If you’ve been in the School District of Palm Beach County for more than a year, you probably remember Suite360. Every year you would have to sit through a bunch of online lessons on topics like mental health, drug addiction, and human trafficking. For Santaluces, we took them on “Mental Health Mondays”, where we extended 4th period to complete a lesson for around two months. Well, Suite360 is now gone, and it is being replaced by RethinkEd; here’s everything you need to know.

The reason we have these mental health lessons in the first place is because of a specific law, Rule 6A-1.094124. Among many other things, we are required to have 5 hours of “resiliency education”, teaching good values, the dangers of substance abuse, and suicide prevention. It went into effect over the summer, and while it doesn’t contain portions of what Suite360 did, most of the material will be on the same topics.

If you remember Suite360, you most likely didn’t like it, as was the case for many throughout the districts. In fact, according to official sources, it was one of the issues mentioned by the district’s student representation. So, the district decided to cancel Suite360 and purchase a new program adhering to the law, RethinkEd. According to their site, their goal is to, “…create healthy school climates, promote a greater awareness and understanding of mental health and wellness, and empower educators with training and instructional tools that drive whole school success.”

Similar to the old program, RethinkEd is already located on your student portal for you to access. On Friday, in addition to our pep rally, most of our day will be spent completing as many lessons as possible. This will reduce the need to use a changed schedule every Monday for many weeks. Still, we won’t be able to complete everything on Friday, so we will supposedly schedule another day to finish the remainder. Here’s to hoping this new program turns out better than Suite360, and we’ll be fine with it for the years to come!