Gordon Flett

And I got to the point where I'm saying, okay, did our resilience intervention work in terms of the experimental ones that received the intervention versus the control group?

And I immediately looked and realized it had failed horribly because there was one school of the control schools that had kids with astronomically high resilience scores and well-being scores.

So I went to the school board people I was working with and I said, what's going on with that one school?

And they said, oh, yeah, they're one of our best schools.

On Mondays, they have Mental Health Mondays school-wide.

And on Fridays, they have physical fitness Fridays school-wide.

And I said, why did you pick them as a control group?

Because my advice now is do what they're doing.

Because the message that comes on Monday, every Monday and every Friday is that we care about you to the point we're taking school time and we're making this

focus.

It doesn't have to take great resources.

It doesn't have to take cash outlays.

It just means it needs to be a focus where the message is sent, hey, we care about you here so that these are kids who want to get to school and stay engaged as opposed to staying home and dropping off the radar.

And this school did it.

And I've seen another project.

Unfortunately, it didn't go to fruition because the key people at another school board retired.

But I asked them, in all the schools you have with all the data, because I got them to ask mattering,

can you find me schools that are doing way better in terms of kids feeling like they matter versus ones who don't?

And they said, yes, here it is.

And it wasn't correlated with size of school or wellbeing, but there was something going on.