New app for schools, teachers focuses on improving students' mental health

New app for schools, teachers focuses on improving students' mental health

A new wellness app is helping students express their feelings so that teachers can help connect them with the resources they need.

Letting her teachers know how she's feeling is part of 9-year-old Neriah Williams' morning routine. The fourth grader at Furman L. Templeton Elementary School in west Baltimore is evaluating her own mental health using an app called WellCheq.

"I like that I am able to express how I feel without telling anybody because, usually, I'm kind of shy," Neriah said.

With WellCheq, students not only pick an emoji for how they're feeling, but answer on a scale of one to 10 how they're doing overall.

"This means you don't feel good at all, but this means you feel really awesome," Neriah said, pointing to the different emojis used in the app.

WellCheq is the brainchild of coder and post-doctoral Johns Hopkins University student Jodi Miller. She created it as a way to connect with the high school students she was teaching at the time.

"When I had a little bit of insight, I was just better able to support them. So, if a student had their head down, it was hard to know, are they tired? Or is there something else going on?" Miller said.

With WellCheq, students can also ask for additional help. Furman L. Templeton has been using the app for three years and has developed a team to respond.

"It could be anything that's either triggering or specific to that individual student. But there have been other partnerships, or supports, put in place based on simple conversations that have been had as an outcome of these daily surveys," said Ladaisha Ballard, the school's principal.

"When we split the list, we're like, 'Huh, we never knew that something happened to this child,' or, if they're hungry, or grandma died this weekend. And so, all of those kinds of things come out," said Kristine Zwerlein-Rose, a social worker at the school.

WellCheq also gives students a way to identify friends who may be having a hard time.

"Yes, I have checked on one of my friends because they looked a little bit mopey and not and not as excited as they were," Neriah said.

"Our kids tell us those types of things, and we would never know that otherwise," Zwerlein-Rose said.

WellCheq is being used in two Baltimore City schools and in more than four dozen schools across the country and around the world. As for privacy, Miller said WellCheq tracks responses only and cannot see student names. One day, she hopes to develop a version to help teachers.

"Teacher emotional well-being is so important, too, and if they aren't taking care of them, they also can't take care of our students," Miller said.