Published January 8, 2025 by Drew Johnson, The South Portland Sentry
Yellow tulips symbolize hope and when a thousand of them pop up at schools and the Police Department in South Portland this spring, you’ll have the high school’s Advocates for Mental Health club to thank – along with students of all ages across the district who were eager to lend a hand.
The club, which was formed last school year, participated in the Yellow Tulip Project last semester. The project is a worldwide youth-driven movement aimed at spreading hope and fighting the stigma against mental health, which is also a mission of the club.
“I had a friend who died by suicide last year, mid-school year, and I thought it should be something we should provide everyone an opportunity to talk about,” said Logan Shepard, a junior.
What started with just a handful of students meeting with their principal has grown into a full-fledged club with 25 students, at least 15 of whom show up regularly to its weekly meetings.
“(Shepard) and a few friends said how they were meeting with the principal last year and he told me how they were going to start a club,” said Ella Sawyer-Garland, a sophomore. “I just wanted to join and help out.”
The Advocates for Mental Health club wants their peers to know they always have a shoulder to lean on and an ear willing to listen.
“I had someone close to me pass away and I dealt with that very emotionally,” said junior Knox Jackson. “We wanted to do something in the school that let other people know that there are people that can help them, that they don’t need to suffer alone in silence.”
Althea Turner, a social worker at the high school and the club’s adviser, said the whole point of the club is for it to be student-led and for them to control the conversation and their mission.
“My goal has really been to allow students to have agency and really let them lead the charge as to what they want the club to look like,” she said. “We want to create a safe space for students to come together, discuss current issues and plan events that provide education and joy to our student body.”
Like many school systems in the country, mental health support systems have grown in the South Portland district in recent decades. This school year, Erika Boulware was hired to a newly created position: director of mental and behavioral health.
“She has been really helping us with more systematic approaches to talking about mental and behavioral health and supporting our students,” said SPHS Principal Sarah Glenn.
Boulware said the school has developed three tiers of mental health support, the first being information shared with all South Portland students.
“Tier 1 is just universal support that we give to every student by virtue of them being a student here,” Boulware said. “In the older grades, that’s making sure that people have access to 988, the crisis line. In younger grades, that might be making sure they know that they have an adult who students in the building feel connected to and can go to.”
The second tier is more direct support of students who may be struggling with depression, anxiety or trauma.
“We try to get them group, short-term, brief interventions to support them with that specific symptomatology,” she said.
And for students who need more support, they’re able to meet regularly with a school social worker and the district can help connect them with outside resources as needed.
That’s on top of a wealth of school staff focused on students’ mental health, such as social workers or teachers who specialize in social-emotional learning.
The Advocates for Mental Health spread awareness to their peers of all of these support systems that are in place, which Turner says has already been beneficial.
“It’s really important to me as one of the school social workers that we have a group of students talking about the usefulness of our services,” Turner said. “We can say it so many times as adults, but kids respond to kids. My hope has been that this club would spread awareness about our school resources and also other resources, which the kids have done a really great job doing.”
Jackson said she wasn’t aware of all of the support available to her when she entered high school, but when she learned about it during her sophomore year, she was eager to spread the word.
“It really did help me, so I wanted that to be an opportunity for other students who were either going through the same thing or going through something completely different,” Jackson said.
Whether it’s members of the club or the staff surrounding it, they all believe what’s being done by these students is important work.
“As a club, we don’t really get together and talk about our problems,” Sawyer-Garland said. “It’s just to show people that mental health is real and that everyone goes through something on a daily basis.”
Glenn said the club is a great way for the student body to communicate its needs to administrators.
“We have professionals that understand and know best practices, but our students are the ones that are in tune with what it’s like to be a teenager right now,” Glenn said. “Any time we have opportunities to hear from our students, we have to absolutely listen. They are the ones driving this work in a way that is going to be effective and heard.”
When someone is struggling, it can be very difficult to ask for help – especially when you don’t know where to turn. The Advocates for Mental Health club provides a beacon and a ray of hope.
“I think everybody goes through something, especially outside of school, that maybe nobody in school actually knows about,” Shepard said. “There’s always something that you don’t want to be out there, but you still want to be able to seek help for it … We’re here as a way to speak out.”