As a small school district in rural Arizona, Cottonwood-Oak Creek School District has often faced a problem of lack of resources.
A few years ago, it had a shortage of guidance counselors — the school at one point had two working part- time whose hours did not even add up together to a full- time staff member, according to Superintendent Steve King.
Facing a need for a creative approach to an important part of education, the school district started implementing a policy they referred to as “Focus Zones,” by using practices based on mindfulness meditation to help address behavior issues for children.
Starting at the now-closed Cottonwood Elementary School, the project aimed to help students who were finding it difficult to behave well in class to breathe, calm down and become present in the moment.
“It was around this idea of mindfulness in the class- room,” King said. “In schools it’s a newer concept. It’s a way for kids to recognize when their emotions are starting to get out of control and then to take steps to self-regulate. The goal is to recognize that you need to self-regulate. [They’re] getting mad about whatever, upset and instead of just acting out or lashing out at their peers or teachers, you give them the tools and the ability to recognize it, and then to take steps to not do those things.”
The school managed to get a grant from the Narbha Institute, a mental health nonprofit in Northern Arizona, for a pilot program at CES, beginning in the 2016-17 school year. Much of the initiative focused on instructing teachers how to introduce mindfulness in the classrooms, while also allowing the students who were causing problems to occasionally work in a separate group setting on methods to keep themselves present.
In the coming school year, COCSD will be able to expand its pilot program to all four campuses, each featuring their own full-time staff member, due to a grant of $150,000 from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona, as part of their Mobilize AZ grants program.
In August, Blue Cross Blue Shield joined with Gov. Doug Ducey to begin its $10 million program with an aim of addressing the opioid crisis within the state. The program has been expanded to include a wider focus on mental health in the state, leading to COCSD becoming one of four awardees for the coming year, and the only school district.
“They are using a program that has promising outcomes,” said Christine Wiggs, director of Community Health Intervention and Health Equity for Blue Cross Blue Shield. “They’re using an evidence-based approach around not only ensuring not only that there is buy in, commitment and support from leadership, but there is widespread support across principles, teachers and staff, so everyone is highly engaged.”
“When we toured the school and walked down the hallways, we got to see youth really living the work of the Focus Zones in action,” Wiggs said. “We got to see them living out their social contracts. We got to go into classrooms and see youth from kindergarten all the way up through eighth grade developing social contracts of how they want to be respected and create classrooms that support one another.”
The grant is not prescriptive. Blue Cross Blue Shield does not ask anything from the school district beyond continuing and expanding their program. For the district, this is a chance to scale it up, transitioning to having a full-time mindfulness counselor at each school. The four counselors hired — Bruce Steele at Cottonwood Community School, Darren Gagnon at Dr. Daniel Bright, Barb Daher at Mountain View Preparatory and Blaze Way at Oak Creek School — come from backgrounds in teaching and counseling and will be able to serve in a more traditional guidance counseling role of talking to children about what experiences and surroundings contribute to their behavior.
“It’s dealing with kids who are emotionally disregulated and students who have a very difficult time managing their emotions,” Daher said. “It basically stems from some kind of genuine episode in the brain that might be making a situation much, much worse than what’s really happening.”
Daher comes to the new position with over 20 years of teaching experience and masters in counseling. She said one of her goals is to teach students in a way that allows them to not only use these practices when she or another teacher encourages them, but to be able to recognize the value of focusing their mind on their own when necessary.
“That’s the ultimate goal, that I don’t have to be present — the kids will ultimately regulate themselves,” Daher said. “We can teach very simple techniques that will calm a student down very quickly. And so usually when we’re able to teach those techniques, it shouldn’t take very long. I’ve had students before where I’ll be on the phone, and they’ll just come into my office so I’ll put an index finger up, like, ‘I’ll be right with you.’ And they’ll calm themselves down, get themselves back and actually go back to class before I’ve gotten off the phone.”
The Mobilize AZ grant only covers one year of funding for the program, though it does provide the option of applying for a second round grant. King said that he hopes to be able to find a way to continue the expanded program if it is successful and is already searching for additional funding sources.
