Central Valley High School students were busy checking out the booths at Friday’s Mental Health Awareness Fair during the lunch hour.

A handful of agencies set up booths on the campus of 2,400 students to hand out information along with fun activities like games, prizes and free products.

The mental health of students has been of particular concern for professionals in the school system for a myriad of reasons, especially due to social media pressures. Ceres Unified School District has the resources in place to help combat problems students encounter before they worsen.

According to Maninder Basra, a Student Support Specialist on the campus, the district is always striving to let students know where they can get help to preserve their mental health.

“Kids come to us for a variety of reasons – breakups, things happening at home, some because they don’t feel motivated at school,” said Basra. “It’s a scary time for a lot of kids. And right now, too, is just with everything going on, just with the economy, and jobs aren’t easy to get as they were just a few years ago. I feel like a lot of kids don’t want to go in the military because they’re afraid of a war.”

At this time of year it’s common for graduating seniors to struggle with thinking out future plans beyond high school “because they’re off to the real world,” he said.

One method used by Basra and other campus specialists is to host academic goal -setting groups to help students set goals and specific steps to achieve them. He also encourages students to email teachers if they are not doing well in any particular class and figure out tutoring hours.

“We all need support once in a while,” said Basra, who also noted that Principal Casey Giovannoni is “very big supporting students’ mental health.”

Some of the efforts include passing out little treats before finals week and providing encouraging remarks. Another effort is placing QR codes around campus so that students can scan them and get in touch with the support staff.

Ceres High School has the same program with specialists. Elementary school and middle schools have one Student Support Specialist, whose position is basically a step below a counselor.

Basra believes that pressures on students come from social media and the comparison games that that go on.

Student Support Specialist Devyn Dollard said she and her cohorts offer group sessions as well as meet individuals one on one weekly to “help and teach them coping skills and help them kind of work through whatever’s going on but it’s unique to every student.”

Because some students aren’t always willing to ask for help, occasionally the team will “push into classrooms just so that we can try to reach a little bit more students just because our campus is large,” said Dollard, “and they don’t always know where to go.”

Getting out the word about where to seek help can come in many different forms, include advertising, posting videos and posters all over campus, and leaving cards with all the learning directors’ offices.

In the middle of the school year the team can see as many as 50 students per specialist.

Dollard believes that kids today are challenged in ways previous generations did not. For example, there were no pressures of social media which did not exist 40 to 50 years ago.

“I think that kids have challenges today that we didn’t face when I was a teenager,” Dollard commented. “I can remember being a teenager. It was like, if you were having troubles with your peers or anything going on at school you went home at the end of the day and got a break. And now I feel like these kids don’t get break from that. And if they have access to media 2/47 … I think it’s a little detrimental sometimes. There’s a lot of stimulation all the time. And so we do get a lot of students that are just anxious and stressed.

“I think it’s just important that we keep reminding students that social media isn’t always real life. It’s kind of like a carefully crafted, picturesque perfect view of what somebody wants their life to look like, but it’s not real. And so I think just reminding students that everybody struggles, and that everybody has a hard time and that life is not all sunshine and rainbows like it looks like online.”

Other agencies which had booths at the fair were Ceres Unified’s Family Resource Center, Golden Valley Health Center, Digital NEST and HAVEN.