by Marty Green ·
Friday, November 8, 2024
Last spring, more than 400 Bromfield students answered a broad range of questions as part of the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, sponsored by Emerson Hospital. The questions dealt with stress, depression, sexual activity, drug and alcohol use, self-harm, and more. Results of the survey were presented to the School Committee this week, and those results showed both some encouraging changes from past years and a few concerning trends.
Emerson has given the risk survey to nearby school districts every two years since 1997. Harvard first took part in the survey in 2012. The survey is administered to students in grade 6 and grades 8 through 12. Parents can choose not to have their children take the survey, or students themselves can opt out.
This year, a total of 7,885 students from 10 districts took part in the survey. The districts were Acton-Boxborough, Ayer Shirley, Bedford, Carlisle (middle school), Concord-Carlisle, Groton-Dunstable, Harvard, Littleton, Maynard, and Nashoba Regional. The survey was carried out by Market Street Research of Northampton.
Stephanie Gonthier of Market Street’s senior team presented the survey’s findings at the School Committee’s Oct. 28 meeting. Gonthier said she focused on areas where there had been significant changes since the 2022 survey, rather than covering every topic the survey addressed.
Of the Bromfield students in grades 6 and 8-12, about 85% took part in the survey. Gonthier called that number “a really robust sample.” (She also said she did not know why Emerson has never included seventh-graders in the survey.)
In many areas, the 2024 survey shows improvement over the post-COVID survey of 2022, Gonthier told the School Committee. The percentage of Bromfield students who said they had “a hard time making it through stressful events” was down from its 2022 level in all grades—most sharply in grades 6 and 8, but also in high school. Academic stress also dropped at all grades, especially for eighth-graders.
Reports of depression, thoughts of suicide, and cases of self-harm rose during the pandemic, according to the 2022 survey. But the 2024 survey showed these troubling figures falling again to pre-pandemic levels or lower for most grades.
Vaping has plummeted from pre-pandemic levels. For Bromfield High School students, the percentage who had used an e-cigarette within 30 days before the survey fell from 19% in 2020, to 12% in 2022, and then to 3% this year. Marijuana use also dropped, although less sharply—from 20% in 2020, to 15% in 2022, to 12% in 2024.
Not surprisingly, reports of recent alcohol use among Bromfield students in 2024 rose from one grade to the next, being highest among 12th-graders. But the overall year-to-year trend since 2020 has been downward—from 34% for all Bromfield High School students in 2020, to 30% in 2022, to 18% this year.
Two areas, however, showed upswings that Gonthier pointed out as concerning: sexual harassment and bullying.
The 2024 survey showed that sexual harassment and nonconsensual sexual contact were both higher in Harvard than in other nearby school districts. While a fairly small number of Bromfield ninth-graders reported being sexually harassed, the numbers rose steeply for older students. About a third of 10th- and 11th-graders at Bromfield said they had experienced sexual harassment in the past year; about a quarter of 12th-graders said the same.
Overall, for high school students in Harvard, about 20% of students—about one in five—reported experiencing sexual harassment in the past year. For all the districts in the survey combined, the average was 12%, or about one in eight students.
Likewise, about 10% of Bromfield students report experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact at some point in their lives. For all the school districts combined, that figure was 6%.
The other problematic area was bullying, especially in sixth grade. In the 2022 survey, just 8% of sixth-graders reported being bullied in the previous 12 months. That percentage tripled to 24% in this year’s survey.
Moreover, the share of sixth-graders who were confident that an adult at school could help them if they were bullied fell from 66% to 55%. At the same time, the share of students at upper grade levels who believed an adult could help rose significantly.
Gonthier pointed out that students who are part of a racial or ethnic minority, or who are transgender, nonheterosexual, or nonbinary, are also particularly vulnerable to being bullied or sexually harassed. They may also be more vulnerable to depression or self-harm.
“We take all of this data really seriously,” Superintendent Linda Dwight said at the meeting, “… and work toward helping students to feel more secure, to feel safer.”
“Some of this data was hard to see, for sure,” concluded Bromfield High School Principal Kim Murphy. “This generation is taking these things more seriously, and that is something I’m happy and proud of.”