‘Students’ Social, Emotional, and Mental Health Needs Must be Prioritized’.
‘Students’ Social, Emotional, and Mental Health Needs Must be Prioritized’
As the director of wellness and prevention education at Phillips Academy Andover, SPH alum Nicole Jeter is working to strengthen the school’s COVID-19 pandemic response while developing and overseeing a variety of health and wellness programming for students.
For School of Public Health alum Nicole Jeter (SPH’19), the COVID-19 pandemic gave her an opportunity to rethink the impact and purpose of her public health work. With a background in community assessment, program design, implementation, and evaluation, and previous experience in AmeriCorps VISTA, she knew she wanted to pursue a career that merged her interests of prevention education and working directly with youth.
Now, as the director of wellness and prevention education at Phillips Academy Andover, a boarding school in Andover, Mass., Jeter is overseeing the development and implementation of a variety of programming to ensure students’ health and wellness needs are being met and they remain connected to their peers and school culture. When she joined the school in 2020, much of Jeter’s work centered around strengthening the school’s protocols and guidelines in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, making sure to keep student well-being at the center.
“Academics are important, of course, but the last two years of the pandemic have shown that students’ social, emotional, and mental health needs must be prioritized, as well,” says Jeter. “It is really important that young people have the tools and lifelong skills they need to lead healthy lives.”
One program that Jeter oversees is called Empathy, Balance, and Inclusion (EBI), which is a comprehensive, multi-year wellness education program that creates informal spaces for students to find social connection and mentorship. Topics covered for each grade level vary, but all conversations center around themes of understanding the self and others, life transitions, communication, healthy relationships, self-care, and decision making.
Jeter leads the ninth-grade EBI program, and works with other EBI course heads to coordinate training and professional development opportunities. She is also working with the consulting firm Hinderlie & Associates to conduct a formal evaluation of EBI to determine if the program is appropriately meeting the students’ needs, how it should be adjusted to better meet these needs in the future, and if the program will be included in the school’s required curriculum.
In addition to this work, Jeter has worked on programming to support and strengthen peer-to-peer connections on campus, which, she highlights, is critical for building a strong school community.
One such program is a sex positive peer-education program called YES+. Jeter is the program advisor, and she works with students to train them on speaking with their peers about various sexual health topics, including safe sexual practices, destigmatizing sex, healthy relationships, and consent. In Fall 2021, she also developed and introduced a new program called the Peer Listening Program, which provides students with the knowledge and tools to deliver care education to their peers and recognize when their peers need adult support. The program is designed for student educators to mitigate minor concerns that may arise, such as navigating feelings of homesickness, transitioning into the school community, and techniques for reducing stress.
Throughout her time at Phillips Academy Andover, Jeter has also been instrumental in bringing notable community leaders and activists to talk with students about various health topics, including Dean Sandro Galea and Liza Talusan, an educator, speaker, and leadership coach.
“Through all of the programming I have worked on throughout my time here, the goal is to always provide our students with tangible skills and takeaways that they can implement in their lives, whether that is here on campus, when they go home for breaks, or long into the future,” says Jeter. “I want them to thrive, so if I can help them understand how to manage their stress, to reach out to someone for support when they need it, or to even just take time out of their day for themselves, I feel like I will have accomplished something great.”
On top of the stressors that come with the vigorous academic culture at Phillips Academy Andover, most students are living far away from their parents or guardians, so a critical part of Jeter’s job, and one she says she finds most rewarding, is simply being present with the students on campus. She can often be found sitting in common spaces across campus, making herself available to students who may want to talk about how they are feeling, vent about their concerns, or have someone to sit with while they work on their homework.
“Often, our students just want an adult to talk to,” she says, “so showing up for them and putting in effort to connect with them, even in small ways, can really go a long way in letting them know that I hear them, I support them, and I genuinely care about them and their wellbeing.”
Jeter says that her coursework at SPH prepared her well for the work she is doing now, specifically her time in Communications Strategies for Public Health, a practice-based course taught by Jacey Greece, clinical associate professor of community health sciences.
“This was truly a course where I was learning by doing, which is a special kind of course to take” says Jeter. “It provided me with a solid framework for the many different roles that I hold in my work now, and I think about and use the skills and techniques I learned throughout the course nearly every day.”