Wellness Center
Our on site Wellness Center is a quiet oasis, a healthy escape from the often hectic school environment. Students, kindergarten through sixth grade, can drop-in to the center for support with a comprehensive array of social-emotional needs. The Wellness Center additionally offers check-ins with the wellness center staff and targeted, evidence-based resources focused specifically on the areas of emotion identification and regulation, mindful relaxation techniques, bullying prevention & intervention and sensory integration development.
This year, we are pleased to welcome our new Wellness Counselor, Dreema Abila (she/her). An Oklahoma native and recent graduate of USF, Dreema is bringing her passion for working with neurodivergent students and families of all kinds to CASA. Not only does Dreema provide individual therapy and run social-emotional support groups for our students, but she oversees our Wellness Center, pictured below. This year at CASA, our Wellness Center (WC) has prioritized focus on identifying mindful activities, as each station in the Center is geared towards one piece of the 'whole student.' The WC is sinking deep into a few domains of wellness: emotional, physical, social, environmental, and spiritual (through play). Each day, our students have the opportunity to engage in an activity grounded in a strengths-based framework surrounded by one of these domains.
The CASA Wellness Center stations in action
Kindness Is Cool
At CASA we work closely with our students to encourage respect, empathy & kindness. Each year we offer a week of workshops investigating these themes and aiming to combat bullying. Through experiential creative arts projects, participants are shown how inclusion and being a “Witness-Hero” can end the bullying cycle. Our Kindness Is Cool programming is inspired by expressive arts therapist, Maryam Mermey, who takes an innovative approach to addressing bullying.
