Today I would like to share the story of the Healthy Schools Council, a group of students for whom the goal is to spread awareness regarding mental and physical wellbeing to our school of over 1500 students.
School is meant to unleash potential and inspire growth and creativity, preparing youth for their future aspirations. But pretty early into my high school career, I noticed a discrepancy between this ideal and the daily struggle of my peers. A lot of discomfort arised from the fact that students had taken to vape in the school washrooms, creating an unsafe space for those who needed to use the facilities. I realized this was not a clear cut problem. Students are afraid to speak out if they witness this happening, and reporting something was not a long term solution. What was also at stake here was the health and livelihood of the students vaping, who might be struggling with addiction alongside any personal challenges. Maybe vaping was being used by these students to deal with other underlying personal challenges.
I was inspired to take action when I realized just how normalized this was in my school. It indicated to me that there was a widespread perception that this was the way high school must be. At the start of grade 10 I became one of the founding members and the President of the Healthy Schools Council. Our goal is to make information regarding physical and mental wellbeing more accessible to the student body, and over the years we have approached this in a number of ways.
We have held fairs where students can learn from trifold boards and speak to Public Health Nurses. Our first fair was focused on vaping and substance abuse, and in addition to the main event, we put up posters around the school and on the washroom doors to discourage vaping and provide support resources. Slowly but surely I started to see a change amongst my peers and there were more discussions happening in regards to health. Through this experience I recognized other prevalent struggles in my school, one of the most pressing being mental health and coping, especially during exam seasons. In response, our fairs evolved to provide coping strategies, gratitude boards, and giant board games for students to engage with one another and destress.
In my grade 12 year, we have been able to integrate a variety of activities to further upon our work in previous years. In October we organized an autumn walk over students’ lunch periods to celebrate International Walk to School Month. In December we hosted our Winter Wellness Fair which adopted an interdisciplinary approach that involved multiple school departments like Guidance, Arts, and Phys. Ed, and covered topics such as mental health, vaping, and concussion awareness. On the topic of vaping, we coordinated with Public Health Nurses this April to run our very own Vape Escape Room for grades 9 and 10 classes, and being able to now challenge the normalcy of vaping at school in a thoughtful and empowering way has brought this journey full circle for me.
The success of these initiatives piqued the interest of our parent community, and in 2025 I pitched our idea for our upcoming May Mindfulness Fair to administration and the Parent Council. On May 8, 2025, we hosted this fair, our final one of the year and the final one of my high school journey. In addition to the life-sized board games and tri fold displays, we organized student-led activities in different classrooms so that teachers could sign their classes up to participate in yoga, guided meditation, gratitude journaling, music therapy, and breathing and grounding activities. This fair had the most engagement we have ever seen in the past, reaching hundreds of students.
As a leader, I have been responsible for cultivating a vision for distributing the information our school community needs in an effective and engaging way. Through this initiative, I have learned about teamwork, organizational effectiveness, and creating momentum. All council members have diverse perspectives and ideas which can be incorporated with the aim of developing a better, more comprehensive framework. Seeing younger council members flourish and engage, I am confident that the spirit with which I spearheaded this grassroots movement will prosper amongst our student body long after I graduate.
