In Oregon, school counselors serve an average of 345 students each, and many rural or remote areas have no mental health providers at all. In rural communities like Silverton, it can be difficult to meet student needs. While clinical care is a critical piece of the puzzle, local schools also face an immediate need for proactive, daily stress management tools within the classroom itself to help students learn to regulate their nervous systems.
Jenifer Trivelli of WiseMind Educational Services has seen the impacts of this student stress firsthand. She’s worked with children in multiple schools, seeing how often kids coming into the office with headaches or stomach aches had nothing physically wrong with them, but wanted to share other stressors going on in their lives. She began researching neuroscience and mind-body tools that support people of all ages with trauma and stress.
“When kids are in stress and overwhelm, the executive function of their brain is not accessible,” Trivelli says. Asking kids to focus on what they’re feeling in their bodies—their heart is racing, or their breathing is intense—can ground them, she explained, “putting the blood back into the executive function of their brain.” WiseMind began as a coaching program to give students and their teachers a shared toolkit they can use to work through this process.
A grant from the Roundhouse Foundation supported WiseMind’s work providing stress management tools for students, families, and educators at two rural K-8 schools in Silverton, Oregon. Student participants said the coaching they received helped them get through auditions, stop fighting with siblings, and reframe their sense of self. One student expressed they’d formerly felt like a “bad kid” when they were upset, but no longer think that way.
Prior to 2020, Trivelli says, it was hard to get people to understand how helpful stress management tools could be for students. In a post-2020 world, there is a universal understanding that student stress and overwhelm are causing challenges in the classroom.
Up next, Trivelli is working toward developing an app that will walk students through somatic exercises formulated to regulate their nervous systems during times of stress.
