Back-to-School Season Brings Focus on Mental Health at Trevista

With the summer season drawing to a close, schools across the Denver area are filling back up with life and energy as another school year kicks off. As children once again begin to flood the halls of Denver schools, faculty at Trevista at Horace Mann, an elementary school nestled in Sunnyside, are once again tasked with balancing the many different needs of these kids. 

One of the issues that’s at the forefront of mind as the school year begins is mental health and helping to provide students with the tools and resources to address and manage it. 

“We don’t want too much challenge,” said Jessica Mullins, principal at Trevista. “We don’t want too much trauma. That’s a whole other thing. But we want our kids to be able to go through a challenge, have that stress, but to be able to work through it so that they can be happy and successful adults.”

Helping kids to address issues surrounding mental health is an important value in Trevista, with lessons on cultivating mental wellness built into the curriculum, along with programs that are meant to help mental health needs among the student body. The new school year brings new developments on that front, with the school adopting a new therapy dog that it hopes will help in calming students and creating a space for them to reflect.

“That’s something that we’ve been prioritizing for the last few years,” Mullins said. “We do a social-emotional learning block. We also have a lot of initiatives that we do. We have a monthly initiative where we prioritize a monthly theme. So we always start the year talking about empathy, like what does it mean to walk in someone else’s shoes? Kids struggle understanding perspective.”

Mental health is a priority for the broader residents of the Sunnyside area as well. Saturday, September 6, shortly after students are back in classrooms, is the Sunnyside Health and Wellness Festival, a yearly event organized by the Sunnyside United Neighbors, Inc., or SUNI.

“The idea behind it is that Sunnyside hosts a lot of health and wellness businesses,” said Joey Shearer, president of SUNI. “So we wanted to find a way that our local chiropractors, doctors, dentists, barbers, tattoo artists, can get to a place and engage with our community on a one-on-one level.”

This marks the third year that the event has been hosted. The goal of the event is to help encourage healthy practices among the people in the area and amplify those who provide services to address these needs in the area. The festival features wellness demonstrations, lessons on bike safety and outdoor recreation, and over 25 local health and wellness vendors.

“We also want to focus a lot on our families,” Shearer said. “This is kind of the last bit before school starts going; we want to be sure families can get together. It’s about just being inclusive and making sure everyone knows what they can do to live a better, healthier life.”

As part of its broader message surrounding health and wellness, the festival hopes to spotlight ways of developing healthy mental wellness habits and practices, from yoga to meditation to therapy.

“We’ve had a couple of psychiatrists and mental wellness providers come back year over year,” Shearer said. “This is a good way to take away that mystery of what therapy could look like by having a bit of those one-on-one conversations. It’s really bridging all of those facets of what wellness looks like.”

School-aged children are one of the demographics most disproportionately impacted by issues surrounding mental health. According to the CDC in 2023, 11 percent of kids aged 3-17 had diagnosed anxiety, and 8 percent had some sort of behavioral disorder. This is in line with a rise in reported cases of mental health problems among children and adolescents.

“I think one challenge is we are in uncharted territory,” said Mariah Kamei, head of the Trevista PTA and vice president of SUNI. “I worry now that this generation—my kids are six and eight—is going to have this whole new world, which is the AI era, and how that’s really going to change how people interpret facts. Then there’s just the usual stuff, growing pains, right? Learning how to socialize, learning how to be part of a group of people, how to be an individual while also maintaining your sense of belonging, right? All of that is really hard.”

With these trends in mind, focusing on strategies to help address and regulate mental health is seen as incredibly important for schools. However, Mullins is optimistic about the steps being taken at Trevista to help strengthen mental wellness and address these issues.

“When you talk to parents, they really just want their kids to be happy, right?” Mullins said. “That’s like the biggest thing for them. They want their kids to be successful in school, but ultimately, they want their kids to be happy. When their child leaves the school building and gets in their car at the end of the day, parents want to hear that their child had a great day, and they want to hear something positive. And I think that is in life as well, so when kids have just the tools and the strategies to be able to work through whatever life brings them, they’re able to have more and more of those  positive and joyful moments.”

The Sunnyside Neighborhood Health and Wellness Festival will be held at Chaffee Park on September 6, from 9 a.m. to noon, and is free to attend.