Pressure to get good grades. To look good. To fit in. At Cary Academy, we know young adults experience tremendous pressure. Add to these the uncertainty and strife that seem to dominate today’s headlines, and you have a significant challenge to emotional health.
Recently, we sat down with Twanna Monds, Director of Student Support Services, to learn how CA is striving to put student wellness front and center across campus.
How do you define wellness?
Well, let’s start with the American Psychological Association’s definition, which defines wellness as a dynamic state of physical, mental, and social well-being. Implicit in the concept of wellness is an understanding of health that goes beyond the mere prevention and treatment of illness and disease. Wellness is more proactive rather than reactive; it’s about actively promoting and participating in a lifestyle that contributes to good physical and mental health.
How does that relate to the promotion of student wellness at CA?
Wellness for school-aged children transcends the individual; it requires seeing them as part of a family, a peer group, and, of course, a part of our larger school community. It demands that we consider all the complex forces, relationships, and influences that are in play for them in their lives.
And that also means that wellness is a team effort, a community effort. It requires a partnership between CA, parents, extended family, peers, and external care providers. We have to ask how we can work together to embrace wellness as a collective goal so that we can best support our kids in all areas of their lives.
Where does Student Support Services come in?
Student Support Services is part of CA’s mandate to advance a culture of wellness across the school. That means making wellness more than just a program here and there but something that is integrated into every facet of the student experience.
I like to think of us as the healthy, beating heart of CA. We collaborate with every member of our school community—partnering with our faculty and staff, the Center for Community Engagement, Administration, the PTAA, the Athletics division, etc.—to ensure that considerations of student wellness are infused into everything CA does. We’re looking at individual student needs and, more holistically, at community or even grade-level needs. What larger patterns are we seeing that we need to address? What kind of community education might we need to undertake?
We have a huge role to play in helping nurture empathy and compassion. We help students process peer interactions, even disciplinary outcomes. We’re talking through what happened with them, the consequences, and how they might make restitution. We’re teaching them how to apologize. How to see something from another person’s perspective. How to repair relationships when maybe you treated someone poorly. These are all crucial parts of adolescent development.
Any personal goals?
I want to ensure that all students are seen for who they are. We want to meet with all students—even if they’ve never met with one of CA’s counselors or learning specialists before—so that we can build that relationship and develop a more nuanced understanding of who they are as people.
Our students have so much going on in their lives—academic pressures, challenges within friend groups, explorations of identity, and stress about the future. Individual one-on-one conversations are so important; it is how we can build trust and show genuine curiosity and care for what they are experiencing.
What are they involved in outside of CA? Who are their friends? How do they handle disappointment? Who do they turn to for advice? What are they worried about? Genuinely seeking to understand each student means that we can more effectively work to meet their needs or connect them with a broader network of providers in our community if that is warranted.
What do you love about what you do?
I truly enjoy working with students. They have a genuine openness. They might be funny or upset. Challenging or resilient. And everything and anything in between. But the look on students’ faces when they discover something about themselves? That is wonderful to me. And getting to be even a small part of it? That’s why I love what I do.
