While meditation has expanded in recent years from a zen-seeker’s path to higher consciousness to a best practice for hard-charging CEOs, it’s now gaining a foothold at a school in Southern California serving students with serious emotional and behavioral issues.
Administrators at the Five Acres School in Altadena, Calif., are testing whether meditation and mindfulness can help students succeed in the classroom. A new mindfulness program implemented there in two semesters over the past year has helped pupils stay in the classroom and minimize emotional outbursts that can derail the learning process, according to administrators.
Students at Five Acres have ended up at the school because of behavioral issues that have led them to be expelled or removed from public schools. Five Acres has contracts with 22 school districts in Los Angeles County, though most students are drawn from Pasadena Unified School District. About one in five is a foster youth who also lives at the Five Acres residential treatment center, located on campus.
Five Acres offers small class sizes and an individualized, trauma-informed approach to helping students learn how to manage their classroom performance. But crisis intervention teams at the school still need to intercede and take students out of the classroom when problem behaviors become disruptive, such as when students overturn a desk or throw an elbow at a classmate.
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