Caught between studying for AP tests and any number of extracurricular activities, today's students are constantly feeling the push to do more and do it better, leaving them little time to even eat dinner with their families. A study at Stanford University is trying to reverse this trend by helping teachers, students and parents identify how to turn down the pressure cooker that may be typical at many local high schools.

And many schools are responding in their own ways.

Four of the five high schools in the Fremont Union High School District attended the "SOS-Stressed Out Students" project at Stanford, which began in May 2004 and will continue with a presentation at Cupertino High School on Feb. 16. The schools were Monta Vista, Lynbrook, Cupertino and Homestead high schools. Throughout the school year, the four schools are researching and fine-tuning their programs, and coming up with unique solutions in the process—Monta Vista High School, for instance, is embarking on a public relations campaign to change its image.

"The typical Monta Vista student has an SAT book in one hand and Starbucks in the other," says Sarah DeWath, a senior at Monta Vista.

Alleviating the pressure that those students feel is one of the aims of the "SOS-Stressed Out Students" project. Founder Denise Clark Pope, Ph.D., works with the Stanford School of Education and has written a book titled Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic and Miseducated Children.

"I didn't get a lot of reaction [after the book was released], but one day, I got a call from a psychiatrist from the Stanford Health Center, who says that he was increasingly seeing the health effects of students working hard to get into selective schools," Pope says.

Students were arriving at college exhausted and burned out. The effects included more students taking antidepressants and attempting suicide, at levels that have increased rapidly in just a few years. Pope also points out subsidiary issues of high-stress environments, such as the temptation to cheat, which could be seen in recent high-profile incidents at Saratoga High School. "It's not normal, nor is it healthy to work every single minute of the day, but parents seem to think that's what's necessary for their child to get into a school like Harvard," Pope says.

Pope and several colleagues received grant funding for the SOS conference and invited various participants in the educational process from public schools in the area, as well as several private schools. School representatives came from as far as Belmont and Fremont to take part in the conference.

George Hamma, a parent from Homestead High School, was one of the representatives who went to the SOS conference last May. At a recent board meeting of the Fremont Union High School District board of trustees, he asked the board to place a district-wide cap on the number of advanced placement or honors classes a student could take. His logic was that college applications look for how well a student performed against the school's course offerings. "I know a number of kids who thrive in this environment," he says, "but college admissions officers want to see kids who challenge themselves to the limits of what's possible."

The May SOS session consisted of a series of workshops and brainstorming sessions, where students on both the middle- and high-school levels spoke about the effects of stress on their lives. Speakers addressed the importance of finding balance in students' lives, and all participants broke into teams to come up with effective strategies for people at all levels—the student, their parents, teachers and administrators—to ease the load.

At a session in November, participants reconvened to discuss what they had found. Hamma says Homestead discovered that it already incorporates several stress-cutting strategies, such as offering a 1/2-hour tutorial four days a week when teachers are required to be in their classrooms and available to students. Hamma's daughter, Jillian, says this has been especially valuable for her.

Homestead has also implemented a block schedule, arranging its daily schedule so there are fewer but longer periods. This allows for extended class times in each subject. At Homestead, for instance, first, third, fifth and seventh periods are held Tuesday and Thursday, while second, fourth and sixth periods are held Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Seventh period usually meets every day. Some say the block class schedule gives students a chance to delve more deeply into subjects, while teachers get an opportunity to come up with creative lessons that shorter class times don't allow.

But Homestead's progressive policies mean more of the efforts to ease stress have to happen at home.

George Hamma says, "I'm familiar with families who use the spurs and the whip, and ride their kids all the time."

Parents, he says, should generally inquire about their child's day instead of asking pointed questions about grades. Teachers were given the suggestion of looking at ways to avoid scheduling of of a student's major tests on the same day, or restricting the amount of work required over school breaks. Another suggestion was to move finals before winter break, much like Lynbrook High School already does, but Homestead teachers said in the workshop they would be likely to assign projects over the break anyway.

Homestead is currently surveying students through homework diaries and additional interviews, the results of which could help formulate a plan to take back to the SOS group when it reconvenes in May. This new session will likely bring in some new schools as well.

Pope says that this phenomenon of overly stressed students is occurring nationwide, mostly in areas around major cities where significant portions of the population (and parents) have advanced degrees, such as Westchester County, N.Y., and certain suburbs around Chicago and Dallas. She says she hopes that by including a great amount of student input, that the SOS study will have some real effects. "We're really taking the students seriously," she says. "That doesn't happen enough."

The changes at Monta Vista, another participant in the SOS study, are being tailored specifically for students. But the larger community also prompted these changes—the image of Monta Vista as a high-stress school is catching some parents off-guard and tarnishing the school's high-performance patina. And this is something Principal April Scott wants to stop.

Scott taught at Monta Vista for 10 years, but says the image has become exaggerated since that time. She and her staff are embarking on a public relations campaign to alter the perception of Monta Vista as a pressure cooker—and also take the load off students in the process.

So far, the changes have been subtle, but they seem to be making a difference. The school's second semester kicked off on Jan. 19 with "It's Great to Be a Matador Week." The period used to be called "Stress-Free Week."

During the school's "Matador" week, there were no club or extracurricular meetings. And lunch hours offered students an opportunity to play Twister, handball, make origami and blow bubbles. On Thursday—pamper day—they got massages, salt scrubs and attended a motivational assembly, and Friday was carnival day and a dance.

"Parents are starting to think twice about sending their children to Monta Vista. The idea they have is that it's so stressful here because we don't do anything else but study," Scott says. "We have to be careful about the words we use—we need to change the picture that's being painted."

Scott gave a presentation to the Fremont Union board of trustees—at the same meeting where Hamma spoke—where she outlined her school's new approach. While she mentioned the fact that approximately 70 percent of Monta Vista's students make grade point averages above a 3.0, she also pointed out that Monta Vista is the only school in the district to employ a full-time woodshop teacher. This is one of many extras Scott says are overshadowed by the school's stellar test scores.

"Monta Vista is a great place, but great can be defined in different ways," Scott says. Plans for re-aligning the school's reputation include outreach to the elementary and middle schools that feed into Monta Vista, as well as employing the thousands of public relations agents that already operate within the local community—the parents. This campaign informally kicked off earlier this school year at a parents' forum.

But Scott also says that part of the strategy is to change how the school relates to its students to project a more relaxed atmosphere. Scott spoke to her staff about making the office a less intimidating place, so "Staff Only" was removed from several doors, and every student is greeted when they walk in. Future plans for the project include personalizing each student's education to their specific learning style and ability, but Scott says that could take a while to accomplish.

"This is step one of a hundred," she says. "People are taking so many classes that they can't eat dinner with their family, or they have to take the SAT one more time. Everyone gets wrapped up in this snowball, and we just have to put the brakes on."

Student DeWath says she can sense a difference at Monta Vista, though she wonders if it is more a result of leaving her ultra-stressful junior year behind. But she also says that despite the administration's efforts, she thinks the stress originates more from peers trying to compete with each other. "It's like a sport," she says.

The problem has many causes, and many potential solutions, and the operators of the study are continuing to help pinpoint both. Mollie Galloway, Ph.D., co-director of SOS with Pope, will speak on Feb. 16 in the auditorium at Cupertino High School. The cost is free. For more information, call Cupertino High School at 408.366.7300.