Yes, schools are a phenomenal place to provide that early intervention and prevention support for vulnerable youth.
I'm thinking about many of the programs that we see here in B.C., and we're seeing it right across the country and throughout North America, in fact. They're teaching social and emotional learning. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence showing that programs that focus on the social and emotional well-being of our youth produce wonderful effects, not only in their grades—we see about 17% increase in youth's grades when they participate in social and emotional learning—but in equipping them with resiliency so that, as they face mental health challenges, they are able to bounce back from them.
I'm also impressed by programs like Stan Kutcher's teen mental health literacy, which teaches youth as well as adults how to understand what mental health issues are and what they're not. Kids get nervous over tests. It's not anxiety; it's just being nervous over tests. It's really helping us to tease apart what is what.
We're also seeing that schools are a very important place to be able to go deeper with youth. As I said, schools are starting to look at ways in which they can look for youth who are having mental health concerns. We partner with school districts purposefully because we know that they know the youth. They know who's not accessing services, and they know who can benefit from them. We rely on them to help us identify those youth and bring them into the program that we serve together.
I would really encourage the committee to think about the place where youth spend most of their time, which is school, how we can help support them when they're there, and how we can support programs like Take a Hike that operate in schools.
I know that schools are not a federal mandate, but when we look at mental health that happens in the schools, that's where the kids want it. That's where they want to be able to get that help. They don't want to have to go somewhere else. They want it to be normalized. They don't want to have the stigma.