Awash in wellness

Middle school teacher’s innovative project bathes colleagues in calming music

In a darkened planetarium at Macatawa Bay Middle School in Holland, four students work together to create a sound bath, immersing a reclining teacher in waves of serene sounds.

Led by band and choir teacher Carrie Ledet, students Sophie Walsh and Jalen Sims make the air hum with Tibetan song bowls; Sebastian Vasquez adds depth when he strikes a gong; Jordan Vantil gently coaxes sound from the suspended cymbal and then brings it all to a close with a rain stick.

“A sound bath is an immersive experience where you’re exposed to different vibrations and frequencies in sound,” said Ledet, a MESSA member her entire life. “You’re immersed in a dark, quiet place, where the sounds come around you, and your body takes them in. And in that experience your body is healing, you are relaxing, your blood pressure is lowering, your heart rate is lowering.”

The idea for the project came while Ledet was watching an episode of the “Today” show. Hosts Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager, in search of wellness treatments, experienced a sound bath at a tony wellness spa in New York City.

“As I was watching the program — and envious of what they were experiencing — I realized that the items they had, we have in the band room here at our school,” Ledet said. “At no cost. And our students know how to play them.”

Macatawa Bay holds a month of caring in February, “when it’s cold and dark and people are not feeling their zest,” Ledet said. Each homeroom comes up with a project to help spread pride in the school. Last year, Ledet decided to create a sound bath at the school.

“We’re all struggling,” Ledet said last spring. “It’s not a secret. The profession is struggling. My colleagues are struggling.”

Ledet recruited student percussionists to learn the sound bath concept and how to use the instruments to create the immersive experience. They learned, they practiced, they did trial runs and they honed their skills. Meanwhile, the project grew beyond the month of February. One year later, the program has been expanded beyond teachers to include students and community members. Ledet’s former student Jasmine Jelsema, a sound healer who studied alternative medicine at Evergreen State College, runs the room while she teaches.

“We’re seeing great dividends on this little project that was just meant to be fun and in the month of February,” Ledet said. “These students are filling up a teacher’s bucket, who is then going back to their classroom and giving it back to the students.”

MESSA Health Promotion Consultant Rhonda Jones knows the importance of creating a work culture that inspires healthy living and prioritizes mental wellness. She has worked with 186 groups since 2021 to help set wellness activities in motion in local districts.

“It’s important to focus on the needs of our caregivers — the people who are caring for and educating our children,” Jones said. “Worksite wellness programs are created to do just that. When we invest in improving the well-being of school employees by offering those opportunities during the work day, we are investing in and supporting the health of our children. This makes district-wide worksite wellness programs a worthwhile investment.”

Ledet credits her building’s administrators for prioritizing wellness.

“Administrative support is so important,” she said. “The administrators in this building are so special. They allow us to think and come up with ideas and bounce ideas off them and be creative, and they support us.”

She encourages other administrators to follow that lead: “Listen to your staff, and support them when you can.”

Employee wellness programs have several other benefits, according to the Healthy Schools Initiative within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including:

• Improved staff retention and productivity
• Decreased employee absenteeism
• Decreased employee health care costs

In addition to teaching and creating wellness projects that benefit the entire school, Ledet is also a MESSA ambassador, helping to educate her colleagues about their MESSA benefits and steer them in the right direction when they have questions.

“I was born into a teaching family with MESSA, so every step of my life journey, MESSA’s had me covered,” she said. “MESSA feels like family. Always has. You have a team of people who care about you, and who you know by their first name. And a lot of people can’t say that about their health insurance.”