Hacking inner peace

The principal calls this a mindful school. Johane Ligondé is effusively warm but with the kind of emotional solidity you'd expect from someone who wakes each morning to manage more than 1,000 kids at the only public middle school in the village of Freeport in Long Island, New York. She is also an aromatherapist and life coach who hangs a sign reading "I AM AN OPTIMIST" in her windowless office. At John W. Dodd Middle School, some of the students' primary struggles are common to many young teenagers: depression, anxiety, self-harm and the looming shadow of sudden violence. So every morning during homeroom, a student or staff member leads the entire building through eight minutes of breathing meditation over the PA system. In detention, students are "invited," Ligondé said, to do mindfulness exercises, "so it's not just a space for punishment, it's a space for reflection." A "social-emotional learning curriculum" has been introduced, teaching them conflict and relationship management. At 11 AM, four periods into a drizzly Wednesday in June, Ligondé watches seventh graders shuffle in for science class and take their seats between model skeletons and posters of plant-cell structures. Some stare blankly into the middle distance. Their assignment is to meditate. Half the students slump their foreheads into the crook of their arm, resting on top of tables or thick ring binders. They are the control group. The other half strap on purple, cardboard VR headsets and clip pulse monitors to their fingers. The teacher, Vanessa Vidalon, turns down the lights, and the class hushes, save for some snapping of elastic headbands over white earbuds and the clacks of phones dropped on desks.