Addressing Mental Health with Focus Zones at Cottonwood-Oak Creek School District

Take a moment and think back to your school days. When you or your classmates acted out emotionally or disrupted class, the punishment would likely range from being sent to a corner, sent home or suspended. While this may still work for kids who are momentarily rebelling, there are others who misbehave as a cry for help.

Cottonwood-Oak Creek School District meets those students with understanding by giving them a safe space to get better – and to be better. We have spent years challenging traditional disciplinary actions that fail to address students’ mental health and the underlying cause of the issues.

I always say, “If there wasn’t a problem, there wouldn’t be a problem.” In other words, if there weren’t any problems in the student’s life, they wouldn’t exhibit problematic behavior in the classroom. Years ago, I dug into the science behind this concept and familiarized myself with Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). The CDC defines ACEs as potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood that could impact health and well-being. This includes abuse, growing up in a family with mental health or substance use problems, lacking basics like food and housing, and more. Approximately 70% of students in our school district receive free and reduced lunch, and 150 students are experiencing homelessness.

When students struggle with their mental health, whether as a result of abuse, neglect or trauma, it is difficult for them to be engaged in the learning environment, so they often resort to attention-seeking or avoidance behaviors. They can become disruptive in the classroom, and that impacts their learning, but it also impacts the learning of students around them.

Our district introduced a Focus Zone in 2017 to get to the root of behavioral issues in the classroom rather than putting a Band-Aid on it. The Focus Zone is a safe space where students can work on academics and shift negative-impulse behaviors into positive choice behaviors with the help of counselors, teachers and a paraprofessional. It is a reset zone more than anything, where kids can regulate and get back to class instead of sitting at home or getting suspended.

With a $150,000 Mobilize AZ grant from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona in 2018, we expanded the program and established more Focus Zones. With additional funding sources, we now have Focus Zones on all four campuses.

Seeing the progress in students’ behavior and mental health first-hand has been nothing short of incredible. Namely, there was one fourth grader who was having a really hard time controlling himself and he constantly caused disruptions in the classroom. He started going to the Focus Zone and learned the shark pose, a calming technique, and he ended up utilizing that pose to stay in class. The bottom line is, we don’t want students to rely upon going somewhere else to regulate their emotions; we want to give them the skills to recognize they can do it themselves.

Focus Zones are still one of the main concentration areas of our district, and the success stories keep coming. To date, there have been more than 7,750 Focus Zone visits. But there are other programs and activities we have introduced to inspire health and growth. Our school district has approximately 70 different afterschool clubs, including biking, archery, dance, music, gardening and so much more. The Mobilize AZ grant also helped supply equipment like helmets and gardening tools to these programs.

We strive to give every student the opportunity to explore. A lot of students who attend schools in our district do not receive the same enriching experiences that students in other areas with other income levels may have, so we have made it a mission to broaden their experiences.

There is one young girl, for example, who didn’t deeply connect with anything in school until she joined the archery club. Now, she has a sense of excitement and belonging, identifying herself as an archer. She inspired me to think differently. Every day, I’ll walk into a classroom and think to myself, how many of these kids are the next Mozart? Or are Olympic track stars? Or gifted physicists? Unless we give them the opportunity, no one will ever know.

These programs can dually give students a sense of self and support mental health – an important issue to tackle in Yavapai County. The county is beautiful and idyllic, but there is a strong undercurrent of generational issues, ranging from substance abuse to homelessness and poverty. This has had a profound effect on our thinking for the district and the programs and activities we implement.

With the help from partners like Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona, we will continue to prioritize the mental health of our students. Because there will always be another young boy who can excel if he just learns self-control or another young girl who can find purpose and fulfillment if she is just given the chance to explore. And you never know, the next Mozart could be in Yavapai County, ready to compose an ingenious symphony – we just need to give them the tools, time and opportunity to find out. QCBN

By Steve King

Steve King is superintendent of Cottonwood-Oak Creek School District.