Prior to discussing the financial issues facing Mercer Island Youth and Family Services (YFS) with members of the Mercer Island City Council and School Board at Thursday’s joint meeting, YFS Director Cindy Goodwin showed board and council members a slide featuring the image of a smiling, freckle-faced young boy. The caption beneath his picture read: “My name is Tyler, and in nine years I will be an alcoholic.”

The presentation that followed was the task force update from YFS’ Healthy Youth Initiative. Its findings provided plenty for School Board and Council members to weigh when planning YFS’s next steps.

The task force, composed of Island parents and professionals, aimed to identify root causes and conditions contributing to underage drinking and drug use among Mercer Island youth. The data used included numbers from the 2012 Healthy Youth Survey, Dr. Suniya Luthar’s 2006 Survey of Affluent Communities and 2014 data collected from focus groups, police arrests and school discipline records.

Facilitator Sherry Burke, with the University of Washington’s Department of Social Work, noted while federal and private funders are more interested in funding research in high-risk communities, kids in affluent communities are also at risk.

“There are different pathways to risk in different communities, and there are different manifestations in how risk shows up in communities like ours,” Burke said.

Root causes included issues within family communication and function, a stigma with seeking help, defining success/experiencing pressure to excel at whatever they do, the “work hard, play hard” ethos, and students not being able to see themselves as more than their GPA or college resume.

Within the family, only 44 percent of high schoolers said their family has clear rules, ensures rules are followed and applies appropriate consequences. While 72 percent said parents tell them they love them often, only 31 percent said they have meaningful conversations with their parents on a regular basis.

The stigma for seeking help, particularly with mental health, revealed 20 percent of eighth graders admitted experiencing depression in the last year. Sixteen  percent said they considered suicide, while 7 percent said they’ve attempted suicide.

A mere 13 percent of students reported they would ask for help if they were anxious or suicidal, while 54 percent said they would encourage a friend to ask for help. “What we’re hearing there is that there are real mental health issues, but kids are reluctant to ask for help,” Burke said.

Regarding drug and alcohol use, 50 percent of 12th graders said drinking regularly is not a problem. Almost half said smoking marijuana was not a problem. Sixteen  percent of 10th graders said they have had at least one episode of binge drinking in last month; 14 percent used marijuana.

“One of the things Dr. Luthar’s research suggests is that kids in affluent communities are more likely than kids in higher risk communities to use high risk behaviors, typically alcohol and drugs, as a way to manage stress and anxiety. That’s part of what we heard from task force members as well,” Burke said.

Feedback from defining success revealed high levels of perfectionism and fear of failure. Burke relayed a story from Goodwin about a young man who ended in a prestigious medical school and came back on a break and said, “I made it here, I didn’t have much fun doing it.”

“That kind of strikes me of what we may be taking away from some of our kids,” Burke said. “Even though what we’re doing for them is the right thing, maybe [it’s] a little too much.”

Superintendent Dr. Gary Plano said after the presentation while he was worried about the number and the types of unsafe actions that students are engaged in, he also hoped to see more clinical research regarding mental health work done on Mercer Island.

“Healthy Youth Survey is one array of data points that needs to be considered, but I think you have much richer qualitative research that you’ve been doing, clinical work with our students and families for 20 some years. And so I’d like to dig in to what your clinicians are finding and how they’re correlated with what students are reporting on the Healthy Youth Survey. That’s frankly more interesting to me,” Plano said.

Council member Dan Grausz asked what was working and helping the situation. Goodwin replied people have been talking about the issue and reducing stigma, which they haven’t always done, with higher use rates by people in the schools with counseling services.

“We bring this up to you and we want you to know that we’re taking it on. We need you behind us and we need to continue community conversations about this,” Goodwin said. “We don’t have an exact game plan, but we want you behind us in developing a game plan because we can take it on.”

YFS, along with City Council, was planning to explore funding options at the Oct. 20 meeting to deal with a looming $260,000 deficit coming in the 2015-16 year. The current deficit figure doesn’t include having an additional full-time counselor at the new elementary school, something the superintendent addressed.

“Part of our allocation model for the future is conducting this needs assessment,” Plano said. “We do know that we want a mental health counselor at Elementary #4 and as I look at the secondary schools, the middle school is over 1000 students and the high school is over 1400 students, and they have the same allocation of an elementary school with 550 students, but the need is greater.”

Plano said it’s important to address the needs of children early, but there are needs that don’t show up until a child becomes 10 or 12 or 14 years old,.

“As we look at this needs assessment, we’ll be looking at the entire allocation. The city may tell us we have to draw this line somewhere, and the school district will have to consider what we’ll need to do in order to meet the needs we have in schools,” he said.