Carlmont’s Students Offering Support (SOS) program changes some of its presentations to fit the Life Skills curriculum better.
SOS is a program at Carlmont designed to have students help other students with similar problems and situations. Students in SOS regularly present to the Life Skills classes at Carlmont about suicide prevention, eating disorders, academic stress and anxiety, unhealthy relationships, drug and alcohol use, and LGBTQ+ through the students’ personal stories and experiences.
These presentations aim to give students the resources, skills, and support they need to deal with difficult situations. Recently, the Life Skills teachers changed which presentations SOS can show the freshmen in their classes in order to better match their curriculum.
“[The Life Skills teachers] didn’t ask for the child abuse [presentation] this year, so we incorporated child abuse into unhealthy relationships,” said Shelley Bustamante, SOS coordinator.
Previous presentations have included child abuse, divorce, self-esteem, hate crimes, and sexual assault; however, each of these has either been eliminated or incorporated into other presentations because it doesn’t fit the Life Skills curriculum. Child abuse is the most recent presentation to be removed.
Bustamante is unsure what else Life Skills might force SOS to remove or change in the future. She intends to ensure the core messages of the program continue to be covered, but in the end, the Life Skills teachers decide what gets presented to their students. “We (the SOS presentations) had to match up with [the Life Skills] curriculum,” said Bustamante.
As mentioned before, matching the Life Skills curriculum required Bustamante to eliminate the presentation on child abuse from last year to this year. “[Child abuse] was talked about on one of the slides, but there weren’t any personal stories,” said freshman, Adam Smith, referring to the presentation on unhealthy relationships.
Nefeli Tsangaropoulos was a senior at Carlmont last year who dealt with child abuse through the support of SOS. She got involved in SOS in her freshman year and continues to present with the program to this day. “Seeing [the child abuse] presentation as a freshman really changed me and many others,” said Tsangaropoulos. “I think not having it be its own presentation only takes away from the topic itself, but also doesn’t allow as much information to be shared.”
Carlmont’s SOS program is the only one of its kind in the area according to Bustamante. Bustamante is always looking for ways to expand the program through presentations to other schools and encouraging her students to become certified as mindfulness educators and trainers of students.
Students in SOS will continue presenting to freshmen about their struggles this fall. In addition to this, Bustamante is trying to schedule presentations for seniors and juniors later in the year. According to her, upperclassmen especially deal with a lot of extra stress and anxiety from college applications, so she aims to help students deal with their stress through more student-led presentations.
The SOS program continues to support and aid the Carlmont community despite the constantly changing nature of the Life Skills requirements.
