A Lifeline for Inner City Teachers

Mindfulness has become a lifeline for some stressed-out inner city teachers. 

In a federally funded two-year study of mindfulness and emotion-skills training for K-12 teachers, the CARE program is teaching mindfulness techniques to two groups of Pennsylvania teachers—one in the affluent community of State College and the other in the much poorer city of Harrisburg. Preliminary findings indicate the inner city teachers are deriving the most benefit. 

According to Dr. Tish Jennings of the Garrison Institute, which developed CARE (Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education), “Both groups have clearly benefited from the mindfulness and emotion training, but for Harrisburg teachers it’s already become a lifeline, an essential skill, that may be keeping them in their jobs.” While nearly half of all teachers quit during their first five years, Jennings notes that attrition rates in poorer urban areas are another 50 percent higher.