High schools and development of healthy young people

While high schools were designed to teach and guide adolescents, institutions today often fail and even harm their students. Low-income and minority youth are the most affected by this trend because poor quality schools are most often found in urban settings, and poorer students are the least able to call upon other resources to make up for the inadequacies in the school. Furthermore, today's high school paradigm is the least helpful to the student who will enter the job market immediately after high school, carrying few marketable skills and little understanding of his or her place in the community. Several effective school models do exist, and these often meet the needs of the minority students as traditional high schools do not. Physicians in the adolescent health field can and must help in this arena. Getting a teen out of a poor school and offering alternative schools where appropriate will contribute to the health of each individual, and hopefully will encourage change in schools generally.