When senior Kira Brown comes home from soccer practice, she just wants to take a nap.
“I’m the most stressed I’ve ever been in my entire life. I have an early decision application coming up in less than two weeks, and I have to balance three AP classes as well as my school schedule and trying to sleep and eat healthy,” Brown said.
Brown, along with seniors Gaby Germanos, Emma Nash, Maya Levine and Lindsay Westlake are planning a potential speakers’ panel between Headmaster Deborah Holman and stressed out students.
According to Germanos, the idea for a more formal discussion about student stress came up one day in an English class the five have together, when they happened upon the subject.
“We all realized that we had the same problems. We were walking around thinking we were some anomaly, but it turned out we were as stressed out as everybody else,”

Germanos said. “We realized that we are holding ourselves to the highest standards, and our peers are, and that’s a problem with the culture of the school.”
According to Brown, the high school is the main cause of this stress.
“It’s a little hypocritical for the school and student board to tell us to try to be a very well-rounded student and balance all these things when it’s clearly impossible to maintain a healthy physique and mindset when you are always stressed out about something,” Brown said.

Brown said the goal of a potential academic stress panel would not necessarily be to  reduce homework.
“We are just trying to bring to light the fact that we are constantly being told to not really stress out about things and take care of yourselves too,” Brown said. “At the same time we are being pressured to get into all these great colleges, and we have all this work that we’re supposed to be doing.”

Anthony Poluyanoff and Conor Amrien can be contacted at [email protected].