VAN BUREN, Ark. — At the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year, 75 schools across Arkansas received funding from Blue Cross Blue Shield to build calming rooms.
As the spring semester wraps up, many of those schools are finishing up the rooms, with some already putting them to use.
“Kids spend the majority of their day at school, and we want them to be able to do well in life [and] to be able to do well in the classroom. This is one way to do it. It's an area where they can go just decompress,” said Kerri Nettles, the communications coordinator for Blue Cross Blue Shield.
Each school selected for the grant was given $2,500 to put together a calming room.
While the schools had some creative freedom in putting the rooms together, Nettles said most rooms include soft music, comfortable seating, and sensory items like fidgets or coloring books.
One of the schools already getting use out of its calming room is Butterfield Trail Middle School in Van Buren.
School counselor Kim McCormick said she has already seen the room fill an important need.
“Arkansas has one of the highest student populations with ACEs, ‘adverse childhood experiences,’ and their bodies physically do not regulate the way that they need to,” McCormick said. “We assume that kids know how to calm down, they know how to pay attention in class, they know how to focus, but more and more, we see that that is just not true.”
The calming room is meant to be a space where both students and faculty can go to take a moment to themselves.
“Staff are learning how to recognize those symptoms of things and also try to be more responsive instead of reactive,” McCormick said. "Some kids have some pretty short fuses. It could be an anger outburst; it could be a 'shut down.' They recognize that and they let one of us know, and they come down to the room.”
As the school refines a plan for using the room long-term, McCormick said it’s a step toward a bigger goal of promoting mental health.
“It’s an avenue to open up the discussion, and for a lot of our students, it just kind of starts the conversation, and it helps them to feel like they're not alone."
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