Schools regularly administer academic assessments to get a sense of what new students know and how to best help them learn more.
They should do the same with what happens in a student’s heart, learning a lesson from “the toughest prep school in America,” that Benedictine monks have run for over 150 years in the heart of Newark, New Jersey.
Saint Benedict, Now widely considered one of the most successful inner-city educational movements, it provides an excellent example of how using simple emotional health information forms can help educators reach troubled teens long before their problems ruin their academic performance.
After years of reporting on the school for my latest book, I realized that this modest approach, or some version of it, could work well beyond the walls of a small school.
St. Benedict’s gives each incoming student a personalized assessment, originally modeled on Western Psychological Services’ “Problematic Experiences Checklist” for adolescents, which is now out of print. The school is updating its own form to reflect emerging issues, recently adding a question about isolation caused by the pandemic shutdown.
On the form given to them, students indicate which of more than 200 potential “problems” bother them, such as “Other kids tease me,” “My parents don’t like my friends,” or “My family member is in jail.”
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Ivan Lamourt, St. Benedict’s associate principal and certified school psychologist, says assessing each student in this way costs little more than the price of the checklist itself and provides powerful information about how students are feeling. Assessments are the best way “to collect real-time data on the kids in front of us,” he told me; they “challenge us to grow to meet the needs of these children.” Their motivational mantra: There is no point in trying to reach a student’s mind unless you first address their heart.
St. Benedict’s Prep, founded in 1868, has long been a pillar of a poverty-stricken community. However, as the racial makeup of Newark changed, enrollment declined, and in 1972 a majority of monks voted to close the school.
But a few held on, determined to reinvent what a prep school could be.
They extended the school year to 11 months, instituted a strict honor code, and prioritized brotherhood and empathy. While maintaining high academic standards, they gradually introduced experiential learning, including a mandatory week-long hike on the Appalachian Trail for all freshmen.
They also made a conscious decision to focus more on emotional counseling than standardized testing.
The school reopened a year later with only 89 students, which is easy enough for a single counselor to manage. Over the decades it has grown considerably. It now includes primary and middle school divisions and, since 2020, a girls’ preparatory school division. Total enrollment is approximately 1,000, and most students in all divisions are black or Latino. Daily attendance hovers around 95 percent and almost all graduates continue on to college.
Many students come from disadvantaged or dysfunctional families. The school now has a counseling center on its property, staffed by two trained psychologists, a handful of psychiatrists and licensed school counselors assisted by interns from nearby colleges.
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Lamourt and his team use admissions forms the same way administrators use academic evaluations to determine which students need immediate help and which can be kept on a constantly updated watch list.
Additionally, throughout the year, any student showing signs of emotional distress may be referred for individual therapy or the unusual group counseling sessions offered by the school.
These sessions are another way St. Benedict gets the most out of its orientation budget. As this is a private school, students can attend group sessions without prior parental authorization.
Each day of the week features different groups and themes. For example, “Blue Man Group” discusses depression, “Women of Wisdom” deals with coming-of-age issues for girls, and “Unknown Sons” looks at families in which parents are physically or emotionally absent.
While the rest of the school participates in morning assembly, up to two dozen young people can show up for one of the 30-minute groups in which younger students mingle and learn from the upper grades, discovering ways to talk about intensely personal issues that urban children – especially boys – rarely discuss outside of this type of setting.
One “Unknown Sons” session I attended asked students how they felt when compared to someone else. The responses were deep and emotional, full of anger, resentment and jealousy.
An older boy took the lead and helped a young man painfully recognize that hearing his mother say he is like his father is truly humiliating, because he knows she hates his father for leaving the family.
Several other students said they had experienced the same thing and that it hurt their self-perception.
Administrators and parents at other schools live by the academic parameters that St. Benedict downplays, and a fully staffed counseling center like St. Benedict’s is beyond most schools’ budgets.
But emotional assessments are not out of reach and group sessions are effective, greatly increasing the reach of counseling while helping to remove the stigma attached to it.
Guardrails in public school districts would make it difficult, if not impossible, to adopt the St. Benedict approach on anything other than a limited basis. But adding an abbreviated emotional checklist to freshman selection or experimenting with a group of “Unknown Sons” are feasible options. And I think this small school in a big city shows that any measure that gets ahead of emotional problems in adolescents can lead to enormous progress.
Anthony DePalma, a former education journalist and foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of several books, the most recent being “On This Ground: Hardship and Hope at America’s Toughest Prep School.”
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about emotional health intake forms for schools was produced by The Hechinger reportan independent, nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Register with Hechinger weekly newsletter.
The article OPINION: Against All Odds, a Small School in a Big City Changes Lives by Focusing on Emotions appeared first in The Hechinger Report.
