How 'Mindfulness Wednesdays' at Tank Elementary School led to a 30% decrease in discipline referrals
Natalie Eilbert
GREEN BAY - When he first came into the social worker's office, a kindergartner at Tank Elementary School acted out and couldn't control his emotions.
By the end of the school year, whenever he felt himself enter the "red zone," he practiced controlled breathing, attributed colors to his feelings and accessed calm.
It's part of an ongoing mission at Tank Elementary School, using mindfulness toward what principal Janay Banks-Wilson calls "outrageous love."
"When you have the kid destroying the classroom, or the defiant kid, we have to give them a little bit more outrageous love," Banks-Wilson said. "We have to give them a little bit more patience, understanding and more of us, because that is what they're screaming out for."
Across 15 schools in the Green Bay School District, the Brown County community nonprofit Wello distributed nearly $8,000 in mini-grants for mindfulness practice in K-12 classrooms. The practice includes guided breath work, meditation and yoga poses, but the work doesn't stop at asanas. Some classrooms let students play with fidget spinners, hit punching bags, calm themselves with weighted blankets and color mandalas.
Data from local schools show that in the two years since the in-school practice began, weekly mindfulness, dubbed "Mindfulness Wednesday," has reduced discipline referrals up to 30% at Tank Elementary School, which is part of the Wisconsin Achievement Gap Reduction Program.
Many of the students have already amassed post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety, a result of housing instability, financial struggles and personal experiences, said Alyssa Hawley, a social worker at Tank Elementary.
"We have a lot of families who are never house-stable, they go from one place to another. So when students come here, learning isn't a priority, it's 'Where am I going tonight? Who am I gonna be with? Am I gonna have enough food?'" Hawley said.
Banks-Wilson said it isn't up to the teachers to decide what a student's version of mindfulness looks like. The role of the teacher is to help provide tangible tools to access a space of calm.
"The last couple years have impacted us as adults with fully functioning prefrontal cortexes," Banks-Wilson said. "What did that mean for a 5-year-old, an 8-year-old, a 10-year-old? If they can't attend to the teaching, they're not going to receive the teachings."
Beth Heller, director of strategic partnerships at Wello, has been a practitioner of meditation for over 20 years. She said studies have demonstrated the positive physiological outcomes of meditation, which include reductions in anxiety and depression, heart disease and high blood pressure, and more.
"Since schools began introducing mindfulness techniques into the classroom, there's been a huge trend upward in research," Heller said. "The data has shown that mindfulness can improve academic performance and regulate emotions."
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A 2017 study published in Psychology in the Schools found that mindfulness-based programs in schools can "improve attention and executive functioning, bolster social-emotional resiliencies, and help teachers and students manage school-related stressors."
Although some gurus might not see it this way, mindfulness comes in many forms that go beyond traditional forms of meditation. Some students like to doodle and color when they feel tension coming on, others like to play with fidgets and still others prefer to let out steam on a punching bag, Hawley said.
But managing stress rises to a whole new level when moving from elementary school to middle school, a time of dramatic physical and emotional growth.
At Washington Middle School, disproportionate suspensions of Black students in the 2015-16 school year led to working groups grappling with ways to decrease expulsion rates and uplift students with a mind toward new community approaches.
In 2017, school administrators worked with the Greater Green Bay Chamber to convert a classroom into a mindfulness space. The room, from its lighting to the tools within the space, gives permission for students to preoccupy themselves, calm their nerves and reset.
Washington Middle School reported a 12% decrease in suspensions in the first two years of the practice's implementation.
Molly O'Neill took over as principal this year and started the mindfulness program anew, after the gap created by COVID-19.
She said the space blends the amenities of a bedroom and yoga studio. The school has been able to track data to monitor the frequency of use, which sometimes is five to seven students per hour.
Lunch periods are the most popular time of the day for students to come into the mindfulness space, which O'Neill said is the most frenetic point of the day for many students.
While Washington Middle School hasn't seen quite the same decrease in discipline referrals this year, O'Neill said the year and a half prior to the pandemic hitting there was a "strong correlation" between students entering the mindfulness space and less need for disciplinary action.
While O'Neill said it's too early to know whether discipline referrals will decrease as a result of the mindfulness space after a year of remote learning, the option of sending students to the space has been a net-positive for the school.
It also has provided students with the means of understanding when their adrenaline begins to spike.
"A student being sent to the mindfulness space isn't a consequence; it has nothing to do with misbehaving," O'Neill said. "It's more of a, 'Hey, I see you're starting to be triggered and you're starting to show signs of maybe some escalated anxiety. Before this becomes something, let's go there.'"
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Natalie Eilbert is a government watchdog reporter for the Green Bay Press-Gazette. You can reach her at neilbert@gannett.com or view her Twitter profile at @natalie_eilbert.