Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month 2026

How is CSN’s youth educational programming moving the needle towards a community that doesn’t tolerate violence?

CSN delivers healthy relationship education to over a thousand students in Teton County a year.  We want to let you in on some of the magic that makes our youth education programs so effective. 

What We’re Doing

In our small community, we can see the big picture of healthy relationship education from primary school to high school graduation. Through partnerships with Teton County School District #1, Jackson Hole Community School, athletics teams, and organizations like GAP! and Teton Literacy Center, we have built an intentional progression of age-appropriate healthy relationship education that matures as the students do.  

We consider high-risk, high-intensity times in a young person’s life when friendships and romantic relationships are both front of mind and challenging to navigate: middle and high school.  

For 8th and 9th graders, we teach in health classes about healthy, unhealthy, and abusive relationships, sexual assault, consent, and media literacy. We build these health lessons considering: what is the most important information for students to know, and what skills do we want to leave them with that will support healthy relationships for a lifetime?  

Then, through partnerships like GAP! or the high school swim team, we consider: How do we compliment those lessons for this particular audience? How do we address the risks for this group? How do we empower them with the skills to create healthy boundaries, and to believe steadfastly in their self-worth?   

We utilize repetition to hammer home important points. At Dating 101, our middle school club, we love a mantra. Some of our favorites are:  

• First, Love Yourself (or FLY for short) 

• Yes means yes, everything else means no (the definition of consent, which every student should know before they graduate from Jackson Hole Middle School).  

• Be an UPstander (to encourage students to stand up for what they believe in).  

• The relationships you choose should build you up, not bring you down.  

• You are worthy of happy, healthy relationships.  

Something we recently discussed in our Peer Advocates high school club is that there is no way out of difficult emotions, only through.  

How We’re Doing It

Can you imagine a teacher in one of your high school classrooms writing “There is no way out of difficult emotions, only through” on the board and asking you what that means to you? And then having a fruitful, interesting discussion with eleven other 14-17 year olds about everyone’s favorite healthy coping mechanisms? This is the type of learning space CSN creates.  

We make available non-judgmental, empowering, validating, honest spaces where students get the facts and have the space to develop their own values and non-negotiables. As tweens and teens, young people are swirling in self-doubt, judgment, and misinformation. Much of their lives are controlled for them. They constantly are wondering, who am I, who do I want to be, who will I be, and is that good enough?  

Moving us toward a community that doesn’t tolerate violence — this is the magic that CSN is creating, every day, in education and prevention programming for our local teens.