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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.

Around Town

NCHS Junior Launches ‘New Canaan Dance Academy Foundation’ [UPDATED]

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Scarlett Stewart, a junior at New Canaan High School, has been involved in competitive dance since she was 11. As part of the New Canaan Dance Academy company, the sport and art form has seen Stewart and fellow dancers practice and rehearse 20-plus hours per week for four major annual events as far away as Boston, New Jersey, Orlando and even abroad. Yet as she progressed, Stewart also noticed something that she found unsettling when competing with companies from some city programs such as those in Bridgeport and Hartford—namely, those dancers were unable to travel as far for competitions or access the same training, classes and costumes. “I just felt if they had more resources, they’d be striving for more in the dance world,” Stewart said. So last fall, she brought an idea to Elaine Young, studio director and founder of NCDA: Launch a nonprofit arm to raise money for gifted dancers who need the help.