OCPS K-8 School, Calm Room Spotlight

PLEASE DESCRIBE YOUR PROGRAM/INITIATIVE. 

The calm room was established to assist and help students regulate their feelings.

WHY IS THIS PROGRAM/INITIATIVE IMPORTANT?

We need a designated space that we can help students who struggle with emotional regulation who may not have the skills to regulate themselves or who may be lacking in social emotional skills. We work to equip the teachers to have a designated space in their classroom, which is a tier 1 type of situation, where every student is given some type of social emotional learning within the classroom. However, this may not be enough for every student. So, we think of the calm room as a tier 2 settings for students to be able to get pulled out of the classroom by the school social worker or guidance counselor, some of our clinical social work interns and our support staff from the district. We have had teachers who have asked to build that type of relationship with students by going into the calm room themselves — the room is open in that way.

The calm room is designed based on the four zones of regulation curriculum, which is approved by the district. I selected this curriculum because during my first year as a teacher, I noticed that a lot of my students didn’t know how to articulate what they were feeling. I had a young man tell me that he was angry because he has anger in his blood. I talked to him about that and asked him if he thought I had happiness in my blood; he looked at me and said no! So, I explained to him that it’s not something we have in our blood, it has to do with what we see and hear and maybe don’t know how to work through it. That made an impact on him. It was important to me to implement these ways of learning about our emotions so that the kids will know how to best regulate their emotions.

WHAT GAP WOULD EXIST WITHOUT YOUR PROGRAM/INITIATIVE?

Without the calm room, I think it would be very difficult to reach the number of students that we currently reach because it is a designated space for us to be able to take students to for them to come in and tangibly see the four different zones of regulation. Since this isn’t ideal to set up in a classroom where it’s more academically-focused and the teachers may not have a background in this type of curriculum to teach it in-depth, I think it’s important for students to have that tier 2 and tier 3 support and to tangibly see how to work with their feelings.

HOW DOES YOUR PROGRAM/INITIATIVE SUPPORT COLLEGE AND CAREER READINESS IN PARRAMORE?

It supports their college and career readiness because we all need those soft skills. It is very important for us, as people, to know how we’re feeling and what we’re feeling; we need to be able to verbalize that and know how to advocate for ourselves and understand that there’s a big focus on mental health now. It’s important for our students to be able to recognize when they’re feeling angry or anxious and to be able to differentiate one feeling from another by having the experience of how to process through emotions. Some students have experienced a lot of trauma and most times they aren’t given the chance to process and work through that trauma. They end up carrying these things with them and it’s just a matter of time before you have a job or you’re in a situation where these struggles may come out in a not-so-positive way.