Kathryn Cross
Staff Writer
Beach Cities Health District Chief Medical Officer Lisa Santora commenced the first MBUSD meeting regarding its collaboration with a BCHD curriculum in MBUSD schools to enhance the physical, emotional, and mental health of MBUSD students.
At the Feb. 4 MBUSD meeting, the Beach Cities Health District is a Redondo Beach-based preventive health agency that offers health and wellness programs, such as the Kindergarten through 5th grade MindUp health program, which will be implemented within MBUSD schools during the 2015-16 school year. The central goals of the curriculum as increasing self awareness, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making.
“This Spring, MBUSD will receive funding from Beach Cities Health District to train all of our K-5 teachers on the provision of MindUp,” Manhattan Beach Education Foundation Executive Director Farnaz Golshani said. “This curriculum has been proven to reduce drug and alcohol usage in teens, which is an area of concern in our community.”
According to Golshani, MindUp is a research-based curriculum and training program that will help students improve their optimism, stress resilience, focus, and self-regulation skills.
“The current health curriculum in MBUSD schools seemed to be outdated, so to replace the current one within Beach Cities, we chose MindUp,” MBUSD Interim Director of Student Services Phil Cott said.
MindUp will be implemented in grades K-5 as a curriculum in three year sections over the course of 15 separate lessons.
“MindUp is not a traditional health curriculum,” Cott said. “The curriculum is more focused on emotional and social health, which is so important because it affects how people live a happy life.”
BCHD is funding MindUp curriculum trainers to facilitate elementary school teachers in learning the MindUp curriculum to teach in their classes. The trainers themselves provided by BCHD are from the Hawn Foundation, a team of neuroscientists and educators in the field of mindful awareness training.
“The Hawn Foundation will be implemented by allowing every elementary school teacher to take a half day off to train the teachers in the spring,” Cott said. “It will be up to the district to make sure this curriculum is implemented though.”
In order to further enforce BCHD’s goals, BCHD is also funding part-time elementary school counselors.
“A lot of secondary and high schools have counselors already, but the district has found that there are young kids who need someone to talk to about the problems that they are facing and the issues in their lives, so Beach Cities is providing it for them,” Cott said.
According to Cott, the MindUp curriculum as well as the elementary school counselors will be trained this coming spring, but they will begin counseling at these elementary schools at the beginning of the 2015-2016 school year.
“I am confident that students in our district will benefit from the program,” MBUSD Superintendent Michael Matthews said.
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