On May 24, 2023, the Culver City School Board unanimously adopted Resolution #37, which dedicates the school district to developing and implementing TK-12 Compulsory and Comprehensive Mental Health Education as a Core Curriculum within C.C.U.S.D. We currently convene a committee of mental health professionals and school administrators to work toward piloting this curriculum.
After three years of advocacy, I presented the following proposal to the school board:
As students, we are taught to “sit down, don’t stand unless you are told to. Be quiet, don’t speak unless you are spoken to. Be good, don’t disrupt the status quo.”
Our silence is learned, it is all we know. So in this war not ours to fight alone — in our classrooms, at home, in every fragment, in every feeling in our bones — we learn to remain silent. But not today. Because today we have shown we are no longer willing to plead the fifth, we are no longer willing to dismiss this crisis. Our crisis is treated like a crime, but we no longer have the time to wait, to waste. It is time for change.
We are not asking for more suicide prevention presentations, Wellness Wednesdays, social emotional learning, New Earth, youth truth surveys, or external resources. We are asking for systemic curricular change.
Physical Education has long been a core curriculum, while Mental Health Education has barely met the bare minimum. We all like to say that mental health is just as important as physical health, but where is this reflected in our schools? Physical and mental health are inextricably intertwined: just like we all need physical health, we all need mental health. We will all benefit from learning how to exercise and care for our minds just as we learn how to exercise and care for our bodies. We all need to know how to identify mental injuries and illnesses, just as we learn how to identify physical injuries and illnesses.
We are advocating for mental health education to be integrated into physical education within CCUSD. We are advocating for a committee to create and implement this curriculum, never done before in any city, state, or country. Just as we were the first to mandate vaccinations in the nation, we can be the first to set the precedent for what education can and should be, by implementing mental health education as a comprehensive, compulsory course alongside P.E.
If you take away anything from the stories you have heard today, it should be this. The greatest tragedy was never our silence, but the silence around us in the midst of it all. Today, we as students have broken our silence. And I hope that you, board members, will too.
