Jim Wise, Chapel Hill High School’s student assistance program specialist, gave a presentation on April 9 about substance abuse, mental health and other issues affecting teenagers.
Wise presented Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools (CHCCS) data from the biennial Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) of middle- and high-schoolers, run since 2001. The district’s YRBS is part of a national survey run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“I’d like this to become as much a conversation as a presentation,” he told roughly 20 parents in the media center. Before he started his slideshow, he passed around for show-and-tell a bag full of confiscated drug contraband.
Kirsten Barker, the president of the school’s Parent-Teacher-Student Association (PTSA), was in attendance. As both the PTSA president and as a parent, she said, she went to the presentation to learn more about issues affecting students.
“Specifically as a parent, I am aware of the prevalence of vaping in the school, but I had never smelled vaping liquid before or seen the e-cig/Juul products. That was really informative,” she said.
In the presentation, “#Trending (In Your Teen’s World),” Wise looked at trends in district data from most recent YRBS, in 2017. The 2019 survey will be held by the end of April, he said, then processed by a data analyst, shown to the school board and published in late summer or fall.
The school club Students Against Violence Everywhere (SAVE), which Wise advises, uses YRBS statistics for the “Reality Check” at the bottom of the “Toilet Talks” fact sheets posted in bathrooms.
“We hope that students appreciate the fun survey results from their classmates, but also take the time to read the Reality Checks that present important information on health and safety,” senior Grace Dodge, a co-president of the SAVE chapter, said.
Wise said the upcoming YRBS will confirm or rebut the anecdotal trend that the number of students who vape has gone up over the last two years. A parent in the audience brought up the perception that school bathrooms are used for “open” vaping.
“Sometimes we have to catch them to have conversations,” Wise said, explaining that when students are caught in the act, they either have to take an online class, or talk with Wise, about vaping; one Juul pod, for instance, contains about the same amount of nicotine as a pack of cigarettes. He said he hoped that security guards searching bathrooms worked as a deterrent.
Though the rate of consumption continues to fall, alcohol is still the most used substance among CHCCS students. From 2013 to 2017, high schoolers’ reported consumption of alcohol at least once over the last 30 days dropped from 33 to 23%.
The 2017 YRBS showed that about 120 of 4,000 high school students in the district were weekly binge drinkers, and teenagers who consumed alcohol generally said they got drinks from someone they knew.
Among CHCCS high school students, from 2003 to 2015, cigarette use over the last 30 days fell from 23.5 to 5%. Marijuana use is falling as well, though about 160 high schoolers smoke it daily.
“Who are they harming? Mostly themselves,” Wise said of marijuana users.
Wise criticized the push toward marijuana legalization in the United States, noting harmful effects like addiction and psychosis, the small number of medicinal uses, the tobacco company Altria’s support of legalization and the fact that as public support grew from 1998 to 2008, the average THC content in marijuana doubled.
Wise spoke about topics other than drugs, too. The social media platforms that CHCCS students use most are YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat, according to the YRBS. In his presentation, Wise gave parents crash courses on Internet topics like sexting, “finstas”—from which students can launch personal attacks under the cover of plausible deniability—and signs of cyberbullying.
He encouraged parents to talk with their kids about what they do online and to try to keep phones out of bedrooms: “It doesn’t have to be an inquisition; it can be a conversation.”
From a parent’s view, mental illness and stress seem common in CHCCS, a perception the YRBS has confirmed, Wise said.
A topic like suicide can seem out of the realm of regular conversation or thought, he said, but “unfortunately, this [thought] is not so uncommon.” In 2017, two in five girls and one in five boys in CHCCS said they had had serious thoughts of suicide over the past year.
Self-care “can mean different things to each of us,” Wise said, such as having “me time,” good nutrition and academic choices, a fun class in the school day, exercise and, especially, sleep. “When it comes down to one more hour of study or one hour of sleep, choose sleep—almost every time.”
Mental health is also among the PTSA’s priorities, Barker said. The PTSA has brought Angst, a documentary about teen stress, to CHCCS; supported Youth Mental Health First Aid trainings for teachers; and contributed pizza to monthly “mindfulness lunches” at school, among other efforts.
In a “Tiger Tid Bit” at the end of a recent school newsletter, Barker wrote about a fact she learned from Wise’s presentation: the Orange County Health Department offers free kits of Naloxone, which reverses opioid overdoses.
“Jim’s knowledge about issues surrounding adolescent physical, emotional and mental health is off the charts,” she said. “We are so lucky to have him at CHHS.”
Wise said he was satisfied with the turnout at the evening presentation.
“It’s good to get this out there to parents who are interested,” he said. “Information is a good thing to have.”
Visit the CHCCS webpage about the YRBS and student health trends.
