Eric Tate felt tired. The 12-year-old from Brooklyn was up late again, playing on his phone and watching movies. He would rather have been home sleeping than in school on that Friday in May. But Eric perked up when Marshall “Mars” Leonard pulled him from a schoolwide town hall to hang out with him in a space carved out on the second floor in the massive building housing the Meyer Levin Middle School. Frankly, the tween said, he doesn’t much like school at all, with a major exception, a program improving middle schoolers' mental health.

“I like being here,” said Eric, who wrapped up seventh grade last month.

Eric’s rapport with Leonard goes deep. They bond over horror movies. They play Crazy Eights. And Leonard recently relearned how to teach math to help Eric, who moved his grade up from a 55 to 80. (Leonard admitted to using ChatGPT to help him.)

Leonard is Eric’s mentor. He’s a graduate social work student at Adelphi University, who was placed at the East Flatbush middle school through an organization called the Arthur Project, which prepares clinicians-in-training to provide mentoring that focuses on school, family, friendships, and health to students with unmet academic, social, or mental health needs.

The program takes a therapeutic approach, but it’s not therapy. The students set individualized goals with their mentors through fun 1-on-1 activities and in small groups. For their Saturday community programs, they’ve taken students to the movies, to an escape room, and to play paint ball. The program exclusively focuses on middle school, an often overlooked but challenging time for kids as their bodies and brains are rapidly changing. It’s also an age where professionals are seeing greater mental health challenges.

“We know that kids feel extraordinarily lonely, that they consider self harm and suicide way more often than we want them to,” Jessica Greenawalt, executive director and co-founder of the Arthur Project, regarding middle schoolers' mental health. “It used to be pretty rare to hear a 10- or 11-year-old-talk about and seriously contemplate or attempt or complete even suicide, and it has become way more common.”

Read the full article about middle schoolers' mental health by Amy Zimmer at Chalkbeat.