Talk About It
By Jill Pate - FF/S
It’s no secret that the top choices of communication among preteens and teenagers are text messaging and email. So it makes sense that tapping these channels is the latest method of reaching teens and offering support.
In 2005, Anonymous Communication (AnComm), a company “dedicated to empowering students,” launched Talk About It, a program to provide schools with the ability to hear from their students via the same methods students already use to communicate with one another—text and email. The immediate result was the disclosure of extremely personal problems and, often, troubled cries for help. Year in and year out, behavioral health issues have topped the list of topics students discuss via Talk About It, namely depression, stress, cutting/self-injury, family problems, and bullying.
Talk About It offers students a more comfortable and easy way to initiate contact with counselors and trained faculty while remaining anonymous.
Students who access the Talk About It program can discuss a variety of topics, including depression, bullying, suicide, stress, grief, death of a loved one, relationships, self-esteem, physical/emotional/verbal abuse, cutting/self-injury, drugs, alcohol and peer pressure.
We hope using this technology at Darlington and allowing students to begin counseling interactions in a less invasive manner will create a “teachable moment” that leads to greater voice-to-voice and face-to-face interactions as trust builds through the continuing dialogue.
Middle and Upper School students may access the program by clicking the Talk About It footprint on their Student Record page. To login the first time, students will use their student number as their User ID and their last name as the Password; they will then be directed to create a profile and reset their password.
