Students Helping Students

Julia Venanzi was nervous. She was about to teach her first health workshop to a room full of East Boston High School ninth graders who weren’t particularly interested in what she had to say. Cell phones vibrated, students continued to talk despite her attempted authoritative stance at the front of the classroom, while others struggled to keep their eyes open. Venanzi introduced herself to the new group of students, took a deep breath, and began her memorized presentation.

‘Today’s workshop will be about contraception,’ she said. ‘Does anyone know what that is? Who can give me a few examples?’ After a few seemingly endless moments of silence, a few students raised their hands. After two or three examples, Venanzi, attempting to appear as enthusiastic and confident as she did during her teaching skills workshop, launched into her speech. Maybe this wouldn’t be so hard.

Venanzi is not a certified teacher. She doesn’t work at East Boston High School. Venanzi is a junior at Boston University, barely five years older than the ninth graders who she is teaching health workshops to every week in public schools across Boston. She is a volunteer for the Peer Health Exchange.

Teenage pregnancy, drug use and obesity rates are getting higher across the nation as the affected population is getting younger, and the students in Boston are no exception. College students from the city are banding together to try and reverse that problem. The Peer Health Exchange recruits college volunteers in cities across the nation to teach a ‘comprehensive health curriculum’ at schools that lack health education, in which a majority of students live at or below poverty level.

What started as a small student-run program at Yale University has blossomed into a group of 1,200 volunteers teaching in over 11,000 public schools. In Boston, participation in the program has thrived on service-minded students who want to make a difference. The college students are facing discouraging statistics and a cumbersome curriculum, but they all enjoy rising to the challenge.

‘Even if they’re laughing, they’re still learning something,’ Venanzi said.

BU Program coordinator Tom Millett, one of the two who helped train 92 student volunteers this year, including Venanzi, said even the high schoolers who don’t seem engaged benefit from the health workshops.

‘Some students appear uninterested, like all this stuff is just going in one ear and out the other, but you never know what they’ll remember and use in future situations,’ he said. ‘They don’t care about it now, but under different circumstances, our lessons might come in handy.’

The Peer Health Exchange began at Yale in 1999 when a group of Yale student tutors, who were teaching academic subjects to high schoolers, were told by a teacher that they would be much more effective teaching health classes. The funding for the New Haven Public Schools health program was drastically cut, she said, and because the college students were relatively close in age to the students, they could be great in effectively communicating the importance of these subjects.

The Yale program flourished, and after the students who started the program graduated and moved to New York City, they started the non-profit organization Peer Health Exchange at Columbia University and New York University. The Yale program stayed separate, maintaining its student-run basis, but has since grown to about 100 students teaching in 12 New Haven schools.

Like the Yale program, the Peer Health Exchange has quickly gained high participation in the cities to which it reaches out: New York, Boston, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area and recently added Los Angeles. Chloe Ciccariello, the Boston program associate for the organization, said both the locations and number of topics are growing quickly.

‘It’s only the program’s fourth year, and we’ve reached 55 percent of ninth graders,’ she said.

There are currently 12 different health workshops taught by college students: decision making/communication (the initial and wrap-up presentations), sexual decision-making & communication, contraception, STIs & HIV, healthy relationships, abusive relationships, rape & sexual assault, nutrition and physical activity, tobacco, alcohol and drugs. Next semester, the program hopes to add a workshop about mental health.

Students from BU, Boston College, Tufts University, Harvard University, Northeastern University and University of Massachusetts-Boston teach these comprehensive workshops in more than 30 Boston public schools. In order to qualify, at least 50 percent of students at the high school must qualify for free or reduced lunch. When the Peer Health exchange contacts high schools to offer their workshop series, they often get an ‘overwhelmingly positive response,’ according to Ciccariello.

‘If you work in these schools, you see kids getting pregnant, kids using drugs, kids in abusive relationships,’ she said. But due to resource problems ‘-‘- either insufficient funds or a lack of teachers ‘-‘- most schools don’t have comprehensive health curriculums, she said. When Peer Health Exchange offers these resources for free, ‘the schools jump at the chance to use them,’ Ciccariello said.

