Kids have stress, too: Portsmouth elementary school brings mindfulness and ways to combat stressors to the classroom
As her Churchland Academy Elementary students faced COVID learning loss, community traumas and rising gun violence, first-year principal Karla Jakubowski knew she wanted to address social and emotional learning.
Coach Jenson Admiral Baker, a longtime physical education teacher, had a solution: mindfulness.
“We’re looking at this gun violence and gang violence, we have to provide students with a tool that comes from within,” Baker said. “We have seminars, we have mentors, but if these kids don’t understand where anger is coming from and how to control anger, they’ll still have problems.”
Jakubowski had just come from an assistant principal position. She believed social and emotional learning in elementary school could help prevent behavioral problems later.
This year, the school was the first in the district to pilot Inner Explorer, an online platform with daily mindfulness lessons. The program, which normally costs $2,100 for students, teachers and parents of one school to access lessons and other resources, was provided on a grant to Churchland.
“These kids have big emotions, and they don’t know what to do with them, and sometimes you see that come out in bad behavior,” Jakubowski said. “This mindfulness program really teaches them to feel their emotion, but take a minute, breathe through it, calm themselves, and then be able to process before they react or display those big emotions.”
Baker, who just retired from teaching after 33 years teaching and coaching in Portsmouth, is a longtime resident and a mental health practitioner with a degree in social work. He met Laurie Grossman, Inner Explorer’s director of social justice and educational equity, at a 2007 conference for mental health professionals.
“The definition of mindfulness is just awareness,” Grossman said. “It’s awareness of the present moment without judgment. When you’re happy, you’re happy, and when you’re sad, you’re sad.”
The mindfulness techniques integrate three parts of the brain — the regulating brain stem, the flight-or-flight limbic system and the sensory and motor neocortex — using breathing exercises and self-awareness techniques taught on the virtual platform.
Grossman first piloted the use of mindfulness with elementary schoolers in 2007 in Oakland, California, as shootings surged in the city. Stressors such as violence and poverty, she said, can lead to worsened outcomes for students. In Oakland, she saw that mindfulness was a useful tool for students under stress to think critically about the consequences of split-second decisions.
Since 2007, Grossman has worked to get Inner Explorer in schools across the country. The grant program allows for students in lower-income areas, who face unique challenges, to reap the benefits.
“When you’re aware of what’s going on, you can be in the present moment,” Grossman said. “So take COVID, take social media, take poverty, violence, shootings, and plop students in a classroom — they’re not there, their body may be there, but until you get their mind there they’re not there.
All teachers had access to the Inner Explorer tools. Of 32 teachers and administrators surveyed, 95.5% of respondents said mindfulness was part of positive behavior change, and 100% said mindfulness was helpful to students while test-taking.
Jakubowski noted the helpfulness of the program in testing. But in addition to academic learning gaps, Jakubowski said she was also concerned about social learning gaps for students who had been stuck in their homes in some of their most formative years.
“We like to think that the pandemic was an adult problem. But for kids, you know, they lived through it, too, and it caused a lot of stress on them,” Jakubowski said. “Not being able to see family and not being able to be at school. For a lot of them, this is their stable place, their safe place.”
Baker is retiring to pursue his mental-health practice full-time; Jakubowski said mindfulness techniques will stay in Churchland’s classrooms. Like Grossman said, mindfulness is most effective as a consistent practice, and Jakubowski hopes even more mindfulness time in the classroom will have a positive impact in the coming year.
“Our young people are facing a lot right now,” Jakubowski said. “We’ll do anything we can do to help them as they grow.”
