Heather Devine's middle school students in a mediation circle in her P.E. class
Heather Devine
For the last three years, students at Lincoln Middle School at Cottage Grove have been learning about mental health in addition to physical health. It’s a mindfulness-based mental health curriculum developed by Lori Allen and Shin Shin Tang of the Oregon Mind Body Institute and funded by the Oregon Community Foundation. It’s being studied by researchers at the University of Oregon. They say the idea is to help sixth graders cope and manage their stress at a critical time in their development and also to help remove the stigma around talking about mental health. Lori Allen joins us, along with Lincoln Middle School teacher Heather Devine and her seventh grade son, Nate Schlitt, who was taught the curriculum in school and now uses it in his daily life.
Editor’s note: This post was edited to correctly reflect who developed the curriculum.
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