We’re taking a break.

Since founding the Post, we’ve taken pride in our efforts to deliver consistent, reliable and timely content to engage high schoolers in local news. But we’re also proud of our internal values of mutual trust, respect and compassion — we look out for each other.

So for the next week, we won’t be publishing content of any kind.

The lofty goals and expectations we set for ourselves are what push us to deliver a product we’re proud of, but they can also cause us to generally neglect our own well-being.

While much of our team is fortunate to have the resources that we do, our exhaustive efforts put into the Post, academics and other extracurriculars — in conjunction with the ongoing pandemic — have pushed many of us into very real struggles with our mental health.

Rushing to breaking news, losing sleep to publish content and sacrificing our other commitments isn’t helping any of that.

A short break from the Post gives us space to breathe, and the ability to return with a new energy to reassess and tackle our challenges as a team.

We recognize that a week-long break will not solve the serious mental-health problems that many of us and teens around the nation face in light of the pandemic, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Our team has always sought to have open and honest conversations about mental health, and we see this as a much-needed continuation of not only that, but a precedent to set for our workplace culture.

While we’re on our break, we encourage you to check out the Los Altos High School Talon, Mountain View High School Oracle, Gunn High School Oracle and Palo Alto High School Verde Magazine — all student publications whose work we follow closely and respect — for your student journalism fix.

And, as always, the Los Altos Town Crier, Mountain View Voice and Palo Alto Weekly are all excellent local publications run by hard working teams of journalists that we admire and aspire to.

We’ll be back shortly.

Tomoki Chien, editor-in-chief
Cedric Chan, managing editor
Allison Huang, chief visual journalist
Natalie Arbatman, copy editor
Carly Heltzel, copy editor
Cathryn Krajewski, lead videographer
Gil Rubinstein, education manager
Olivia Hewang, reporter
Dana Huch, reporter
Agnes Mar, reporter
Jonas Pao, reporter
Garv Virginkar, reporter
Melody Xu, reporter
Emily McNally, photographer
Mia Bassett, videographer
Kaitlyn Huang, videographer