Kaiser Permanente San Francisco awards a Community Benefit grant to the Quiet Time program. At first glance, the crowded halls and grounds of Visitacion Valley Middle School in San Francisco look like those of any inner city school. But visit first thing in the morning or mid-afternoon, and you’ll witness a surprising transformation. The entire school goes silent for 15 minutes while students and teachers sit together in quiet meditation. The program, called Quiet Time, has worked an astonishing change on Visitacion Valley, a school once known for its climate of anger and violence. “Before we implemented Quiet Time, we were known as the ‘fight school.’ We had the highest number of incidents of any school in the district,” said James Dierke, former principal at Visitacion Valley and current executive vice president of the American Federation of School Administrators. “After Quiet Time, that number went down to almost nothing. By taking that pause twice a day, the kids figured out they didn’t have to do those things to get attention or resolve their problems.” The school’s suspension rate, which had been more than twice the district average, dropped 79 percent in the first 3 years of the program. In the Quiet Time program, students, teachers, and staff have the option to learn and practice an evidence-based form of stress reduction known as Transcendental Meditation (TM), a type of meditation widely studied for its mental and physical health benefits. Each student can choose whether to practice TM, another form of meditation, or just take a quiet moment and rest, getting a break from the chaos in their lives. Either way, the impact on the school community is enormous. “The root cause of violence is stress,” said Laurent Valosek, executive director of the Center for Wellness and Achievement in Education (CWAE), which created the Quiet Time program and now administers it in 4 schools in San Francisco. “Our approach to violence, bullying, and anger works because it addresses this root cause.” Recognizing the success of this approach, Kaiser Permanente San Francisco recently awarded a Community Benefit grant of $20,000 to expand Visitacion Valley’s efforts to reduce bullying and violence. “This program is a way to address stress, which doesn’t just affect students, but teachers as well,” said Jim Illig, manager, KP San Francisco Community Benefit. “This is about improving the health of the community at large.” In addition to providing support for Quiet Time’s meditation program, the Community Benefit grant supports an innovative anti-bullying initiative that will target approximately 15 students in each grade who have anger and behavioral issues, and need additional support. The grant will also provide for a schoolwide assembly in which health experts will help students make the connection between stress and violence. The Community Benefit Advisory Committee was impressed with the Quiet Time program, said Illig, because it had documented results that included significant improvement in the school’s test scores and graduation rates. “We were looking for evidence-based strategies and this program stood out because they have strong quantitative data that shows that it works.” Not only that, but Quiet Time’s benefits were easy to see. “We went to observe the program and we were extremely impressed,” said Illig. “It’s quite something to see the entire school meditate quietly for 15 minutes. You can see the positive effect it has on the students and
Posted on: Sun, 04 May 2014 23:19:06 +0000
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