Stress is inevitable and unavoidable at the end of the school year. With everyone in the building rushing to finish the school year, work piles up and things get hectic— that’s reality. While teachers are the ones doing the planning and assigning for classes, the responsibility does not fall just on them. There are underutilized practices that everyone in the St.Paul Academy and Summit School community can do to reduce end-of-the-year stress.

Though teachers are responsible for assigning workloads, students have the ability to manage stress-levels independently of their teachers. The management of any and all free time is essential to stress-reduction and can be controlled exclusively by students. If time management fails, however, communication should be the next step. Students have the skills necessary to work with teachers to reach compromises in this busy time of year. Between sports, drama, clubs, outside of school activities, end-of-year wrap-ups, and exam preparations, students have a lot on their plates. If this is the case, changes and adjustments can be made to accommodate the needs of both the student and the teacher. Above all, it falls on students to reach out to proactively and thoughtfully make their schedules work successfully.

Permeating home life, end-of-year stress affects families in addition to students. Here, responsibility falls on families to reduce stress. Use family time as a stress-reliever instead of an obligation. In a time when many hole up in quiet spaces for hours on end, spend a study break with a family member doing a craft or cooking dinner. Also, students are all very hyper-aware of the things they need to get done and may not appreciate reminders from family members.

In addition to stress at home, stress at school could be managed in a more successful way by student groups, elected and selected groups, and administration. Like colleges have been doing recently, Peer Helpers or PAWS could bring in stress-relief dogs or set up anti-stress activities. As more of a whole-school action, the Upper School Council could work with administration to put a testing calendar on a shared board. This calendar could outline which disciplines had tests on which days. A helpful way to visualize assessments, the calendar could reduce stress and improve transparency in terms of test schedules. Though teachers hand out assignment sheets and post to Veracross, many students and even teachers would benefit from seeing all assessments in one place.

Finally, teachers can do a better job of communicating amongst themselves to coordinate assessment calendars. Many students complain that every teacher piles on the work at the end of the year. This perception, though sometimes an exaggeration, could be changed through communication. Though teachers use a shared, online assessment calendar to plan their classes’ assessments, students don’t often see this in action and only feel the end-of-year overload. With student-teacher and teacher-teacher communication increased, motives could be shared and concerns voiced.

Through thoughtful communication and time management, stress can and should be reduced, turning a stressful end of a year into a reasonable time for everyone. Don’t add stress, communicate with teachers and each other, spend time de-stressing, and make the best of the end of the year.