The name “mental health day” has a connotation of mental illness or instability. However, a mental health day comes in handy simply when the stress of life becomes overwhelming. These days off from work or school help people recover. Students occasionally feign sickness in order to stay home for the day. Sometimes it’s a fever, sometimes it’s a stomach ache, but in any case, the student is still physically able to go to school; despite this, they might feel they just need a day to rest their overworked minds. A mental health day would replace these “sick days” with a more honest reason to miss school, and would take away any incentive to fake a few coughs. Other schools in Delaware already include these days in their policies. Mental health days have the potential to be a key tool in combating student stress and boosting overall productivity and wellbeing.

Sammie Conner ’18 supports the idea of mental health days: “They can be necessary and beneficial as long as they’re not too often. It can be good to just get organized, take a break, and reset—although that is what the weekends are usually for.” Others, however, say weekends are not effective in resting and recovering some students’ mentality. For many students, weekends may be just as busy as regular school days, and they might feel as though they never get a real break. Both football and wrestling teams have games and tournaments that consume almost the entirety of the student athletes’ Saturdays. Starting center Jason Saville ’18 shared his experiences with football on weekends: “We had a football game where we were gone from 9:00am until 7:00pm. We choose to take this time because we love the sport, but it makes it tough to finish weekend assignments.” From these perspectives, mental health days seem like they could be constructive for students with sports commitments.

The concept of mental health days seems appealing to the majority of the student body, but there are issues that need to be addressed, such as how the school would go about managing these days. Clearly, there would need to be some type of regulation that sets a maximum amount of days off for each student. It would be up to the school to decide the balance between providing enough time to recover, and preventing students from taking advantage of the system. These problems are important to consider, but all of them can be easily solved if students and teachers work together openly on this.

Mental health days are something that can relieve anxiety from WFS students. The question then is how to use mental health days productively; students must be able to recognize when they feel overwhelmed and need to release stress, versus just worrying about a test or presentation that day. Hopefully, the school will take this concept into consideration for the good of its students. If the system were to be established, students could start using mental health days to reduce stress, increase productivity, and boost focus in the classroom.