MONROE — As the second trimester at Monroe High School came to an end, students in the year-long LAUNCH program gave summaries of their project work with area businesses and organizations. On Friday, March 8, the students met visitors in the lower level of the Green County Justice Center.
There were 15 total sessions in three different rooms, covering 14 projects over the course of just about an hour. Most of the project had two or three students join a local business or organization for one hour a week. The plan was to understand an area of need to help and a solution to remedy the need through one of four strands: Business Analytics, Media Solutions, Behavioral Health and Skilled Building Trades. The only project with more than three students was the continued renovation of a home in cooperative with SSM Health and Green County Development Corporation. That project has 14 students.
Wyatt Stevenson, Trevor Klarer and Christian Garcia-Garcia worked with Jordan Nordby and Main Street Monroe on developing its social media presence.
“We really wanted to increase the engagement on their Instagram page,” Garcia-Garcia said.
“Our solution ... was to make videos,” Klarer said. Those included intro and content creation videos, as well as still images from places like Baumgartner’s and Heartland Graphics.
Alyssa Hartwig, Christina Grenzow and Jacob Stewart also helped lead a social media blitz for Green County Public Health, which included a focus on limiting one’s daily screen time.
“In our research we found that the average teenager spends 9 hours a day on their phone, and checks it every 12 minutes — or approximately 80 times a day,” Hartwig said in a pre-recorded video.
Ava Waefler, Abe Colin and Alexia Gallagher discussed how they went about improving youth mental health by engaging with students at Parkside Elementary and Monroe Middle School from the dangers of social media.
“5-4-3-2-1 is something that I personally have done myself, and it’s something they can do to calm anxiety or stress,” Gallagher said.
The 5-4-3-2-1 grounding/coping technique asks the person to recognize five things they can see, four things they can touch, three things they can hear, two things they can smell and one thing they can taste.
The students also shared statistics on the impact social media has on children’s mental health. A 2016 study of 1,030 teens ages 13-17 found that 88% use social media to stay in touch with people they don’t see every day; 69% use it to build relationships with students from different schools; and 57% use it to find people with the same interests as them.
All that use does come with drawbacks, like the fact that those who have a screen time of 6 hours or more a day get less sleep, which also results in higher rates of depression, memory loss and lower academic performance.
Aleigh Zettle and Chloe Fry went over ways to help recognize struggles a young person might be dealing with in their home life with “ACEs”, an acronym for Adverse Childhood Experiences. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ACEs are potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood and can include violence, abuse and growing up in a family with mental health or substance abuse problems.
“ACEs have longterm lasting effects on children,” Zettle said.
Fry said putting a child into a quality child care environment, like a 4K or kindergarten program, is one way to help, as they can help children with social emotional learning, like growing self awareness and relationship skills.
The house renovation project quickly went through updates on their project.
The students have installed new doors, windows, and the underlayment for flooring. They have put in new kitchen cabinets, drywall in the garage, and the cutting-in for electricity. The painting of bedrooms and doors, a new deck that extends to the back door, and worked with professionals on the HVAC upgrades.
Up next for the students includes finishing painting and flooring of the kitchen and bathroom.
An open house and ribbon cutting ceremony for the public is scheduled for Wednesday, May 15, less than two weeks before graduation.
