BJE’s Annual Day School Retreat to Focus on Student Anxiety

There’s no question that, for students, parents and teachers alike, these are anxious times. According to mental health surveys, today’s teens and young adults are the most anxious ever, with a recent Pew study revealing that 70 percent of teens consider anxiety and depression a “major problem” among their peers. Academic and social pressures have continued to grow, and technology and social media have added an additional layer of stress and anxiety, with increasingly younger students.

BJE’s day school retreat will bring more than 100 educators together to collaboratively address ways to help students move beyond anxiety to accomplishment, and to broaden the definitions of success, both among students AND parents.

Participants will hear from a range of experts in social work, psychology and education, including a keynote address by Dr. John Piacentini, Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, who is a leading scholar on childhood anxiety and its effective treatments.

Larry Kligman, Head of School at Heschel Day School, said, “This is obviously a topic that schools need to put our arms around even more tightly. We know it’s there, and although we’ve always had students with anxiety, and we’ve always been knowledgeable and reacted, I’m hoping this BJE retreat will provide us with strategies to help lower stress and anxiety among our students. Certainly, there are age appropriate ways to address this issue, for students individually, and for the student body as a whole.

I’m also hoping that we get the tools for how we talk to parents about this. That BJE brings us together in this way is the absolute best, because together, around a table, in the community of a partnership, we can think out solutions together.”

Added Daphna Orenshein, Elementary School Principal at Harkham Hillel Hebrew Academy, “Educators understand the value of creating a healthy routine for students and the comfort they feel which comes from recognizing the boundaries in their lives. The boundless technological, information world has actually added an element of anxiety, replacing the comfort of old, in our kids today.”