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. Stewart said the trio knew from the beginning that the club would need to be an informal, welcoming space instead of one intensely focused on mental health.
“We knew we couldn’t really talk fully about mental health issues because we’re high schoolers, and we don’t want to spread misinformation or anything,” she said.
Teen Pause meetings were held every Wednesday after school, attracting a broad range of students from all grades.
“It’s different people every week,” Stewart said. “People will bring their friends. I’ll even go out in the hallway and ask if anyone wants to come and do arts and crafts. I don’t care if you’re in the club. It’s low commitment.”
The club’s founders have been careful to ensure participating students don’t feel pressured to come. Stewart said, “we don’t want to create even more stress when we’re already trying to reduce it.”
Meetings look different every week, with activities ranging from the artistic to the meditative.
Stewart said, “We’ll greet everyone, introduce everyone, sometimes we ask a question of the day. Sometimes we do breathing exercises to start the meeting. Then we get started with our activity of the day, which could be coloring pages, it could be making slime… we have different activities every week.”
It’s different from the typical NCHS experience.
“At our school, everyone’s really academically driven, and they’re just trying to fill their resume and make sure they have the perfect transcript,” Stewart said. “I know speaking from experience, it’s a lot. [NCHS] offers a lot of AP classes. People are thinking about college, and that’s on top of sports, theater and clubs. It’s really overwhelming.”
While Teen Pause was successful for a first-year club, Stewart thinks that there’s still heavy stigma around mental health at NCHS. After the tragedy that preceded Teen Pause, she said, “It felt like we just went right back to school.” The club gives space to students who are seeking connection, healing and grounding.
“We have a website, and we have links to a lot of different mental health resources, and phone numbers to call for help,” Stewart said. “We advise people who are really struggling to seek help or talk to their counselor at school, because obviously we can’t tell you what to do. Our club can’t really tell you what to do, but we can provide resources on how to help.”
In the future, Stewart said, she, Roscoe and Knowles want to raise money for mental health charities—something that didn’t happen this past academic year.
“We focused our club on doing activities and just taking a break,” she said. “But as rising seniors, we definitely want to look into those and see if we can find ways to donate money. I know a lot of clubs do bake sales, so maybe it’ll be something like that. We’ll do whatever we can.”