Mike Morsch, Regional Editor
By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer, Large numbers of Princeton High School students reported feeling stressed by their schoolwork, putting them in common with their peers around the country, according to a survey that the district recently did., Nearly 90 percent of the student body took a survey designed by Challenge Success, an organization based out the Stanford University Graduate School of Education, Superintendent of Schools Stephen C. Cochrane said Tuesday. The poll gauged students’ experience by asking questions on a range of topics, from stress, how much sleep students get and parental expectations, among other things., The results found that students average three to three and one-half hours a night of homework, get less than seven hours of sleep per night and revealed a gender difference with girls, on average, saying they do more homework, sleep less and feel more stress than boys., “Like students nationally, (Princeton High) students are experiencing high levels of stress and lower levels of what one might define as truly joyful engagement with learning,” Cochrane said in discussing the findings at Tuesday’s school board meeting. “This isn’t just data. This is the voices of our kids. And they’re asking for our help.”, He cited, for instance, how more 80 percent of students said they are “often or always stressed by their schoolwork.”, “So they’re working incredibly hard, they may actually even enjoy or be interested in the work that they’re doing, but they’re not always motivated by learning for the sake of learning,” he continued., He contrasted that with the way students feel about their extracurricular activities after school, with nearly 75 percent saying they do them for “primarily for pure enjoyment.”, He said the “challenge” is getting that same “motivation” and “passion” students have for their after-school activities into the classroom. A committee of faculty, parents and administrators is studying the issue, including schedule and instruction changes, he said., Some ideas include having more breaks in the day and fewer class periods; another avenue is to reduce the amount of homework, with Cochrane saying PHS students, on average, spend 30 to 60 more minutes “per night” on homework compared to “other high performing high schools that have taken the same survey.”, “I know that our supervisors and teachers are committed to making changes in this area,” Cochrane said., PHS is home to 1,586 students, at what has, for many years, been considered a top high school where students strive to get into the best colleges. Concerns about their well being have previously come before the board, amid concerns that student workload — in and out of the classroom — is heavy., PHS senior Brian Li, a student representative on the school board, said that 62 percent of students said they had “too much homework.”, He played recordings from PHS stduents offering their responses, including one girl expressing concern about the stress students are under and saying she was glad the high school was “finally taking action.”, Fellow student representative Abby Emison suggested starting school later in the day., “But then all of this information is worthless if we don’t take action,” Li said. “Shifting the school schedule is by no means an easy task.”, For his part, School Board President Patrick Sullivan talked of the need for changes, both in the long term and in the short term., “But a plan that doesn’t have a meaningful action item for September 2017 is not a meaningful plan, in my opinion,” he said., Yet Cochrane sought to point the blame, for the pressure that students and education professionals are under, to what he termed a “culture of testing and standardization and accountability to standardized tests, and not accountability to high level learning.”, “So I think all of us are eager for a shift — and a dramatic shift and one that other schools might follow,” said Cochrane, who has called Princeton a “lighthouse” district., In his tenure, Cochrane has made student wellness a hallmark of his administration.
