GARDEN GROVE : Program Aims to Cut Student Stress

Today’s high school students admittedly are faced with a new array of stresses and conflicts: gangs, drugs, alcohol, teen pregnancy, single-parent homes and the still-powerful pressures of just growing up.

To help students with these problems, the Garden Grove Unified School District is planning to spend about $450,000 in state and federal money on a program called YESS--Youth Education and Support Services.

“There’s probably always been these problems, but I think now we’re more conscious of them, more willing to do something about it,” YESS director Barbara Stokke said.

The program, which identifies and works with students “at risk” of dropping out, will use school counselors and a counseling firm called Straight Talk.

The YESS program will have several components. The DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) effort will be offered to all district students in the second, fourth, sixth and eighth grades and will deal with the topics of gangs, self-esteem, and alcohol and drug abuse.

Before taking her new post as director for YESS on Jan. 8, Stokke was a counselor for 18 months at Rancho Alamitos High School in Garden Grove and for 10 years at Los Amigos High School in Fountain Valley. Over the years, Stokke said she has seen students become more intense.

“There’s so much competition for students going on to college, students planning on a career,” she said. “I think there’s a lot more stress. There are so many more options. There’s less of a family unity.”

But regardless of how much money the district spends, Stokke cautioned, the solution to today’s problems does not begin and end on campus.

“A school-based curriculum alone cannot erase everything else that’s going on,” she said. “It has to be a combination of the community, the school and the parents for it to work. And I think that’s our goal--to get them all to work together.”