![Wayland Historical Society Executive Director Scarlett Hoey explains the history of the Cochituate Gatehouse.
"The exterior is still a nice monument to remember buildings [involved in] water history," Hoey said. "We all drink lots of water, and it's such an important resource that we kind of take for granted nowadays."](https://waylandstudentpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/IMG_2024-1200x800.jpg)
On Friday, Jan. 30, the Wayland High School junior class went to the theater for a lecture on dating violence. The talk introduced a dating violence unit juniors will cover in wellness.
The lecture was led by wellness teacher Scott Parseghian and senior members of the Mentors in Violence Prevention club. Juniors can choose to join the club after completing the wellness unit. At the beginning of the lecture, Parseghian asked the members why they joined.
“I decided to join MVP because I think that dating violence is a topic that a lot of people shy away from, and I think it’s really important that myself and my peers can feel comfortable talking about the subject,” senior and MVP member Annie Melander said.
Last spring, senior and MVP member Kate Goodman attended the Healthy Youth Summit as a Wayland representative. The summit was hosted by the Healey-Driscoll administration. The event featured a student panel focused on building healthy relationships.
During the presentations, juniors were asked questions about unhealthy relationships and invited to share their responses with the audience. The first question posed to the juniors was, “What does an unhealthy relationship look like to you?”
After hearing students’ answers, MVP shared their definition.
“It’s [an unhealthy relationship] when one partner engages in a way designed to establish power and control over another person,” Melander said.
Melander said one way a partner can establish control is by minimizing harmful behavior. Other signs of abusive relationships the MVP members discussed included threats, possessiveness and physical abuse.
MVP members also created a list of 10 signs of unhealthy and healthy relationships and showed a short film from the One Love Foundation to help students work on identifying the signs of an unhealthy relationship. One Love is an organization that raises awareness about relationship abuse and was founded in honor of Yeardley Love, a University of Virginia lacrosse player who was killed by her boyfriend.
The film followed a couple, Zoey and Will, who appear to have a picture-perfect relationship. However, as the story progresses, the couple shows warning signs of an unhealthy relationship.
After the film, students were asked to identify those warning signs. Some said they noticed cheating and guilt-tripping.
The presentation also included statistics to underscore how common relationship violence can be. According to the MVP presentation, about three in 10 women and one in 10 men experience domestic violence in their lifetimes.
According to Parseghian, WHS began formally teaching about dating violence in 2015. Parseghian and Principal Allyson Mizoguchi took a Mentors in Violence Prevention course at Northwestern University and decided to make it a core, required unit in wellness classes.
“The students are going to understand this is near and dear to my heart for a number of reasons,” Parseghian said. “One being the death of Lauren Astley.”
Astley, a 2011 WHS graduate, was killed by her ex-boyfriend.
“People have times in their life that they’ll never forget and change their life forever,” Parseghian said. “For me, that’s one of those moments in my life that changed my life and made me think about what could I have done to prevent that from happening. This [dating violence circluma] is what I can do.”
