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Rowlett HS has 'reset room' to help students & teachers
Rowlett High School has a reset room on campus that will serve as a place for students to take a break, work through their anger, and re-center outside of the normal school environment.
ROWLETT, Texas - Rowlett High School now has a reset room on campus.
The room will serve as a place for students to take a break, work through their anger, and re-center outside of the normal school environment.
School officials are hoping this room will help them work with students going through hard times.
The woman behind the project said she’s blown away a church in Dallas reached out to help.
"We wanted to create a space here at a high school level where we can invite students, our most at-risk students, and just kind of give them a different kind of space to come do some work in," said Carmen Chadwick, who is an intervention facilitator at Rowlett High School.
Chadwick helps focus on students as a whole and supports them not just academically, but emotionally and socially.
"We needed a space that would invite them to come into and kind of let their guard down, and we just didn’t really have that," she said.
Chadwick reached out on Facebook for funding help for the reset room and got a large response back from the community.
A friend put her in touch with Preston Hollow UMC, which helped financially with the project.
"We can all recognize that we need a place, a safe place, to disconnect from our daily challenges, and really de-escalate or take the emotion out of things or know how to deal with emotions," said Chris Walerczyk, with Preston Hollow UMC.
Volunteers who put the room together Saturday were from Preston Hollow UMC and Rowlett High School.
"When it was really that we’re doing this for the kids and it’s to give them a place that they can go, everyone was like, ‘I’m in,’" Walerczyk said.
The room is the first of its kind at a secondary school for Garland ISD.
"In putting that design together, we thought how does all this culminate? Well, it’s a home that what we’re all looking for," Walerczyk said.
The space has a living room, a desk area, and a dining room with kitchenette, as well as a patio.
"We will start with 14 children that we have vetted, hand-selected that we see great potential in. They’re some of our most at-risk kids. We’re going to start investing in them on a daily basis," Chadwick said.
Chadwick said she and the district will be getting training on restorative circles, groups that offer support and discuss accountability.
"When our students leave our campus and go to an alternative school for like 30 days for different offenses and then come back to us, doing some restorative circles, called re-entry circles, where they come back into our school," Chadwick said.
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Preston Hollow purchased everything going into the room with its funds.
"They’re planting seeds into these children’s lives. When these children leave this high school, they’ve invested in their legacy," Chadwick said.
Students aren’t the only ones benefitting from the reset room. It’s also available for teachers too as a place to voice their concerns.