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Resources to support AAPI Students

AAPI Not a Monolith (“Model Minority Myth”)

• NPR 2021: 6 Charts That Dismantle The Trope Of Asian Americans As A Model Minority
• Obama National Archive: Critical Issues Facing Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders
• USC Student Voice: Debunking the Model Minority Myth
• Video: Breaking Down the Model Minority Myth

AAPI Adolescent Mental Health Stats (pre-Covid)

• Model Minority at Risk 2009
• CDC Suicide Rates 1999 & 2014
• Asian American LGBTQ Mental Health
• Trapped and Suffering — Inside the Asian American Mental Health Crisis

AAPI Adolescent Mental Health Stats (during and after Covid)

• Mental Health During Covid
• LGBTQ+ and Other Stats ca.gov 2022

AAPI Adolescent Stressors: Mental Health stigma, Less likely to be referred and get help, cultural barriers, relentless striving

• Model Minority at Risk 2009
• 2019: Office of Minority Health
• Factors Associated with Mental Health Help-Seeking
• Psychology Today 2022

AAPI Adolescent Stressors: Discrimination, Increase in Asian hate

• Anti-AAAPI Racism 2021
• Breaking the Silence
• Covid and Racial Trauma Stress 2022
• AAPI LGBTQ+ Mental Health Challenges
• Civil Rights Report 2023

Contact Information

The post Improving AAPI Adolescents’ Mental Health appeared first on Challenge Success.

• Students feeling less stressed 
• Deeper engagement with learning
• Less time spent on homework 
• Increased academic preparation for the coming school year and fewer students needing summer classes

So how did they do it? During the School Partnership, a Challenge Success coach partnered with Salesian’s multi-stakeholder team – including students, educators, and parents / caregivers – to center the student experience, gather and interpret community-voice data, design research-based, equitable policy and practice changes, and ultimately create community-specific outcomes. 

We are currently signing up schools for the 2024-25 School Partnership and want to hear from you! Whether your community is looking to increase well-being, deepen engagement with learning, or enhance belonging, we would be honored to co-design with you to transform the student experience. Contact us to learn more!

The post Confirmed: Schools Can Effectively Reduce Student Stress appeared first on Challenge Success.

Measure Impact Over Time

Multi-year surveying allows your team to see school data over time across all of our measures, ensuring you have a baseline as well as current data to share with key stakeholders, parents, and staff when reviewing past initiatives and considering new ones. 

The post How many students have an adult to go to for support at school? appeared first on Challenge Success.

In its recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary and Trends Report, the CDC recognized that improving youth mental health requires an understanding of young people’s environments and how these environments affect their behaviors and experiences. As a result, their latest survey includes a question about “school connectedness,” which is the feeling among students that people at their school care about them, their well-being, and success.

While the research shows that school connectedness has long-lasting protective effects for adolescents, only 61% of students in the CDC survey feel close to people at school. In the Challenge Success Student Survey, we look at belonging and connection in school through a variety of dimensions. We have found that: 

• only 69% have an adult at school they can go to with a personal problem
  
• only 38% feel they can really be themselves at their schools most or all of the time
  
• only 36% feel like a part of the school community most or all of the time

Understanding the Link Between Learning and Belonging

We have known for years that social, emotional, and cognitive processing are all neurologically intertwined. When students of all ages and stages feel they belong to a community, they are more likely to thrive — and students don’t learn as much when they feel uncertain about their belonging.

When we combine our findings from our survey questions around engagement with the belonging questions, we find that students who are fully engaged are also more likely to feel a strong sense of belonging in school. This association between belonging and engagement is bidirectional, meaning that students’ sense of belonging in school is also significantly positively correlated with feeling engaged in their schoolwork. 

These kinds of findings are a powerful tool in helping you to understand how students in your school are actually doing, but once you gather the data, how you choose to use it is what really makes a difference.    

Below, we have included three of our top strategies to improve connection in schools. And, if you are interested in learning how students in your school are doing, we can help. Together we will go beyond merely collecting the data. Our expert research team offers deep analysis of your results and works with you to co-develop a customized plan to focus your efforts on the students who are struggling the most to improve their well-being, engagement, and belonging right away.

