Pleasantville Middle Schoolers Learn Mindfulness

“Dialectical Behavior Therapy” might be a mouthful for adults to say, but the multisyllabic phrase rolls right off the tongues of fifth graders at Pleasantville Middle School.

That’s because Mary Ann Flatley, the Pleasantville schools K-12 social and emotional learning counselor, has been teaching the students that DBT, as they call it, can help them find healthy ways to cope with stress, manage their emotions and develop good relationships.

“Did anyone use the skills we learned?” Flatley asked the pre-teens during a recent visit to Kelly Lane’s fifth grade health class.

“I tried 4-7-8 breathing,” Anna, a fifth grader, said. “It helped me calm down.”

“That’s great,” Flatley said. “Did anyone journal? That can teach you to be aware of your feelings and accept them.”

While the district began introducing social and emotional learning, or SEL, into the curriculum some years ago, it was only last year that the full-time districtwide K-12 SEL counselor position was created, said Joyce Connell, coordinator of counseling and guidance.

“We found that post-covid, children were experiencing isolation and trauma,” she said. “We saw an increased need for district support for SEL.”

Soon middle schoolers were playing computer games in class that asked for the meaning of empathy or showed how judging others could invalidate their feelings.

When the fifth graders in Pleasantville played one of those games in class recently, the kids were so excited they started calling out things like “He’s using emotion mind, not reason mind!” and “That statement’s invalidating.”

The Pleasantville Board of Education meeting on November 1 will include a presentation providing an overview of the counselor services K-12 in the district.