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‘Teen Pause’ Club Gives NCHS Students a Much-Needed Place to Decompress
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When Scarlett Stewart arrived at New Canaan High School as a ninth grader, she found herself struggling with anxiety that she didn’t know how to manage. A competitive dancer who practiced four hours per day on top of her NCHS workload, Stewart “felt like I was taking on too much.”
“And I’ll be honest, my grades dropped because I didn’t know how to handle dance and school,” she told NewCanaanite.com during a recent interview at New Canaan Library. “And that just caused even more stress.”
Together with classmates Kaitlyn Knowles and Lux Roscoe, Stewart—now a rising senior—decided to launch the school club “Teen Pause” (here on Instagram) after an especially difficult event during the 2024-25 school year.
Referring to a fellow student’s untimely death, she said, “My sophomore year, we had a tragedy at NCHS, and that showed us that there are people here really struggling with mental health. It’s not just anxiety, it can be depression, it can be any kind of issue. After my sophomore year, my friends and I said ‘Why can’t we do something to help?’ It feels like it [mental health] isn’t really talked about much, and people just brush it off.”
Knowles, Roscoe, and Stewart held meetings last summer to talk about how the new club could help “and we had to find a teacher to be our club advisor,” Stewart said.
They chose Kerry Hamara, an NCHS math teacher, and registered the club at the beginning of their junior year.