists as it’s super helpful to everyone but I didn’t know that it existed until brought up to me by another student,” Uliyanova said.

It’s easy for administrators to present information and to claim that a subject like mental health is important to them, but when it comes to proactively making sure that students and staff are receiving the information, they tend to lack the willpower to do so. It is outrageous that a number of students were not aware of the fact that it was mental health awareness week until it had already passed. How are the efforts that administrators make to put out resources effective without the equal passion in enforcing those resources?