During a Feb. 10 assembly, Lone Peak High School debuted a video featuring a message from the teachers to the students: “We see you.”
The video is based on a poem written by English teachers Jacob Rees and Kyle Nelson. One line of the poem reads, “We see you push open doors, darkness and hope,” and that is what the teachers and the schools’ administration hope to communicate through the video. They want the nearly 2,500 students at Lone Peak to know that they recognize the teens' struggles and setbacks, and they can empathize.
“They have this idea in their heads that just as we move from one grade to the next, we move from high school to college to our perfect career, and they don’t realize that most people major in ‘I changed my mind’ or ‘I don’t know’ for three years or ‘I moved back in with my parents twice,’ " said Rees, who has taught at Lone Peak for eight years. "They don’t realize that most people have a stutter, start-stop to their lives.”
In the video, Lone Peak teachers share challenges they faced as teens, including depression and academic failures. At the request of Rees and Nelson, Ethan Harris, a 17-year-old junior at Lone Peak, filmed and helped edit the video. Harris, who co-owns Espial Effects with his father, has felt the pressure of adolescence.
“We certainly have quite the reputation to live up to,” Harris said. “There's more going on in our lives than the letters we get on our report card, a lot more. When you break anything down into a grade, a number or a score, we lose something. This video is helping us get that something back, letting us realize there's such a thing as perfect imperfections.”
Rhonda Bromley, principal of Lone Peak High School, said that while the video was not intended to be a response to the suicides committed by students at the school or surrounding schools in recent years, depression is one of the many issues high school students face.
"Even one suicide is too many," Bromley said. "We did have one this year, earlier in the year, and certainly that's something that we want to continue to talk about. We had a big meeting with parents where we talked to parents about signs to look for and things that we can do to work as a community. It's not just a Lone Peak High School issue. It's our entire community."
While the video highlights specific challenges some students may face, the encouraging message applies to all.
“This is a response to every struggle that we see at Lone Peak High School," Rees said. "There’s not any one problem that we were isolating. Something that we wanted to make clear in the text is that we see everybody that has a variety of problems, people that feel like they’re not noticed in a variety of ways whether it is in academics or social or whether it’s in their futures and what they want to do. It was a response to every struggle and every trial that our students go through.”
The video speaks to students across the state and even the nation.
"Students at Lone Peak aren't different than students at other high schools in that all of them are struggling with something," Bromley said. "Even if it is social issues with friends or maybe someone in their family has a health issue going on or parents are going through a divorce. In our area, one of the things we discussed in our CARE Team assembly last week is just the pressure that sometimes students feel to be successful."
The CARE team is a support system created by the Lone Peak administration last year. Students on the CARE team are nominated by peers as people they would feel comfortable turning to if they had a problem. CARE is an acronym for care, action, reassure and empower. The administration encourages members of the CARE team to notify an adult if they know of anyone going through a difficult time.
Harris appreciates, and hopes his peers appreciate, the efforts of the teachers to relate to and support the students.
"We've all been through trials," Harris said. "And it's great that Lone Peak is realistically acknowledging them, rather than pretending we're all perfect. Having the school publicly advertise that is very moving."
Email: mjones@deseretdigital.com