LEARN MORE ABOUT
OUR SURVEYS

Three Ways to Nurture Connection in Your School & Improve Youth Mental Health

1. Solicit Student Voice: Empower students to build advocacy skills so that they learn how to ask for what they need. Provide communications channels for students to share their ideas with adults at school, such as a comment box, student advisory group, or focus group. Do you want to find out how students in your school are doing? Work with us to gather real data about students in your school and partner with our expert research and program teams to analyze your results and take steps to improve well-being, engagement, and belonging. Learn more here. 
   
   
2. Leverage Your Schedule: How time is allocated during the school day reflects what is important to the community, intentionally or unintentionally. The organization of time in the school schedule can facilitate or impede connections between and among the school staff and students. Learn more about our take on school schedules and well-being here, or contact us to be part of a select group of schools working on schedule change in our 2023-2024 School Program.
   
   
3. Make Learning Meaningful: The adolescent years are the peak of our identity development as human beings. Since teens are inherently curious about who they are, we can leverage this focus by creating ways for them to explore their identity through the curriculum. When teachers intentionally design lessons that are meaningful to their students, build an authentic climate of respect into their classrooms, and listen closely to students and incorporate their input, students’ sense of belonging and academic engagement are more likely to be high. Read more about the connection between belonging and engagement here and check out some strategies for peer-to-peer connection building here.
   

Upcoming Events to Support Youth Mental Health

• The Institute for Social Emotional Learning (IFSEL) is hosting a free TeachMeet on April 4th all about School Belonging as a Protective Factor. Their TeachMeets offer a simple structure to share resources and connect with people around the world who “get it”.
  
  
• Join us on May 10th for our flagship workshop, The Well-Balanced Student, which offers schools and families research and strategies that encourage a more balanced student experience, including topics like homework, sleep, cheating, and more. If you have or work with children younger than third grade, join us May 24th for The Well-Balanced Child instead, where we share strategies for healthy PK-2nd grade child development.

If the cost of attending an event is a barrier for you or students you work with, please reach out about our financial assistance.

A: After seeing the data, I felt it was even more important to have well-being, engagement, and belonging…Frosh year I was really scared coming in, because I went to public MS and was not the minority race, coming into HS where I was minority race, that was really scary for me. That’s why I cofounded Asian Cultural Alliance – so students like me could find people going through the same experience.

Q: How has the Challenge Success survey data expanded your awareness around well-being, engagement, and belonging?

-Emma, Student Advisory Committee Member

The post How to Mitigate the Youth Mental Health Crisis in Schools: Connection + Belonging appeared first on Challenge Success.

We were saddened to see the data in the report of the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey that shows that all youth are struggling with threats to their health and well-being and that many of these trends have worsened over the last decade. The report reveals stark rates of mental health challenges for certain groups of students in particular: girls and those who identify as non-heterosexual.

We have seen similar trends in our surveys of more than 250,000 students over the past decade. While we don’t ask questions about sexual orientation in our survey, we do cover gender identity and dig into the causes of stress for students. We are particularly concerned about the higher rates of poor mental health and stress-related health symptoms for girls and students who identify as non-binary, transgender, or genderqueer / gender non-conforming.

Our data shows a notable difference in the experience of students in these two groups this school year. Students who identify in this way are more likely than boys to report stress-related health symptoms, missing school for a physical or emotional health problem, and that mental health issues are a source of stress.

Data Gives You Power to Make Meaningful Changes

“The survey was so helpful and so powerful. Thank you so much. We can really see significant differences between these groups and now we can take some concrete action to improve things. This work is really going to make a tangible difference for our students and staff.”

-Administrator from De La Salle High School

Do you want to find out how students in your school are doing? Work with us to gather real data about sleep, stress, academic engagement, and more. Our powerful analytics allow school leaders to disaggregate data by identity markers such as race, gender, and gender identity.

Go beyond the data with our expert research and program teams to analyze your results and take steps to improve student well-being, engagement, and belonging in your school, especially for historically marginalized student populations.   

Upcoming Events to Support Youth Mental Health

• One of the biggest stressors for youth is the pressure of the college admissions process. Join us on March 9th to find out about a healthier approach to navigating this major transition point for kids and parents alike.
  
• Join us for Mental Health on Purpose on April 19th, a free webinar with Lynn Lyons that is part of our commitment to the U.S. Surgeon General’s Call to Action on Youth Mental Health. Co-sponsored by our friends at REACH Student Life Management.

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