As students, we all know that balancing both our academic and personal lives is difficult. COVID-19 has affected our sense of structure and routine, it decreased our social skills, interfered with the way we balance life, and brought massive uncertainty to all of us. We love to think that we can or should handle all of it on our own, but the truth is that a little help (or a lot) never hurts somebody. Due to our young age, there are many skills or lessons that we have not yet acquired; this is why we have to learn that it’s also smart to rely on those who are more experienced than us.
The American School of Tegucigalpa has always taken into consideration the students’ mental health by giving them the opportunity to rely on the school’s counselor. Last year, high school had two counselors which were available before, during and after school hours: Ms. Aviles and Ms. Santos. Both were professional, talented and caring human beings who, through multiple resources, reached out to students whenever they asked for help. However, they both handled the responsibilities of counseling students’ personal problems and the college counseling that both juniors and seniors required. Ms. Santos taught “College Prep” to students in tenth and eleventh grade in order to start getting them familiar with what college requires, and Ms. Aviles helped students in twelfth grade organize their applications, she reviewed their essays and she met constantly with them in order to check up on their progress. Besides these tasks, they carried a lot of other responsibilities on their shoulders which took away their opportunity to solely focus on each student’s personal struggles. This year, AST has welcomed Ms. Melissa Lopez into our school, which we are grateful and honored to have, in order to target student’s more academic and personal problems.
Ms. Melissa Lopez has been working in schools for over eight years and it was not until she worked as a Physics and Biology teacher, that she realized her true passion for mental health and well-being. She was born in Colombia but was raised in Brazil, and she has taught in areas like Brazil, China and Uzbekistan. This has allowed her to gain extensive knowledge on how students work best in different environments, as well as how to help them overcome a lot of the same issues we go through as students. She has mastered how to best target issues like depression, anxiety, academic burnout, eating disorders, bullying and many more. Ms. Lopez can also help students who struggle with their identity, mindsets or studying skills, as well as offer techniques, strategies or habits that will help an individual become a better version of themselves. In the end, her purpose is not only to help those in trouble but to hear those who are also in search of guidance. Having somebody who knows how the school works, the workload we have, the requirements we are expected to meet and has the proper knowledge to help us emotionally, is ideal.
As a student myself, I know that we often don’t rely on the help that is provided by our school. We are either too shy to ask, unaware that we have the opportunity or feel like they won’t understand us. It is crucial for us to start or at least try to rely on the help that the school has given us; we never know what we might learn along the way.
If you wish to contact Ms. Lopez, you can reach her through her email: mlopez@amschool.org or talk to her through Google Hangouts. She is available to meet with you for any help you may wish for and the school dearly hopes for its students to reach out for guidance.