CWAE’s Quiet Time Program in the News

In 2007, a school meditation initiative was quietly launched in the San Francisco Unified School District.  The district knew that it would be controversial but they needed to find a way to address student stress and trauma when broadly accepted approaches were not effective or scalable enough to transform schools. The Center for Wellness and Achievement in Education (CWAE) piloted their Quiet Time program in Visitacion Valley Middle School.  The pilot was an immediate success.  Within the first year, student suspensions dropped by 45 percent and the attendance of both students and teachers increased.  Based on this initial success, efforts were made to study and expand the initiative.

An early supporter, we made our first grant to support this initiative in 2011 and renewed the grant in 2013 to expand the program to Burton High School. Initially dismissed as an “only in San Francisco” program, Quiet Time is gaining recognition as evaluation and outcome data not only show decreased student stress levels but increased resiliency, better student-teacher interactions, and better academic outcomes.  On January 12, 2014, San Francisco Chronicle published an article by Professor David P. Kirp, a professor of public policy at U.C. Berkeley and the author of “Improbable Scholars:  The Rebirth of a Great American School District and a Strategy for America’s Schools,” that called for making mediation a “school staple.” Read more here.