This article appeared as "Present Tense" in the Winter 2026 issue of Independent School.
In a world where alarming mental health trends continue to shape the student landscape—according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 40% of students felt persistently sad or hopeless, while 20% seriously considered suicide, and 9% attempted it—it is clear that fostering a culture of well-being in our schools is of paramount importance.
About a decade ago at The John Cooper School (TX), after our school community grappled with the tragic loss of an alumna who died by suicide and several other young people in our local community also took their own lives, we made it an urgent priority to destigmatize mental health challenges and prioritize well-being. We quickly realized that a crisis management approach to responding to crises was not enough. We needed to shift from reactive to proactive.
As we took the first steps to centering well-being at the heart of our school community, we created a new counseling position to lead the efforts; partnered with the national mental health awareness organization Active Minds; and initiated many conversations among administrators, faculty members, counselors, and students. From these discussions emerged a strategic framework for positive culture change and a collective recognition that well-being is not a goal to be achieved in the future but a way of being in the present.
The Framework
Through our sustained work over the past eight years, we ultimately produced a framework that we call the Five A’s—Aspirational, Aware, Active, Accepting, and Available. At the beginning of each academic year, we revisit the framework through a series of presentations and wellness messages, reminding teachers, students, and parents that well-being isn’t separate from academic or personal success: It’s foundational to both. The framework guides us to be aware of our mental and emotional state, take effective action to support it, approach challenges with a curious and nonjudgmental attitude, and remain available to ourselves and to others in our community.
Aspirational
What kind of school are we trying to be? This has become a guiding question, not just a passing inquiry, for our school as we continually seek to clarify our true purpose: We want to become a community that understands well-being not as a luxury but as a fundamental need for everyone—and something we actively cultivate together, not just when crisis strikes. We want to be more than a place where students come to acquire knowledge, but rather one where students, faculty and staff, and families feel seen, supported,
and empowered.
This question challenges us to reflect, rethink, and reimagine our shared purpose. It surfaces in faculty meetings, classroom conversations, and in the halls. Through curriculum, staff culture, parent partnerships, and student voice, we’ve embedded well-being into every initiative so it’s not a stand-alone program but a part of every conversation.
It encourages us to look deeper, beyond the traditional metrics of student success, and explore what we value as part of the student experience. When students understand well-being as a universal aspiration, they shift the narrative from “What’s wrong with me?” to “What do I need right now?” They learn to recognize challenges—whether anxiety, grief, or stress—as part of our shared human experience, not signs of personal failure.
Aware
Once we connect with our aspiration for community well-being, we must become aware of conditions that promote or erode well-being. We cannot change what we don’t recognize. Cultivating awareness is an intentional, ongoing process that creates the conditions for people to notice, reflect, and learn.
We gain greater awareness, individually and collectively, through faculty meetings with mindfulness moments, weekly wellness messages for students and parents, regular parent wellness groups, and guest speakers who discuss wellness topics. As a community, we recently read a book by one of the speakers, Permission to Feel: The Power of Emotional Intelligence to Achieve Well-Being and Success by Marc Brackett, and then facilitated discussions and experiences.
Active
Wellness is a deliberate practice of moving toward well-being and adapting to life’s challenges. At our school, we use a well-known quote by Jon Kabat-Zinn––“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf”––as a metaphor. In life, we cannot stop the waves; challenges, homework, exams, and conflicts will keep coming. It’s not about stopping the waves but about taking action and developing the skills needed to move through the waves with mindful awareness.
We’ve intentionally built a ramp for students to participate in and lead this work. The primary vehicle for student participation in well-being initiatives is our Active Minds chapter, which launched in 2015. Any student can join, and members take on various roles throughout the year, based on their interests and availability. These student leaders organize wellness activities and “morning check-in tables” to greet peers. They interview doctors, business leaders, and other professionals about how they manage emotions and stress in their work lives. They’re learning that emotional well-being isn’t just a “school thing”—it’s a lifelong pursuit for learning and personal growth.
