Picture lunchtime at a high school. Barely controlled chaos, kids scarfing their meals and scrambling to finish homework in the cafeteria.
Now, picture this: Students meditating and stretching into yoga moves in a peaceful classroom. That’s the scene you’d see if you dropped in on Sabina Wex during Monday lunch hours. Even if she had a test the next period.
“It’s so relaxing,” says the 16-year-old. “If I have a big presentation or something after lunch, I’m so much more confident.”
It’s not a student spa club; it’s a program called Stress Busters, run by her school’s guidance department. Remember them? The folks that used to administer those dreaded career questionnaires?
While the rocky labour market has made matching kids with specific jobs a mug’s game, school counsellors have rewritten their own job description. While they’ll still help kids aim for postsecondary school or training in certain fields, they’re also increasingly responsible for inculcating so-called soft skills, such as self-control and confidence, that will help students become nimble job seekers.
In this universe, a yoga program that promotes resiliency and relaxation is, indeed, just as important as GPAs and test scores.
After all, any school counsellor will tell you that the majority of jobs their charges will step into don’t even exist yet. Look around any workplace and you’ll see jobs that were never in any of those questionnaires, such as communities editors and chief technology officers.
“It’s not about deciding what job they’re going to work at when they leave,” says the Toronto District School Board’s Lorna McPherson, who oversees the board’s guidance program. “It’s partly about that. … But, really, it’s life-planning, making decisions and goal-setting.”
And while there will always be those who believe the school system should stick to the three-R approach, it’s hard not to conclude that kids – including elementary students – need more, not less, of this kind of counsel.
But in Ontario, for instance, schools are mandated to have only 2.6 counsellors for every 1,000 high-school students and only one counsellor for every 5,000 kids at the elementary level. Since that’s much less than one per school, they are roving counsellors with the unfortunate title of elementary itinerant counsellors, or EICs.
More than a decade ago, most school boards adopted a “whole-school” approach to guidance counselling, rather than a resource-intensive one-on-one model in which students saw a counsellor once a year or when they had some sort of crisis. Instead, counsellors started to oversee school-wide programs around issues such as bullying and mental health, along with credit courses in career studies for all students at the Grade 9 or 10 level to help them ponder their options and get to know themselves.
“Kids are good at something. All of them. And that’s how you keep them engaged in school and that’s part of the role of guidance,” says Ms. McPherson.
When it comes to career planning, they still administer the odd test, but they’re also mandated by provincial ministries of education to bolster general life skills.
That’s where yoga and stress relief comes in, says Michelle de Braux, a counsellor at North Toronto Collegiate Institute and one of the founders of the Stress Busters program.
“Career development is about knowing who you are, what you value, what you love to do, and how you like to work best,” she says. “Not only is it hard to achieve this self-awareness if you can’t balance your life and feel stress or anxiety, but knowing how to deal with stress is a critical life skill for students, and everyone, to learn.”