Venanzi, who in her first semester as a volunteer has taught about six workshops in Boston high schools, said she was shocked by the small amount of health teachers the system has as a whole.

‘There’s like, eight health teachers total in the high schools that we teach in,’ she said, her blue eyes widening. ‘In my high school alone, there were four.’

The desperation for health workshops becomes more evident as the number of schools participating in Boston grows each semester. Just this month, Millet and his co-coordinator Sarah Durrin were told a new high school would be added to BU’s list of locations next semester. The high school has had 13 reported pregnancies between September and November alone, and decided a health curriculum would be in everyone’s best interest.

‘One in five sexually active teenagers in Boston gets pregnant,’ Millett said. He hopes that the Boston chapter of the Peer Health Exchange will eventually bring that number down, and believes that effective communication will do the trick. ‘The students look at us not so much as authority figures, but instead peers who are sharing our knowledge with them,’ he said. ‘Being close in age definitely helps.’

Just because the college students are close in age doesn’t mean they automatically qualify to teach a room full of ninth-graders about important topics. The training process takes time and patience to go through, and often requires a bigger time commitment than many students aren’t willing to give make, Millett said.

‘Despite our warnings of what a huge commitment this is, some students just don’t understand until they have to put in the hours. It’s hard to get people that stick with it,’ he said. But for those who do, the hours of training are important.

First, there is a two-day retreat in which volunteers learn the basics about the 12 different workshops, the mission of the organization, and classroom management skills.’ Following the retreat, all volunteers must pass both a written test and prove that they have memorized their assigned workshop speech in a teaching skills evaluation. After they’ve been assigned to their specific workshops, volunteers meet each week with the all members who teach the same subject as them to go over the curriculum, discuss teaching tips, and practice teaching in front of peers. Volunteers also have a program-wide meeting each week in which they hear from program coordinators Millett and Durrin, and discuss experiences from the past week in the classroom.

Venanzi spent days memorizing the workshop material before her tests, but in the end it paid off.

‘The training prepares you as much as possible before you set foot in the classroom,’ Venanzi said. ‘The first time I taught, I wasn’t nervous about the material, I was nervous about the students.’

The workshop topics are not the easiest things to discuss; most parents have a hard time sitting down one child to lecture him about contraception, STIs, drugs or abuse. The college volunteers have an entire classroom to address.

‘It’s hard because we only go into a classroom once, so we don’t have an established relationship with any of these students,’ Venanzi said.

Nevertheless, she said, she thinks her workshop about contraception will give students a lot of information that they wouldn’t get anywhere else. Even the so-called ‘easier’ topics, such as nutrition, are having big impacts on the students: Millett recalled one of the first nutrition lessons he heard about in a meeting last year, where he realized what an important difference the Peer Health Exchange can make in some students’ lives.

‘One of the students got into a disagreement with the workshop teacher about whether Starburst candy were healthy or not,’ Millett said. ‘The student thought that because they were fruit flavors, there must have been some nutritional value to them.’

Though important lessons are learned in the Boston classrooms, some college students have trouble taking control of a room full of students. Teachers themselves have sometimes given up on their classes, Ciccariello said, which makes it even tougher for a newcomer to settle everyone down and teach a workshop.

Volunteers learn how to handle tough situations over time; only experience can teach them how to deal with disorderly classrooms, Ciccariello said.

Even when the students don’t want to hear what the volunteers have to say, there are important resources handed out at the end of the workshop that may be just as helpful as the lesson itself. Boston volunteers hand out orange cards to each student that lists hotlines, clinic information, and the Peer Health Exchange website on one side, and a map of Boston with clinic locations on the other.

‘There are so many different resources in the city, and we want the students to be able to access help if and when they need it,’ she said. ‘We know our program is just the tip of the iceberg.’