18 | DECEMBER 26 • 2019

‘Know Yourself ’

Prepare U gives Hillel Day School students tools
to maintain mental health.

STACY GITTLEMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
O

n a recent chilly Tuesday morn-
ing, eighth graders at Hillel
Community Day School sat in a
circle, journals in hand and pondered a
text from Rabbi Abraham Kook (1865-
1935):
“But know the reality in which you live.
Know yourself and your world. Know the
thoughts of your heart, and of all who
speak and think.
”
In a first for Jewish day schools, Hillel
Day School in Farmington Hills is teach-
ing Prepare U, an experimental mental
health curriculum for adolescents that
was created by local therapist and Hillel
alumni Ryan Beale.
To adapt it for their Jewish students,
Hillel faculty infused the arc of 15 lessons
covering topics such as anger, anxiety and
stress, grief and family systems, social
media, relationships and self-reflection.
Midway through the course, students
discuss signs and the aftermath of suicide.
In many of the classes, students sit in a
circle as a teacher directs them through
what often are deep conversations about

mental health.
Throughout the workbook are pages
left blank for self-reflection, plus self-care
tips and national hotlines for suicide pre-
vention, domestic abuse and LGBT teens.
Prepare U is taught in select high
schools in six states, including Michigan.
Now in its second year at Hillel, the
course there is funded by a grant
from the Michael Kroopnick Family
Endowment Fund for Healthy Emotional
Development and Resilience.
There is a mental health crisis among
the country’
s schoolchildren. Locally, the
Jewish Federation’
s 2016 study, Jewish
Community Health and Social Welfare
Needs Assessment, confirmed the high
rates of anxiety and stress or experiences
with a mental illness — about 50 percent
— among teens in Detroit’
s Jewish com-
munity.
Hillel faculty members Nicole Miller
and Kimberly Love said that Prepare
U was developmentally appropriate for
the school’
s eighth-graders and a good
response to the Federation findings.

Jews in the D

Doris Gold, 13,
reviews some
of her Prepare
U coursework
at Hillel Day
School.

STACY GITTLEMAN

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