At Co-op high school, students balancing academics, work, and personal lives are speaking out about a shared reality: mental health is affecting how they learn, show up, and survive school. Students share testimonies about ongoing struggles with anxiety, depression, and stress and, more importantly, how current systems fail to fully support them. It is clear that while teachers often step in to fill the gaps, institutional support for student mental health remains inconsistent, limited, and overdue for reform. This struggle is not limited to academics. Art and other creative outlets have long been essential ways for students to process emotions and express themselves. As Co-op shifts its school mission to be more focused on academics, students lose one of their most important tools for managing stress and cultivating well-being.
For many students, mental health support is not something they find through official resources – it is something they piece together through individual teachers who are willing to listen. Dayanna Guerra, who struggles with anxiety, explained that she turns to teachers rather than administration when she needs help. The history department, in particular, has become a safe space where she can step in, sit down, and talk through what she is feeling. Teachers take time out of their lunch periods or grading hours to support her, and that support has been essential to her well-being.
While this speaks volumes about the compassion of educators, it also raises a serious concern: that students’ mental health should not depend on whether a teacher has the time, energy, or emotional bandwidth to help. Similarly, students who rely on art classes as a space to release and work through emotions cannot depend on those spaces being available if programs are cut or shortened.
Other students point to how school structure itself contributes to mental health struggles. Mariano Lopez, who lives with depression, shared how advisory and social-emotional learning (SEL) days help ease the constant pressure of school. On those days, the focus shifts from productivity to connection, making it easier for him to attend school at all. “It actually makes it much easier to get up and go to school,” Lopez said. Something that is not a given when mental illness is involved. The problem is not that these days don’t work – it’s that they happen too seldom to make a lasting impact. Having advisory days once or twice a month, sometimes replaced by class meetings about redundant announcements, quite literally defeats the purpose of having them. How is 450 minutes (or 900 if we’re lucky) of the 65,000 minutes each school year supposed to actually be effective in addressing the support our students require with their school work, social lives and future planning? Without creative outlets like art, even the limited SEL time becomes less effective, as students lose a key way to process their emotions outside of those short advisory windows.
Toro Lightning’s experience places these individual stories in a larger context. At their previous school, mental health was almost never discussed. Success was measured by grades, and how fast or correct their work was done – nothing else. While they recognize that schools today are more open to discussing mental health, it is clear that progress is incomplete. Students are still expected to perform at full capacity while quietly managing stress, trauma, and illness on their own. Awareness without action, he suggests, is not enough.
These stories point to a larger truth: schools often claim to prioritize mental health but their policies tell a different story. When mental health support is informal, inconsistent, or optional, students fall through the cracks. Co-op students are not asking for special treatment – they are asking for systems that acknowledge that learning cannot happen when survival comes first. This includes preserving access to the arts, programs that provide students with the space to express themselves, process emotions, and find relief from academic and personal pressures. Cutting or reducing these programs undermines mental health and the very foundation of student growth.
If schools are serious about supporting student mental health, change must go beyond posters and assemblies.
First, advisory and SEL days should be expanded and protected, not treated as expendable when academic schedules get tight.
Second, mental health resources must be clearly accessible, well-funded, and student-centered. Students should be guaranteed consistent interactions where they can get support.
Third, administrators must actively involve students in shaping mental health policies, because those most affected understand the gaps best.
Finally, teachers who already shoulder emotional labor deserve institutional backing, not silent reliance.
Mental health is not separate from education – it is the foundation of it. Until schools treat it that way, students will continue to struggle quietly, leaning on each other and on a few trusted adults to do the work that systems should have supported all along. Art is not an optional enrichment, it is a vital form of self-expression and emotional release. Protecting it is essential to nurturing both student well-being and meaningful performance in every aspect of school life.