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Buddah Warriors

For the past five months, Gina and Jodi from Buddah Warrior have been working with our Felicity students. Every Tuesday during P.E., each of the instructors separate the P.E. class into two sections, one section for students who want a high impact workout with Gina. The workouts provided during high impact P.E. include: self-defense techniques and cardio kickboxing.  This is a great space for students to try different types of workouts in a P.E. class setting on a more consistent basis.

For the students who are not interested in a high impact P.E. workout, Jodi guides some of the students through practicing mindfulness and meditation exercises. “After mindfulness, the kids have said they feel a sense of calm for about 1-2 hours after the exercises” high school teacher Mr. Watson states. Mindfulness groups with Jodi from Buddah Warriors give students the opportunities to journal about being present in the moment and setting intentions for the day ahead, it encourages students to slow down and take the day one moment at a time to reduce previous patterns of impulsive behavior.

Recently, the Buddah Warriors and some of our Felicity team was featured on a news segment regarding self-defense practices! Please visit this link to check it out: https://wgntv.com/2020/01/22/around-town-learns-cobra-self-defense-with-the-buddha-warrior-girls/

For more general information about Buddah Warrior workouts and philosophies, please visit, https://www.buddhawarriors.com/

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Felicity's New Building and Recent Changes

At the start of the 2019-2020 school year, we successfully moved into our new building! Our new address is 550 Lake Cook Road in Deerfield. We are now located in the Old Berto Center, which is also known as the famous Chicago Bulls practice space. For footage of where Chicago Bulls history took place at the facility, we recommend watching the documentary “The Last Dance”, which includes the famous Michael Jordan retirement press conference footage, which took place in our current gym!

Specifically, the majority of our classroom and academic space is on the second floor, with the exception of two downstairs classroom spaces and our gymnasium. Please see the featured photos for a preview of our new home.

Some of our upgrades include: additional comfortable seating for students to study, a terrarium and fish tank for students to help take care of, a newly finished basketball court, four spacious classrooms with two staff members accessible to assist students with academic success and general support, three clinician offices, a larger main office space for our administrative assistant and principal and a number of additional classroom-sized rooms for added space for activities.

In addition, we have a number of new staff members joining the Felicity team as we gain more and more new students! Joining us, we have our new school principal Dr. Chris Dignam, with over 20 years of administrative experience in the field of education. We also have a new middle school teacher joining us with over 20 years of experience in special education, Ms. Stephanie Horwitz. Last but not least, we have three new clinicians on staff, Ms. Patel, Ms. Greenawalt and Ms. Swillum. Our new clinicians come to Felicity with a variety of different backgrounds in the mental health field to provide new perspectives to support our Felicity students.