Their involvement in this work allows students to become active agents of change, contributing to building a school community that recognizes well-being as an essential pillar.
Accepting
Yet striving toward well-being doesn’t mean instant happiness or the absence of unpleasant emotions. Being human means experiencing a wide range of emotions. Emotion is inseparable from learning in the brain, so it becomes crucial to develop an “emotions matter” mindset with an accepting attitude. The goal is to understand emotions as information, not existential problems, and to become emotion scientists rather than emotion judges.
To acknowledge the value of emotions in the everyday, we use RULER, an evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning developed at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. This helps to develop a shared mindset vocabulary and to create change throughout our school community.
Available
When we connect with our aspiration, become aware, take action, and cultivate the right attitude, we can truly be available to ourselves and others. It’s a reminder to check in with ourselves and others to ensure that everyone’s essential well-being needs are met.
As part of our effort to do this, we introduce a communications strategy early in the school year during faculty professional development days and then to students through advisory lessons and assemblies. It’s called VAR—Validate, Appreciate, and Refer—giving everyone practical tools to support one another and ensuring that every community member is available to others. Parents learn about this strategy during parent wellness sessions so they, too, can be available.
A Final Question
Behind every mental health statistic, millions of students struggle to find hope. The mental health crisis demands more than good intentions. It requires systemic, student-centered approaches to mental and emotional well-being in schools. The Five A’s framework has helped us move our school toward a culture of well-being.
When schools truly embrace well-being as a foundational principle, students develop the skills and resilience that will help them fulfill their aspirations. The question for every educator is simple: What kind of school are we trying to be?
In Her Words
Zoe Tait, a graduate of The John Cooper School, has experienced the framework firsthand and reflects on how her school experience led her to where she is today.
One weeknight, as a 10th grader, I noticed something the school did that had a huge impact. Not a single teacher across all departments assigned homework. They wanted us to attend an evening lecture with a mental health professional. At that moment, I realized that the school was prioritizing mental health alongside ensuring students could meet their academic goals.
I began to experience the framework as a student. Prioritizing well-being was not limited to one teacher or subject area but rather a mindset that extended across the school faculty. Schoolwide events started to promote well-being—including the most important assembly of the year—offering a forum for discussing initiatives and ideas. Through events, programs, and even hallway conversations, I learned to recognize mental health warning signs, emotions, and a lesson that many people don’t learn until later in life: It’s OK not to feel OK all the time.
These moments and interactions would plant the seeds for my own journey. Teachers demonstrated the school’s aspirational mindset time and again, normalizing emotions, meeting students where they were, and even accommodating them in extenuating circumstances of competitive sports or medical leave. With this awareness, I knew there was more to do—learning comes from doing.
I volunteered to lead club-sponsored events throughout the year. I became the school’s chapter president of Active Minds (and later president of University of California San Diego’s Active Minds chapter and vice president of the Active Minds National Student Advisory Committee). I coordinated and hosted the schoolwide Stress-Less Week, organized the school’s National Suicide Prevention Awareness Day, and collaborated with other students in the KIND Schools Challenge, an initiative aimed at promoting kinder school communities.
I knew it was a school priority, and I wanted to be involved. All the while, I was building leadership skills—and putting my well-being first—both of which I’d take with me to college. Upon entering UC San Diego, I recognized that a new environment would pose new challenges. But, with the foundational understanding I learned in high school, I was able to regulate my emotions and use them as information as well as share the principles I had learned with my fellow classmates. I recalled the RULER Mood Meters used in classrooms, normalizing emotions as part of the learning process and staying attuned to internal experiences.
Now with a degree in cognitive and behavioral neuroscience and experience as a chief research assistant in Stanford University’s Computational Psychology and Well-Being Lab, I recently stopped by The John Cooper School to visit my former teachers. Five years after graduation, I noticed that the culture around well-being has carried through to a new era. The Mood Meters are still in use, and mental health is ever more present. This mindset and the intentional approach set my foundation for the classroom and life beyond graduation, inspiring creativity, innovation, and ambition on my own path and so, too, for other students.