Feb. 26th’s Stressed Out Students (SOS) “assembly” was executed in unique, student-led discussions. The smaller individual assemblies, held in each classroom during B period, were designed to engender an open dialogue between students about enjoying and managing life in high school.

The assembly was a project of the Gunn SOS committee. Gunn has been working with Stanford and parent-student-teacher SOS committees for two years to consider strategies for stress reduction.

Denise Clark Pope, director of the SOS project at Stanford and author of a landmark book on student stress entitled Doing School, began working with Gunn in 2006. Since then, Gunn has created its own SOS committee composed of teachers, parents and students. “The committee worked very hard on this assembly,” Principal Noreen Likins said.

During the assembly, student discussion leaders, who were trained by members of the Student Executive Council, asked each classmate to create a brainstorm web about sources of stress in their lives. Conversation followed this brainstorm. “I think people have forgotten what they’re working for,” senior Jinnyi Pak said in a discussion.

Midway through the assembly, all students watched a video titled “My Life in High School” produced by senior videographer Kaitie Macknick. The video included interviews with several Gunn students about their hectic schedules. “It was good to see the perspectives of different students,” sophomore Ben Bendor said.

The assembly ended with a final discourse about solutions to combating stress. “We discussed different techniques people have for relieving stress,” Bendor said. Avoiding procrastination, tackling problems one at a time and discovering activities for relieving stress were major topics discussed, Bendor said.

Several students found these in-class discussions more useful than past SOS assemblies. “This one was much more effective,” Bendor said. “It was more meaningful to have someone who’s a student talk to other students.” Senior student facilitator Michaela Venuti agreed. “I thought it had the potential to be helpful,” she said. “In the previous assembly, the lady speaking [Denise Clark Pope] only had one idea: you shouldn’t take hard classes.”

As a result of this generally positive feedback, Gunn will hold assemblies akin to this one in the future. “We’ll continue to probably have one discussion assembly per year,” senior Student Body President and SOS committee member Max Keeler said.

Despite the efforts of the SOS committee, some students feel that the Gunn administration has made few, if any changes to reduce student stress. Senior Ayumi Tsurushita said she has seen “nothing really evident” in terms of change.

The Stanford SOS group devised a list of suggestions for schools to follow to reduce stress and bolster integrity. These include policies such as creating test and project calendars to reduce overlapping assignments, revising late work “zero” policies, moving finals to before winter break, opening access to AP and honors classes and developing parent education programs to address family pressures.

“We are careful not to suggest specific strategies to schools; rather, we ask schools to make their own site-specific plan to reduce stress and increase student health, engagement with learning and integrity at their schools,” Pope wrote in an e-mail message.

Pope said Gunn has made a conscious effort to reduce stress on campus, despite student perceptions that the school has not made any changes. “Gunn has sent representatives to several of our SOS conferences in the past years, and this year was no exception,” Pope wrote. “I know that they have surveyed students, parents and staff to gauge stress levels, and that they have re-vamped freshman orientation in part as a response to our work.”

According to Likins, the administration has improved interdepartmental communication in an attempt to coordinate testing schedules. The SOS committee at Gunn also explored the possibility of restricting the number of AP classes each student can take. “The difficulty you run into at Gunn is that people value the opportunity to choose,” Likins said. “We have many students who can honestly cope with a large number of AP classes. Ultimately, it doesn’t serve all of our students if we try to restrict them.”

The committee also suggested a block schedule (having fewer classes in one day) as a means of reducing stress, but the administration decided against it. “If people like the present Gunn schedule, why would we necessarily want to go to a block schedule?” Likins said.

After working on the assembly since last May, the SOS committee at Gunn will halt its monthly meetings. “We’re not meeting for another year because the committee has completed so much in the [five] years it’s been around that we think we’ve done a good amount for the school,” Keeler said. “Also, a lot of our members are moving in to focus on the WASC [accreditation] process, so they wouldn’t be able to focus on SOS.”