News
September 24
Recent news headlines have reported global pandemics and national vaccination campaigns. Despite the grand scale of these problems, the Peer Health Exchange, an organization comprised of altruistic students, is approaching health matters on a much more local level.
The Peer Health Exchange (PHE) began in 1999 when a group of six Yale University students noted the ailing health programs of New Haven public high schools and took it upon themselves to start teaching free workshops to students. As the number of volunteers ballooned, this grassroots effort officially became Peer Health Exchange and expanded on a national level to cities such as New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago and its newest branch, Los Angeles.
Although PHE has existed in Boston since 2006, the program's involvement with Tufts only began last year when it sent representatives to recruit volunteers that would provide the foundation for the Tufts division. Once the coordinators were trained, they signed up "basically as many freshman that they could find," according to Laura Kroart, a sophomore who has been involved with PHE since the fall of 2008 and is now a co-coordinator.
Last year, 42 students volunteered for the program. By the end of the 2009-10 recruiting session, 10 new handpicked volunteers will swell the ranks of PHE for the current academic year.
PHE handles 10 different workshops dealing with varying issues, ranging from contraception to rape and sexual assault to tobacco use. Each volunteer is trained in one particular workshop to become an expert and is then sent with a fellow PHE volunteer to public schools around Boston to spread their knowledge to ninth grade students.
"They do really intensive training — they make you teach to a video camera and then make you watch yourself, and do it again … which is really embarrassing!" said sophomore Jenna Strauss, a leadership council member who teaches an alcohol workshop.
No strangers to shocking statistics, PHE is attempting to improve the current ratio of 60,000 students in the city to 11 health teachers. Currently 3,000 students out of the 6,000 in the downtown Boston area — the battleground of PHE — are being reached by the program.
"[It is a] really positive experience; the kids are great," said sophomore Emma Yudelman, a co-coordinator. "[It is] challenging at times because you have to wake up on Friday mornings. But it's OK because you feel like you're making a difference."
Volunteers follow a specific curriculum issued by the organization. Every year revisions are made with the advice of professionals, and the program of study is assembled in a manner that will make it accessible to the target group of high school freshmen. Certain workshops may not initially appear engaging to young teenagers, and the teachers must frequently use new methods to gain students' attention, according to Kroart, who taught a workshop on healthy relationships last year. "As soon as you start applying it and playing games, anything can be fun," she said.
One of the maxims of PHE workshops is to avoid pontificating about what students should or should not do. Rather, the emphasis is placed on decision making and the particular goals of each student. Those goals are then placed in the context of possible hazardous behaviors and how they might ultimately fail if hindered by drug use or a teenage pregnancy, for example.
"It's really wonderful to be able to go to classrooms and talk to kids and give them information about things they wouldn't normally get. Unless they were experiencing it firsthand — and often in unsafe environments — most of the things we teach they don't learn them anywhere else," senior Lauren Gluck said. "We hope that we're giving them the tools to learn what to do in those situations whatever their decision may be."
PHE tried to espouse thoughtful decision making in the past through a model of "values." The group, however, found this template to be unsuccessful as it became moralistic and even religious at times, failing to cause the desired impact on teenagers. Eventually the current model of "goals" was adopted, based on positive decision making to allow those goals to thrive. Gluck, a leadership council member who leads the nutrition and physical activities workshops, said that this method has made an impact.
"Some of the kids would call me over and timidly say something about ‘my friend is thinking about quitting cigarettes, but he doesn't know what to do … Do you think that's a good idea?' I'm really excited that they would take something away from it, because it's not the first time they've heard ‘smoking is bad for you.'"
Volunteers of PHE are discouraged from sharing personal experiences in classes and giving individual advice to students due to their lack of formal medical training. Instead, small resource cards are handed out containing a listing of health centers and active hotlines that students can contact for specific problems.
Despite the gravity of the issues at hand, the volunteers still find time to enjoy the amusement and social awakenings of working with high school students who are, in many cases, quite different from themselves. Kroart recalled one instance in which her group gave a presentation to students who only spoke Cape Verdean Creole.
"It's weird to be saying something important enough to be translated," Kroart said. This sentiment — the feeling associated with being involved in an honorable pursuit — is what drives the students behind the program.
At the same time, being a member of PHE has its share of taxing experiences. According to Kroart, troubled students on the verge of dropping out are generally placed in the same classroom, making it difficult for the PHE students to get their message across.
"You initially get frustrated [in complicated classrooms], but then feel bad for the kids because the teachers are the ones who aren't doing a good job," Yudelman said.
"They are really, really hard to get through to, and it's hard to command any respect," Kroart said. Nonetheless, this does not discourage the PHE leaders; it merely adds a layer of experience and motivates them to do even more.
"PHE opened me up to the possibility of teaching in the future. The program affected me in a way that I never expected," Strauss said.
