How Brain Health Retreat Rooms Are Transforming Student Well-Being in Ottumwa

When Ottumwa High School opened its Brain Health Retreat Room in 2023, administrators hoped it would provide students with a safe place to pause, compose their emotions and return to learning ready to engage and succeed. What they did not anticipate was how profoundly the space would reshape student well-being, school culture and even attendance rates.

Now, with the opening of a Brain Health Retreat Room (BHRR) at Ottumwa’s Evans Junior High School, the district is extending that impact to younger students, with the hope of eventually meeting brain health needs earlier and building continuity from middle school through high school.

Brain Health Retreat Rooms are intentionally designed, safe and judgment-free spaces in school for students to decompress, manage stress and learn emotional regulation skills. With school counselors providing guidance, Brain Health Retreat Rooms often feature calming colors and images, comfortable furniture and activities to help calm and regulate students’ emotions before they return to the classroom.

“They’re able to practice mindfulness techniques and coping strategies to strengthen their mental well-being to get back to learning,” said Evans Junior High School Brain Health Liaison Jessica Dowdy. “That's the ultimate goal, to get them back into their classrooms so that they can continue to learn.”

The need for this safe place and emotional refuge is critical to facilitate self-regulating techniques and maximize students’ capacity to learn as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report: 2013–2023 found that 40% of students had persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness with 20 percent seriously considering attempting suicide. Additionally, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, more than two-thirds of U.S. public schools have reported an increase in students seeking mental health services since the start of the pandemic.

The Brain Health Retreat Room at Ottumwa High School provides a safe place and sense of belonging where students can stop by to meet with a supportive adult and learn self regulation strategies. With approximately 1,000 visits in the first half of the school year and 40 students on average visiting the room per day, the goal is to help students reregulate and return to the learning environment as quickly as possible.

The rooms are made possible through community support from organizations such as Wellmark, the Ottumwa Legacy Foundation, local mental health providers and Brain Health Now. Brain Health Now, a grassroots organization aimed at ending mental health stigma, assists schools with the layout, design, construction and programming of Brain Health Retreat Rooms.

Nearly 20 schools in Iowa currently offer Brain Health Retreat Rooms, with the facility at Evans Junior High School among the first in a middle school.

“Ottumwa Schools has been a true partner in changing how we care for our students’ well-being. After seeing the impact of the Brain Health Retreat Room at Ottumwa High School, I’m incredibly proud to open our second BHRR in Evans Junior High,” said Brain Health Now founder Debi Butler. “This expansion signals more than a new space—it affirms a shared commitment to early, everyday support that helps students regulate, reset and return to learning,"

Students can visit a Brain Health Retreat Room at any point during the school day. While many students may pop in between periods or during an open period, students who feel overwhelmed or unable to learn while in class can request to visit the Brain Health Retreat Room. Students are issued a pass, and counselors are notified of the student’s visit, while the teacher is notified of their status and return to class. Teachers can also refer students to the Brain Health Retreat Room if they feel a student has become dysregulated.

“We've had really positive feedback from everybody involved on how much it means for them as a place to recompose themselves and get back to class,” said Ottumwa Community School District Director of Special Programs Mike Stiemsma. “Students are more regulated when they're coming back to class and they're ready to learn. And that's what we're shooting for, for all of our students.”

Through this system, teachers and administrators can also identify classes, times of day and social situations where students may be struggling and how to minimize those impacts and provide coping strategies.

“I get social anxiety being around people, and being in class with loud noises makes me very anxious,” said Manaswee Dixit, a ninth grader at Evans Junior High School. “I can come in here, calm down and do my work here too. “It helps my brain calm down and reset and get ready to go back to class.”

That sense of safety and belonging is echoed throughout the school. Students are not judged or singled out. Instead, they see peers navigating similar challenges.

“They see others just like them going through the same thing, and it takes that fear away and lets them know they are not alone,” said Evans Junior High School principal Mike Davis. “It has brought a sense of belonging for all our students.”

According to Davis, the impact of the Brain Health Retreat Room extends far beyond the school's walls. Since the opening of the facility at Evans Junior High School, the notifications he receives outside of school hours through Securely, a platform that students use to monitor mental health stress, have decreased significantly. When he does receive a non-emergency notification now, he can refer and encourage the student to visit the Brain Health Retreat Room the next day.

While already established at the high school, Dawdy noted that when the Brain Health Retreat Room first opened at Evans Junior High School, she had to go out and engage students to let them know about the available resources and encourage them to visit. Slowly, visitors started trickling in, and word of mouth quickly spread through the hallways as more and more students visited and brought friends to experience a quick mental respite from the hustle and bustle of the school day.

One of the anecdotal successes of the room is when students use it less frequently throughout the year as they build the skills and coping mechanisms into their daily lives that allow them to focus on learning.

“They’ve kind of found their groove and stopped coming in so much,” Dawdy said. “They might still make a quick visit between classes, but for the most part, they’re back in the classroom.”

School attendance has also increased as students, especially many who have been chronically absent, now know their buildings offer the support and resources they need to help them mentally and emotionally navigate the day.

“A lot of what you see is anxiety about coming to school or some social anxiety concerns,” said Ottumwa High School Brain Health Liaison Brianna Porter. “But they know they have a place where they can at least touch down, and have a supportive adult or peers that listen to what they're processing.”

For students who need additional support, counselors regularly connect them with wraparound supports and services from the district’s Family Services Coordinators.

“I hope it branches out to elementary schools because things can start there, and having those resources earlier would be a good thing to expand and teach kids that it is ok to talk about and provide them with these resources earlier,” said Ottumwa 11th grader Isabella Hoffman.

District leaders do envision the rooms as one part of a larger system of brain health care.

“Sometimes when students come to the brain health room, the things that brought them there are more than a brief session with our liaison can address,” Stiemsma said. “We have a lot of conversations around, how do we know the right times to make a referral to our outstanding community partners here in Ottumwa, so we can help bridge that gap to community, wrap-around services for students.”

As schools across Iowa add and expand Brain Health Retreat Rooms, Stiemsma encourages those districts to listen to their students and the struggles they are facing, which was the driving force behind Ottumwa’s initiative.

“It's important to listen to kids because our students talked about being dysregulated, having anxiety, having depression, any of those kinds of things,” Stiemsma said. “Going to the Brain Health Retreat Room and having that opportunity to decompress or talk to a trusted adult is what brought them back to the learning environment. That's what we're here for, and what you hear from our students is that the brain health room was pretty important in that process.”