Through May 12-16, the counselors planned to acknowledge Mental Health Awareness Month through the Mental Health Awareness Spirit Week in the SIS high school community. However, the event faced obstacles, including its overlap with AP week and the lack of promotion, leading many to question its effectiveness in achieving its goal of spreading awareness.
Each day featured fun themes that tied back to the goal of spreading the different aspects of mental health to help boost morale and school spirit for both students and staff.
The dress codes and themes from Monday to Friday were the following respectively: green to represent the official color of the Mental Health Awareness month, promoting the support for the awareness week and breaking the stigma to encourage emotional well being; pajamas to suggest the importance of sleep in the improvement of one’s mental health, celebrating the power of rest, relaxation, and recharging your body and brain; activewear to bring awareness to the need for physical activity to help our bodies stay energized; fruit or veggie to promote the importance a balanced diet in supporting mental and physical health; and school spirit colors to show the strength of our school community, unity, and pride.
Even though these goals and themes were chosen to reflect diverse aspects of spreading awareness on mental health that have often been overlooked, the event has struggled to fully engage with the school community and maximize its potential impact due to limited attention and participation.
Its timing was not ideal, as it overlapped with the AP week, where many students were absent either for preparing or taking their final AP exams. Because the students were too preoccupied with exams, the event was not able to garner enough participation.
Another challenge was the lack of promotion. Themes and goals were communicated only through emails and an instagram post, many students were unaware of the event taking place, or did not know where to find the themes for each day.
“Personally, it reminded me of all the ways I can care for my mental health, like eating healthy and exercising, for example,” Haven Cha (11), spirit week participant, said. “But I think maybe there could have been more promotion, such as making morning announcements or posters, because I kind of forgot about the event, and many people seemed not to know about the spirit week.”
Although various spirit weeks have been previously implemented throughout the school year, they have been one of the hardest activities to get students to engage in. Considering that school spirit is not easy to garner, extra efforts are needed when organizing spirit weeks.involvement.
For example, to draw in more students to follow the dress code, organizers of the events could send out surveys of possible options of dress codes that aligns with the theme of the day and allow students to vote on the option that they would most likely to be participating in or even make contributions themselves by suggesting an idea. By implementing students’ creative ideas and looking into the participants’ preferences, the event can become more appealing and interactive.
Even with the consistent email announcements and great effort behind the organization of a special event for raising awareness on such an important issue, spirit weeks remain a challenge in the SIS community.
