Group aims to use survey data to help Summit County students navigate the challenges of adolescence
When Summit County teens drink, it’s increasingly at someone else’s home with the permission of parents.
Very few teens smoke cigarettes, but vaping use is skyrocketing
Group aims to use survey data to help Summit County students navigate the challenges of adolescence
When Summit County teens drink, it’s increasingly at someone else’s home with the permission of parents.
Very few teens smoke cigarettes, but vaping use is skyrocketing — fivefold among eighth-graders.
The places that students feel the least safe at school are the bathrooms and parking lots.
More than a third of students in grades six through 12 are somewhat or very worried about the possibility of gun violence or an active shooter.
Support Local Journalism
These are some of the facts contained in the most recent version of a state survey designed to reveal the reality students face and to help school and community leaders determine where to focus prevention efforts.
The Student Health and Risk Prevention (SHARP) statewide survey was administered to Utah students in grades six, eight, 10 and 12 in 39 school districts, 17 charter schools and one private school, according to the report. Students in all three Summit County school districts took the survey, with a roughly 30% participation rate, said Carolyn Rose, the county’s nursing director and the person tasked with digging into the data contained in the report.
The survey asks students questions like how many times they’ve drank alcohol in the last month, whether they would be perceived as “cool” if they worked hard in school, if they would miss their neighborhood if they had to move and how important it is to be truthful to their parents.
Other than vaping — five times as many eighth-graders had vaped in the preceding 30 days in 2019 as did in 2017 — the most concerning trends that Summit County’s Communities that Care coordinator Mary Christa Smith noted are a jump in substance use and depressive symptom rates and an increasingly lenient parental attitudes toward certain “antisocial behaviors” like picking a fight or drawing graffiti.
The response rate wasn’t what officials wanted it to be; the report notes a 60% participation rate as a good indicator of accurate responses. Summit County’s rate was half of that, and that is something Rose said organizers are trying to improve. Parents have to opt their students into the survey, and many do not.
Still, Smith says it’s the best tool they have in determining how to address substance abuse and behavioral health challenges affecting Summit County students.
“This is our primary data tool that we use for all of our prevention work,” she said.
It’s foundational for determining the programs that will be used to try to tackle some of the problems identified in the report, she added.
Summit County and its school districts have made a concerted push to increase access to mental health care in the years since the overdose deaths of two young students put the issue front and center in 2016.
The SHARP survey contains some positive information on that front, but also the stark reality that 51.6% of respondents are somewhat or very worried about the possibility of a fellow student committing suicide.
In the previous year, 4.8% of Summit County students had attempted suicide, while 12.2% had seriously considered doing so, according to the report. Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of Summit County students reported high or moderate depressive symptoms.
“We have seen a rise in depressive symptoms for all grades between 2017 and 2019,” Smith said. “There are positive, hopeful signs in there as well: 87% of students felt it was OK to seek help or talk to a professional if they feel sad or hopeless. … The good news (is) — kids are seeking treatment, stigma is declining. (It’s) OK and acceptable to reach out and ask for help.”
She added that students now are more likely to report concerns about a fellow student to a school staff member, which was rare in the past.
Sixth-graders are more likely to tell an adult if they’re feeling sad while older students tend to confide in their peers.
The school districts have begun teaching students how to help when a friend is struggling and have adopted various programs aimed at helping students through mental health challenges.
“Students train students and talk to each other and support each other,” Rose said. “It’s the best support there could be.”
As for substance use, sometimes the issue can be handled if parents talk to their children about their family’s rules, Rose said.
“An example of that is … the parent does these types of behaviors but don’t have the conversation with the child that says this is wrong or the parents don’t have the conversation with the child that they have expectations of no drinking until you’re 21,” Rose said. “Parents need to have conversations with kids about the parents’ expectations. It’s talked about more in schools, (but) kids don’t always know what their parents expect.”
A key initiative that arose out of the effort surrounding the 2017 SHARP report called Guiding Good Choices attempts to help parents initiate those difficult conversations with their children and to know what to say. It’s a five-week course involving about two hours per week and offers sessions in both English and Spanish.
The 2017 SHARP survey prompted stakeholders from the North Summit, South Summit and Park City school districts, as well as county and nonprofit officials, to gather under the guidance of the Communities that Care program to work together to find solutions.
The co